But it is also likely that some complexity in the
proto-language has left no trace in the attested languages.
The author has drawn here on his own published study of proto-Northern Chin, which contributes to the sharpening of our view of that hazy phantom, proto-Sino-Tibetan, through the lenses of several other
proto-language reconstructions of his own.
These poets allow Melaney to build on the work of his first book, After Ontology: Literary Theory and Modernist Poetics, by showing how the material difference of the literary text enacts a central principle of Gadamer's hermeneutics in which "the work of art can function in relation to a kind of
proto-language that actually exists prior to our interpretation of words" (135).
EES has made a questionable choice of defining as stems only the lexems that are not derived from other stems either in Estonian or in any
proto-language from which Estonian derives.
Using an algorithm known as the Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler, the program sorted through sets of cognates - words in different languages that share a common sound, history and origin - to calculate the odds of which set is derived from which
proto-language.
Even if scientists have for the last century tried to find an alternative grammar to replace the traditional one, consider also their trials to invent the much promised Esperanto, even if like archeologists they have tried to reveal the
proto-language, the mother of all languages, even if they hoped to launch UG and the innateness hypothesis, even if they have constantly been on the lookout of finding a common core, a universal essence of communication, the only answer is in the vibrational alphabet, something most people reject and probably all scientists hate to hear about.
Much of the differences in vowel quality and quantity between NP and SP can be attributed to three shifts taking place from the
proto-language into SP.
Jason Haugen, in his article about Uto-Aztecan reduplication, analyzes grammaticalized reduplicative operations in order to reconstruct the productive reduplication mechanisms of the
Proto-language of the Uto-Aztecan family.
His desire to find an over-arching
proto-language that diffused around the world similarly reflects an earlier tradition in anthropology and philology.
The paleolinguist Eve, the protagonist of the second story, is unrecognized and shunned by her colleagues in spite of important achievements in the reconstruction of human
proto-language. Plagued by doubts, she finds that her only pleasure is her addictive love for tea.
Using the comparative method, the only method for reconstructing a
proto-language, presents problems, because it has been conceived for researching the reconstruction of the standard norm.