- Joined
- Apr 13, 2021
View attachment 2857782
So he claims to have studied etymology, yet wasn't able to figure out what "proto" actually means? As in prototypical? It means "the first" or "the original", not "something that is assumed to have existed". What a tard.
As much as it pains me to admit he is right. The proto-prefix in linguistics always means a language assumed to exist, and almost always reconstructed, that other languages descended from, its a bit of jargon from linguistics. Like for example as to why this is useful is that sometime we have a corpus(body of written material) of a language but it is incomplete or certain words from its daughters haven't been attested yet. A perfect example of this is vulgar latin and proto-romance, Vulgar Latin is what we call the group of dialects that eventually became the languages of French, Italian, Spanish etc, but Proto-Romance is what we get when we work backwards from French Italian Spainish etc., they usually agree. This is sorta abstract so if you have questions ill be happy to explain.
(Any linguists who see any errors feel free to call me a retard and correct me, I am very much an amateur and very aware of my limitations)