User:Talskubilos

Hi all, my name is Octavià Alexandre and I'm an amateur linguist, although not a conlanger. My own specialty is paleo-linguistics, that is, the study of extinct languages, especially those poorly attested in writing or not attested at all, only surviving in loanwords to other better known languages.

In addition to their native lexicon (i.e. the one inherited from its ancestor), all languages have loanwords from other languages, either resulting from language replacement (substrates) or contact (adstrates) processes. Thus languages aren't actually monolythic but multi-layer entities (a term which I myself borrowed from the Bulgarian linguist Vladimir Georgiev, who first used it for describing Lycian, an Anatolian language).

Unfortunately, most comparative linguists have chosen a monolythic approach when reconstructing proto-languages (which to some extent are conlangs), so they implicit assume all the lexicon is inherited from a single source. In the case of the IE (macro)family, the "PIE" reconstructed by specialists doesn't represent a real language spoken by real people but rather a cross-section of the last stages of IE. This can be exemplified by the huge gap between Anatolian and the rest of IE languages (cfr. Sturtervant's "Indo-Hittite"), which has lead to scholars such as the Spanish Francisco Rodríguez Adrados to propose a more refined model which several splits and intermediate stages.