What is known about prehistoric language?
[Previous] [Next] [Index] Quite a lot, if by ‘prehistoric’ you’ll settle for maybe 2000 years before the development of writing. (Language is many thousands of years older than that.) Languages of the past can be recovered by comparative reconstruction from their descendants. The comparative method relies mainly on pronunciation, which changes very slowly and in highly systematic ways. If you apply it to French, Spanish, and Italian, you reconstruct late colloquial Latin with a high degree of accuracy; this and similar tests show us that the method works. Also, if you use the comparative method on unrelated languages, you get nothing. So comparative reconstruction is a test of whether languages are related (to a discernible degree).
