Proto-Indo-European language
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- noun
- Specialized
- Linguists have reconstructed aspects of the Proto-Indo-European language to understand its connections to modern languages.
Examples
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Many words in English trace their origins back to the Proto-Indo-European language, illustrating its influence on contemporary vocabulary.
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Studying the Proto-Indo-European language helps scholars explore the migrations of ancient peoples across Europe and Asia.
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Dr. Anil Biltoo, the London-based linguistics expert who taught actor Michael Fassbender the Proto-Indo-European language that David speaks in the film, was too happy to reveal what the happy android said during the big moment with the Engineer.
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Synonyms
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An ancestor language of many European and Asian languages that people think was spoken long before writing began
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An ancient language that experts think is the ancestor of languages like English and Hindi
Surface Forms
Morphology
Proto-Indo-European + language
The phrase is a straightforward composition of a proper name/technical label 'Proto-Indo-European' plus the noun 'language', so its meaning ('the language called Proto-Indo-European') follows directly from the constituents. If a B1 learner knows the constituent name and the word 'language', the overall referential meaning is fully predictable and cross-linguistically parallel (e.g. 'English language', 'Spanish language'), making it transparent.
Etymology
Proto-Indo-European language is the name for the imagined first language that started many modern languages from India to Europe. Because it was spoken before people wrote things down, language experts work out its words by comparing later languages, so it is called the 'ancestor' of those languages.