The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly
since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However,
it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying
the
comparative method, a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist
August Schleicher. This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the
list of language families. For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called
Proto-Indo-European.
Proto-Indo-European is not attested by written records and so it is
conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing.
Sometimes, however, a proto-language
can be identified with a historically known language. For instance, dialects of
Old Norse are the proto-language of
Norwegian,
Swedish,
Danish,
Faroese and
Icelandic. Likewise, the
Appendix Probi depicts
Proto-Romance, a language almost unattested due to the prestige of
Classical Latin, a highly stylised literary register not representative of the speech of ordinary people.
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