Words from the first language

A. Linguists Joseph Greenberg and Merritt Ruhlen have claimed to have reconstructed words from the world’s first language, which they call Proto-World. They compared words with similar meanings in hundreds of languages and deduced what the original form would have been.

B. Although this work has often been covered with interest in the media, most linguists who specialize in language change have vehemently rejected it. It is tempting to suppose that Greenberg and Ruhlen are typical examples of despised renegades who history will eventually prove right. But based on what we have seen so far in this course, we can see that there is a great deal of validity to the objections.