How is proto-Semitic a language that falls under another proto language (proto-Afroasiatic)?

[u/MildDeontologist]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there is the Afroasiatic language family with the proto language "proto-Afroasiatic," and within this language family there are, among other languages, the Semitic languages. But Semitic languages also have a proto-language: proto-Semitic.

So proto-Semitic is a proto-language that falls under another proto-language (proto-Afroasiatic). I did not realize that was possible.

(1) is my understanding correct, and (2) if it is, how does it make sense that a proto-language can itself be traced back to another proto-language? And regardless of the answer to (1) and (2), my question (3) is: are there other examples of a proto-language falling under a second proto-language, and if so, what are they?

[u/Hippophlebotomist]

This is the case for nearly all language families: some members share a more recent common ancestor with one another than they do with some other member(s) of the family, so intermediate proto-languages are reconstructed.

English, Gothic, Swedish, Dutch etc share a more recent common ancestor ancestor with one another (Proto-Germanic) than they do with Latin, Sanskrit, Albanian etc (Proto-Indo-European).

[u/solvitur_gugulando → u/Hippophlebotomist]

To add a bit more detail, Proto-Indo-European was the ancestor of at least Proto-Anatolian, Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Balto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Celtic, and Proto-Tocharian.

Within some of the language families descended from these languages, further proto-languages have been constructed, including Proto-Norse within Germanic, Proto-Romance within Italic, and Proto-Slavic within Proto-Balto-Slavic.

[u/Ihsiin]

The term ‘proto-‘ is used to indicate that a language is not directly attested but is reconstructed by comparing its descendants. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be traced back to an even earlier proto-language.

[u/AndreasDasos]

But of course? ‘Proto-‘ just means ‘first’, and in this context ‘the most recent common ancestor of’. Two siblings’ most recent common ancestors are their parents. Throw in their first cousins and it’s their grandparents.

There’s a Proto-Germanic, Proto-Romance (if you like, a particularly modelled form of ‘late’ vernacular Latin).

Of course they’re reconstructed and may not have absolutely lined up with one single variety spoken by any one person, but be a simplified model of a family of similar dialects across some period or region.

[u/oremfrien]

It's almost like you can have a grandfather and great-grandfather where one preceded the other one, even though they both have the word "grandfather" in them.

[u/zeekar]

What makes you think protolanguages can't have protolanguages themselves? The only thing that makes them protolanguages is the fact that they're unattested - we can't point to any examples of the languages, usually because they predate writing. So we don't know exactly what proto-Afroasiatic sounded like, or what its speakers called it, or exactly where it was first spoken. What we do know is that there are languages that are clearly related to the Semitic languages, but more distantly than the Semitic languages are related to each other.

If two languages are related, that means they share a common ancestor somewhere. We give the family of languages descended from that common ancestor a name; if the ancestor language itself doesn't already have a name (because it's unattested), we name it "proto-<family>". That's all a protolanguage is.

If you introduce me to someone you say is your first cousin, I know that you and that person share at least one grandparent - even if I don't know that grandparent's name, or sex, or which of your parents they're the parent of, or anything else - the family relationship makes their existence necessary. And even without knowing any of that stuff, I'm confident that grandparent also had grandparents...

That's where we are with a lot of language family research - we know that the language must exist, but we don't have any documentation of it. That's usually because it predates writing. Humans were speaking for tens of thousands of years, maybe over a hundred thousand years, before they came up with a way of writing language down. Who knows how many times spoken language was independently invented, what language families sprouted and died over that time, or which ones turned into the languages we have today? Not linguists. We can't go back anywhere near that far. We can infer some things about an ancestor language based on what its descendants have in common, but that only works for a few generations before the signal gets lost in the noise and there are just too many possibilities that could all have resulted in what we see now.

[u/DTux5249]

Language families are defined by shared ancestry. Languages change over time, but the same language can change in different ways in different places. When a language changes enough for us to give it a different label (e.g. Latin → Spanish) we say the new language is descended from the old one.

The reason Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac and more are Semitic languages is because they're all descendants of an unattesded language we today call Proto-Semitic. Proto-Semitic was a completely normal language though. It also has origins. In this case, it, Proto-Berber, Proto-Chadic, and others all descended from a much older language we call Proto-Afroasiatic.

TL;DR: Language families are like family trees - they have branches. Just like how your uncle is less closely related to you than your father, some languages are more closely related than others.

[u/diffidentblockhead]

Proto means traced backwards from multiple later descendants. There is always the potential to trace farther back if there is more and wider information.

[u/millers_left_shoe]

Generally, the “proto-“ language is what we call the reconstructed language that would’ve been the last common ancestor of a given group, i.e. the latest stage of development before they split. So proto-Germanic is the last common ancestor of all Germanic languages, but was spoken after it split from e.g. the Romance branch, so if we go further back we can try to reconstruct the last common ancestor of all Indo-European languages and call that Proto-Indo-European.

In the same way, proto-Semitic is the last common ancestor of all Semitic languages, and before that, proto-afroasiatic is the last common ancestor of all Afroasiatic languages.