protolanguage

n. in genetic linguistics, a posited common ancestor of the members of a language family. Most protolanguages have been partially reconstructed through comparison among different members of a language family. The most celebrated protolanguage is Proto-Indo-European, the unrecorded prehistoric language that is presumed to be the ancestor of all Indo-European languages. See sound change.

Browse dictionary by letter

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z

Psychology term of the day

February 25th 2025

Yerkes–Dodson law

a law stating that the relation between motivation (arousal) and performance can be represented by an inverted U-curve (see inverted-U hypothesis). [Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson(1879–1955), U.S. psychologists]