Proto-

原始

A prefix used in historical linguistics to refer to a linguistic form or state of a language said to be the ancestor of attested forms/languages, e.g. Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Romance. More recently, some linguists have begun to use the term analogously in the context of language acquisition, to refer to the emerging linguistic system of the young child, in such uses as ‘proto-conversation’, ‘proto-sentence’.

历史语言学用这个前级指假设为证实形式/语言的祖先的语言形式/语言状态，如原始印欧语，原始罗曼语等。近来有些语言学家在语言习得研究中也开始仿用这一术语，指幼儿最初的语言系统，如“原始会话”、“原始句”等名称。