A thought experiment

[pauamma]

Assume someone with suitable field linguistics training and experience goes back in time to the PIE era, learns that language, and brings it back, passing it as a conlang. How long do you think it would take for linguists to catch on?

Comments

[madfilkentist]

If it's presented as a hypothetical reconstruction of PIE, it would be hard to tell. If anything, it would get a lot of criticism for not being authentic. :)

[steorra]

I think someone would come to the conclusion very quickly that this conlang was based on PIE. (It would probably be identified at least as an IE language within weeks of a significant amount of the language being presented.) However, they would probably assume that it was an imaginary elaboration of what PIE might have been like, rather than supposing it was an actual record of what actual PIE was like.

There are enough academic linguists in the conlang community that some linguists would probably be aware of it (it might even be a linguist who identified it as based on PIE, but not necessarily), but it probably wouldn't get much academic notice since it would be seen as imaginary, not factual.

In order for it to be identified as fact-based, someone would have to notice that its forms provided convincing explanations for currently unexplained issues in PIE linguistics. This would likely happen eventually, but could take years or even decades. At that point, the first guess might be that it was based on (but still elaborated from) genius reconstructive work by a clever conlanger who for whatever reason chose to express their work in conlang form rather than as an academic reconstruction. At that point, it might start to influence academic linguistics as a source of hypotheses.

Would people ever conclude that it was based on actual acquaintance with PIE? I don't know. Some might, a lot probably would just dismiss it as impossible. If the describer at this point admits to having time travelled, the language might just be enough for to convince some people that it's true.

[conuly]

Question: Do these linguists know about time travel? Is there any opportunity for them to learn about time travel?

Also: What dialect of PIE are we talking about here?