I know that some words are “conserved” to varying degrees as they pass down through the various languages that come out of a protolanguage. For instance, aqua is considered a conserved word, its sound and meaning have remained relatively unchanged in several languages all the way back to Proto Indo-European.
How conserved would a word be considered to be if the sound of a word remained basically unchanged, but the meaning did not, if the word can be traced back to its roots and the original meaning is at least related somehow to the new meaning.
For example, let’s use the word Sleipnir. Today it is the name of an supernatural eight legged horse from Norse mythology. Two thousand years from now, humanity is at a horse and buggy technological level. In the cavalry of the day, a squadron commander is titled Sleipnir. There is a connection there to power and horses between today and my hypothetical future. How conserved would the word sleipnir be considered to be?
I presume you’d have to chart some connection between either sound or meaning between the two uses, or have a risk that the same sounding word is coincidental.
Many fantasist speculators about ancient history have pored over word lists from different languages and would posit some bizarre connection through ancestral migration because the word for ‘fire’ in one ancient European language was sort of similarish to the word for ‘fire’ in an Asian one. In historically connected languages [say Roman → Italian, Romanian, Portuguese] you might be on reasonable ground, but otherwise the default case should be that it is a coincidence and the onus is on the claimant to show the words have some deeper connection.
Proto Indo-European isn’t an actual language, it’s theoretical concept. It’s a projection of language development back in time - with what accuracy it’s difficult to say.
Experts can’t even agree who may have spoken this proposed language, when it was spoken to within a couple of thousand years, or where within thousands of miles.
Ah, so in the Nordic-Rus Hegemony that rules much of Northern Asia and all of Europe that word might make sense as a rank or title, but not so much in the Colorado Imperium
@GreenWyvern, yeah, I know.
I would not consider it very well conserved, because it hasn’t preserved the original original meaning. I think the relationship is tenuous at best. Especially with something like proper name. Sleipnr doesn’t literally mean “8-legged horse”, it’s more a kind of kenning. The literal meaning is something like “slippery one, glider”, so associating it specifically with power and horses is indirect and only because of the mythological implications of the name that you’re already aware of. That’s not very conservative, IMO.
There are established linguistic “rules” for what happens to the word sounds over time. Some sounds nearly always soften or disappear, some sounds nearly always shift to other sounds, etc.
So if you wanted a “conserved” word, you’d have to start with something that (as MrDibble pointed out) currently means something like a commander of a cavalry unit. Then you could apply sound change principles to that word and come up with what it might (might) sound like after a period of time.
You’d basically be doing the opposite of what linguists do to formulate the hypothetical pronunciations of PIE words.