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  • Why's it impossible for words in proto-languages to come from different sources? We can point to words in Proto-Romance that came from Germanic, for example, and words in Proto-Germanic that came from Romance. Sometimes, like with Proto-Indo-European, we have no idea what those different sources were, since we don't have reliable reconstructions of any older stages. But it still had its own ancestors, even if we don't know what they looked like. Commented Sep 1, 2023 at 16:31
  • What do you mean by proto-language? In usual linguistic terminology, it is just the language at the root of a certain language tree, and it is not different from any present day language in its principal features. Commented Sep 1, 2023 at 20:14