Centre for Lusophone and European Literatures and Cultures as an area of specialization. It was also innovative in the way it combined the filological studies tradition with the newness of the structuralist proposals and sociology of reading. Its initial projects dealt with the study of the different Lusophone literatures, such as Portuguese literature, with special emphasis on studies regarding Camilo Castelo Branco, as well as African literature and Brazilian literature, and matters regarding sociology of reading, in a project directed by Jacinto do Prado Coelho. This established route was continued by the centre's following directors and coordinators (Fernando Cristóvão, Maria Lúcia Lepecki, Manuel Ferreira, Alberto Carvalho and Maria
Proto-language system of isoglosses which held together dialects which were spoken by various tribes, from which the historically attested Indo-European languages emerged. Proto-language A proto-language, in the tree model of historical linguistics, is a language, usually hypothetical or reconstructed, and usually unattested, from which a number of attested known languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested "daughter languages". It is therefore equivalent with the "ancestral language" or "parental language" of