In his article Proto-Indo-European Reality and Reconstruction, Ernst Pulgram states that ‘when we reconstruct, through the methods of comparative historical linguistics, an array of asterisked Proto-Indo-European forms, the procedure itself implies that the result of our endeavours is a uniform construct’, and asserts that ‘anything in linguistics that is timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic, by definition does not represent a real language’ (422). He then bases his further discussion of the impossibility of learning about ‘Real Proto-Indo-European’ on the presumed unreal nature of the reconstructed proto-language: ‘No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality’ (423). Hence, for Pulgram, the formulaic character of our reconstructions of individual items renders it impossible to make a serious attempt to reconstruct texts in a proto-language: ‘To write an Aesopian fable or the Lord's Prayer in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is innocent enough as a pastime, but the text has no doubt little if any resemblance to any speech ever heard on earth’ (423).