Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of an
unattested ancestor language of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction:
*
Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language – that is, it is based on evidence from that language alone.
*
Comparative reconstruction
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards ...
, usually referred to just as reconstruction, establishes features of the ancestor of two or more related languages, belonging to the same
language family, by means of the
comparative method. A language reconstructed in this way is often referred to as a
proto-language (the common ancestor of all the languages in a given family); examples include
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- ...
,
Proto-Dravidian.
Texts discussing linguistic reconstruction commonly preface reconstructed forms with an
asterisk (*) to distinguish them from attested forms.
An attested word from which a
root in the proto-language is reconstructed is a reflex. More generally, a reflex is the known derivative of an earlier form, which may be either attested or reconstructed. Reflexes of the same source are
cognate
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical e ...
s.
Methods
First, languages that are thought to have arisen from a common proto-language must meet certain criteria in order to be grouped together; this is a process called subgrouping. Since this grouping is based purely on linguistics, manuscripts and other historical documentation should be analyzed to accomplish this step. However, the assumption that the delineation