Questions tagged [reconstruction]
The reconstruction tag has no usage guidance.
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Words for tongue in Tungusic
In Tungusic there are attested the following words for tongue:
Manchu: ilenggu
Nanai: siŋmu
Evenki: inni, čoli
Wikitionary postulates that the words ilenggu, siŋmu and inni are related and gives ...
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What is the state of Sino-Tibetan lexical reconstruction?
To those who are specialists (or even have a passing knowledge) in the state of Sino-Tibetan lexical reconstruction, are you able to provide off the top of your head a rough number (round to hundreds) ...
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Can these similarities between PIE and Burushaski be explained?
We have:
English PIE Burushaski
brown bʰerH-om baard-um
tongue dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s juŋus
warm gʷʰer-om gar-um
pair kʷeth₂ kaat
fire péh₂wr̥ pʰu
...
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How Did the Palatovelar /*ḱ/ Consonant in PIE Become a Sibilant in Satem Languages?
In Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages (which are conveniently all Satem languages), there is a sibilant or affricate sound in places where Centum languages usually have a velar consonant. It ...
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I have been reconstructing Austro-Thai but the vowels are inconsistent
I have been reconstructing Austro-Thai believing it to be a rather easy undertaking and it mostly was, the consonants between the two language families line up rather well only with occasional ...
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2
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Apparent sound crespondences between Eurasian, Trans-New-Guinean, Pama-Nyungan and Burushaski
It seems to me that there can be regular sound correspondences between Eurasian, Trans-New-Guinean, Pama-Nyungan and Burushaski. I would call the hypthetical proto-language of these "proto-mitian&...
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How to do Practice Problem for Basque
Link to Problem(both Problems and Answers[but no explanations])
https://sites.google.com/site/paninilinguisticsolympiad/Resources/sample-problems-and-solutions
My question is about the problem titled &...
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Limits of historical linguistic reconstruction
It is a well-known and widely repeated fact that the linguistic reconstruction associated with the comparative method is no longer effective for large temporal depths (informally estimated to be ...
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German contraction "wara" - morphology or phonology?
The regular form
War er ... 'was he ...'
would, in certain positions of sentence in my idiomatic sociolect, sound approximately as
* wara /vaːʁɐ/.
I can not imagine at the moment how this came ...
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Are PIE *yóh₁r̥ "spring, summer" and Proto-Turkic *yāŕ "spring, summer" cognates?
In Turkic it seems to be related to the word for "half" (yarım in modern Turkish).
The semantic development looks more likely into the direction half->spring rather than the opposite.
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Why is the proto-italic reconstruction of "corpora" "*korpezā"?
I was studying rhotacism and I came across the word corpora (plural of corpus). I would reconstruct the proto-italic form as *korpoza, but I saw the entry on Wiktionary and it says that the actual ...
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Why do so many ancient/reconstructed languages lack labial fricatives?
[I saw this question somewhere else (where it wasn't answered at the time) but I don't remember where and I'm unable to find it.]
So there are a number of ancient and/or reconstructed languages that ...
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What is the reconstructed root for fire in Proto-Uralic or Proto-Finno-Ugric?
Starostin alleges that IE root h₁n̥gʷnís has cognates in Finno-Urgic.
But I distrust this database and also I would like to know what was the proto-form of the root, particularly, the origin of Mari ...
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What's the reconstruction of the word for fire in proto-Australian?
The word for fire in some modern Australian languages:
Tiwi yikwani
Djinang junggi
Maung yungku
Walmajarri yakun
This is strikingly similar to that in PIE:
PIE h₁...
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Which books did John read which books? Displacement and reconstruction
In his talk available on YouTube as “Language, Creativity, and the Limits of Understanding” by Professor Noam Chomsky (4-21-16) at 56:36s Noam Chomsky starts talking about the phenomenon of ...
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How would've the Old Novgorodian language looked like?
I need help reconstructing the Old Novgorodian words for "earth", "hand", "bee" and "bird nest". I'm not good at linguistics at all and don't really understand ...
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Advances in Glottochronology
I have read some old works on lexicostatistics and glottochronology, like Swadesh's original articles or this work, where using Swadesh's basic assumptions, the author obtains a temporal estimation ...
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Is there any reflex of initial *h₁?
It's commonly posited that all PIE roots consist of two groups of consonants, neither of which can be empty. For example, the root *h₁ed- has the groups *h₁ and *d.
However, I'm not aware of any ...
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Origin of "will" in Germanic, wouldn't it be subjunctive?
Small print: This is language specific about English, but tangential to Germanic to a certain degree that is likely out of ELU's scope. .
As a follow-up to this Q and several ones like it about the ...
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2
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What is Proto-Semitic *x̣?
In his Akkadian grammar (specifically the appendix on phonology), Huehnergard lists the following Proto-Semitic consonants:
Most of this looks familiar to me. However, *x̣ caught me by surprise; I'm ...
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Proto-Indo-European *nepōts cognate in Old English
From Proto-Indo-European word *nepōts (Latin nepos, Sanskrit napāt) I need to determine what is its cognate in Old English. More precisely, I need to determine whether the result is nefa (Grimm's Law) ...
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Can we make a case for Eurasiatic numerals for one and two?
There is a widespread Eurasiatic theory that puts all these families (except PIE) into one group, the case for common numerals for one and two seems more plausible. I also add Chukchi-Kamchadal family ...
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internal reconstruction before comparative method
I am just curious about the comparative method, and how a simple tool could be so powerful. So, I want to ask if internal reconstruction could be applied to the oldest IE languages (Pre-Latin, Pre-...
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“Reconstruction” of an attested and well studied language
I wonder has anyone ever tried to reconstruct Latin language via data on modern Romance languages as if we know nothing about what Latin actually was.
Both as a fun exercise and as a method to test ...
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How does internal reconstruction work?
I remember last night asking about reconstructing proto languages. One of the comments said something about "internal reconstruction". I want to know how to reconstruct pre-PIE by looking at the Indo-...
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Reconstructing pre-proto languages
I have asked about reconstructing pre-PIE from PIE and possibly using daughter languages for help and got no response. What I remembered is a book about Proto-Afroasiatic that I stumbled upon. First, ...
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Could Proto-Indo-Uralic be reconstructed?
I am interested in linguistics and how words spread from place to place. I have seen that there are two language families, and that there are signs that they might be related. Proto-Indo-Uralic is the ...
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When was Proto-Austronesian spoken?
I read on Wikipedia that the language that Hawaiian comes from, distantly, is called Proto-Austronesian. It says that it had more sounds/phonemes was spoken around Taiwan and Southern China. However, ...
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Can computational techniques solve historical problems that couldn't otherwise be solved?
Recently I've read that machine learning has been used to apply the Comparative Method (example with references here). Also, there are other mathematical approaches that have been applied to the ...
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If *h1 were a glottal stop, and virtually all German word initial vowels have an implicit glottal stop
If *h1 were a glottal stop, and virtually all German word initial vowels have implicit glottal stop then would the claim about regular laryngeal loss have to be revised?
There's a rather recent ...
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Are any of the Old Chinese reconstructions for「能」plausible descendants of Proto-Sino-Tibetan /*dɣwjəm/?
(Apologies if this is off-topic.)
The Chinese character「能」was originally a picture of a kind of bear. The character was once used to represent a word meaning bear, but this word doesn't appear to ...
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Homophones in Proto-Germanic
Does anyone know reconstructed homophones in Proto-Germanic or where I could look them up? I am interested in clear homophones, not polysemes.
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2
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What are some of the most divergent cognate word forms?
I'm looking for examples like this pair:
Russian for 'grass snake' — уж, [uʂ]
Classical Latin for 'snake' — anguis, likely [ˈaŋ.ɡᶣɪs]
These word forms are both masculine nouns in the nominative, and ...
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What is the oldest language that we know enough about to construct a plausible sentence in it?
One exciting way to track the evolution of our understanding of Proto-Indo-European is to look at the different versions of Schleicher's fable from different years. The more time we spend studying the ...
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What are the different schools of PIE reconstruction?
I have read some works on Proto-Indo-European which mention different schools that advocate for different paradigms of reconstruction, such as the Leiden and the Erlangen schools. I'd like to know if ...
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Why Is It That Ancient Greek Reconstructed Pronunciation Is Always Used For Koine?
By the time of Koine greek, in general, it was much the same as today, but I always see the Ancient Greek pronunciation being taught, why is this? Is is it because most people learning koine in ...
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The naturalness principle for [a] and [e]?
I am trying to doing an exercise that requires me to reconstruct a proto language from two languages that has a difference in the [a] and [e] phonemes. I know I cannot use the majority rule because ...
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Understanding the reflexes of PIE *ǵneh3- in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek
Today I was trying to reconstruct some PIE roots by myself and I came across the word for '(to) know' in different indo-european languages. Here are some examples:
Eng. (to) know
It. conoscere
Lat. (...
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Potential gaps in the pIE phonological system?
The phonological system of proto-Indo-European (and of any other proto-language without written records) is reconstructed via the comparative method, which inevitably leaves some questions open.
One ...
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Did PIE *h3 cause voicing in any other words than the "drink" word?
The Proto-Indo-European "third laryngeal", *h3, is often assumed to have been a voiced sound based on the fact that some reflexes of the "drink" root *peh3- appear to show voicing assimilation of p to ...
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Literature on the reconstruction of proto-Greek
I usually find scattered proto-Greek word reconstructions, but I never came across literature that focus on the reconstruction of that language. Do you know of any?
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Difference between "Leiden school" and "mainstream" Indo-Europeanists?
Recently, I've been asked what the difference between the "Leiden school" and "mainstream" Indo-Europeanists is. The asker is planning to study in Leiden and has been concerned with the many vague ...
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What do [ ] mean in the middle of a reconstructed pronunciation?
While looking up Old Chinese reconstructions, I often find square brackets [] in the middle of an reconstruction.
For example, Baxter-Sagart system says 寺's old Chinese pronunciation is /*s-[d]əʔ-s/.
...
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Is Austronesian the closest relative to PIE?
Austronesian is usually regarded as a separate family, not related to any other. It is never groupped into Eurasiatic or Nostratic. Yet it seems to me that it may be related to PIE. I wonder whether ...
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Could a language be reconstructed from a dictionary and lots of natural text?
Let's say aliens (someone completely new to the language) want to talk with users of it. They've obtained a complete dictionary, and a large selection of natural text (for this hypothetical situation, ...
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Were the so-called aspirates of PIE ever aspirated?
In the thread Is unvoiced & unaspirated a category of speech? it was pointed out to me, that the aspirates in Indic languages, notably Sanskrit, are from a truly phonetic perspective not aspirates,...
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Why can verbal roots in PIE only contain the vowel e?
Verbal roots of PIE are generally reconstructed as (C5) (C3) C1 e C2 (C4) (C6); with certain phonetical restrictions, especially on the outmost consonants.
I wonder why only "e" should be allowed as ...
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Would it be possible to discover through linguistics if any non-human languages influenced known language families?
Suppose some recent hominins such as Neanderthal had a spoken language (currently, as far as I'm aware, we are uncertain if they did, but suppose we knew they did). If this were the case, would it be ...
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Use of forks/chopsticks and sound change?
Apparently
[European] humans had an ape-like bite until relatively recently, with our top and bottom incisors aligned along their edges. With the invention of the fork around 250 years ago, our ...
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Third-person singular suffix [eth] in Middle English
Related: Grammaticalization of third person singular -s in English
According to responses to this question, there was a dichotomy between northern -s and southern -th in Middle English.
What I am ...
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