Questions tagged [reconstruction]
The reconstruction tag has no usage guidance.
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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 ...
15
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Did Ancient Greek have a rising intonation for questions?
Unlike English, Ancient (e.g. Attic) Greek does not reorder words to formulate a question. The particle "ἆρα" does modify a statement into a question, but is not always present. In that case, I ...
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Pre-Proto-Basque: is there a methodology to establishing its vocabulary?
For example, say I have a list Basque/Euskera words, is there a way I can reconstruct these modern Basque words into a Pre-Proto-Basque version?
beo (hot)
lur (earth)
izotz (ice)
izuga (fear)
...
14
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How does a linguist determine whether a pattern is grammatical in a language?
How does a linguist determine whether a pattern is grammatical in a language? Is there some kind of standard test? This is assuming that there is little documentation of the language and no authority. ...
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To what extent has Martha's Vineyard SL been reconstructed?
Martha's Vineyard had a large deaf population and a native sign language. I read that this had been partially reconstructed by looking at the differences between ASL and LSF, as modern ASL is ...