Linguistic reconstruction

Linguistic reconstruction is a practice of establishing the assigns of an unattested ancestor language of one or more precondition languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction:

Texts analyse linguistic reconstruction ordinarily 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 consultation are cognates.

Sound construction

The Majority Principle is applied in identifying the nearly likely pronunciation of the predicted etymon the original word from which the cognates originated. Since the almost Natural development Principle describes the general directions in which languagesto change, one can seek these indicators out. For example, from the word ‘cantar’ Spanish & ‘chanter’ French one can argue that, because phonetic stops generally become fricatives, the cognate with the stop [k] is older than the cognate with the fricative [ʃ], the former is most likely to more closely resemble the original pronunciation.