reconstruction
n. C / Un. the process of figuring out how an old, lost language sounded by comparing the languages that came from it. Experts look for patterns in modern words to guess the original form.
n. the systematic process of establishing the features of an unattested ancestral language by comparing its descendant languages. This comparative method identifies regular sound correspondences to hypothesize the original proto-forms.
Linguists use reconstruction to understand how people spoke thousands of years ago.
The reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European allows researchers to trace the shared history of languages as diverse as Hindi and English.
While internal reconstruction focuses on a single language's history, comparative reconstruction relies on a broad data set of cognates across multiple related tongues to verify phonetic shifts.
A proper-noun variant of reconstruction.
Uncountable when referring to the scientific method; countable when referring to a specific hypothesized word or language model.