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Intro to Historical Linguistics: Reconstruction of Lost Proto-Languages (lesson 4 of 4)



NativLang

In lessons 1-3, you learned how to identify cognates in languages, and how to use those cognates to compare languages to their family members. Now I show you how to reach back into the past in order to uncover and reconstruct an unattested parent language.

The “Intro to Historical Linguistics” series is a remastered version of four older videos from nativlang.com.

Visit the website for more information, including examples and exercises:
http://www.nativlang.com/linguistics/historical-linguistics-lessons.php

Here’s my course on the International Phonetic Alphabet:
http://www.nativlang.com/linguistics/ipa-pronunciation-lessons.php

This page lists regular sound changes with examples of each type of sound change:
http://www.nativlang.com/linguistics/historical-sound-changes.php

music by Kevin MacLeod .

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20 thoughts on “Intro to Historical Linguistics: Reconstruction of Lost Proto-Languages (lesson 4 of 4)
  1. Strange that /dωs/ et al mean two or two-more, when protolinguistics shows us /n-/ was secondary or plural e.g. Sumerian nin was secondary-prince/princess/lady… was it a loss of the nasal feature by decline ('human speech is as bull-bellowing', complained Enlil), or, /ᵈn/-hardening for definitiveness, or, unlearned-alpha-moron-imposed speech pattern.

  2. The /k/ vs. /t/ might be an historic differentiation—not, splitting, but meaning something else—e.g. in protolinguistics (or simply archaic Sumero-Egyptian as a paradigm), the /k-/ prefix meant definitive 'THE' (cf softer /h/ meant definite 'the') while the /t-/ prefix meant the now-present-source, (e.g. Ra was T'Amun while very-younger Shu was Kh'An-Shu)….

  3. Is that [?e] in Hawaiian related to any grammatical forms in the related languages? (prefixes, suffixes, determiners, verbal or noun or adj/adv forms? — The L/R is shared evenly by two daughter Langs each, so I couldn't guess to be sure of the ancestor without a fifth or further langs. But *ph -> f or h happened in both Irish and Japanese, so this makes sense as F for the older form. T -> K in Hawaiian looks pretty regular, though why that would happen, I don't know. W -> V is common. Voicing and devoicing are pretty common. So I could come up with some close guesses, but I'd want more data to be more sure of the reconstruction's accuracy.

  4. thax for really helping stuff..it's true..some kids who ever learning new words likely to misspell L to R it's my observation which leads to funny meanings.. being a native speaker of Telugu language i would put such words with you
    ..Ranjan= large mud pot to store water;a kid next door to me used to call it Lanjan (= prostitute). humour instead of saying "dad brought a new Ranjan.. to home"…he spelt " my dad brought a new Lanjan".
    . LOL to nativelanguage,com

  5. …the 'oldest' we have for duo, meaning, two, might be Deucalion whose great flood ended the era of the first-lineage gods' rulership: in that sense a second beginning, not merely a second of countable objects… Prior to that, Egyptian, Duat, was a secondary, branch, or sporadic trace, of, the oldest, Nile river…

  6. Thank you for making this series. This last part looks rather complicated at first glance, but I think I've grasped it a bit. The reconstruction of ancestor languages look very logical.

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