The comparative method

Assembled from 34 blocks · 2 evidence · 38 related

1. Story
2. The procedure that turns a suspicion of relatedness into a demonstration, and the only one historical linguistics has that produces a testable result. It runs in four steps. Assemble candidate cognates — words of similar meaning across the languages being compared, drawn preferentially from vocabulary that is rarely borrowed: body parts, kin terms, low numerals, pronouns, basic verbs. Extract the sound correspondences: not resemblances, but recurring equations of the form "wherever language A has p, language B has f, in this position". Reconstruct the proto-form that would yield every attested outcome by the fewest independent changes, and mark it with an asterisk because it is an inference and not an attestation. Then test the reconstruction against words not used to build it. The force of the method comes entirely from the third and fourth steps: a correspondence set that holds across hundreds of unrelated meanings cannot be produced by chance, because chance does not repeat, and it is not easily produced by borrowing, because borrowers take words rather than rules. The method is also what defines a family — a family is not a group of similar languages but a group for which a shared proto-language has been reconstructed.
3. Knowledge
4. The comparative method
5. The regularity of sound change
6. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
7. Language death
8. Connections
9. Language death
10. Contact, borrowing and the limits of resemblance
11. The regularity of sound change
12. Bayesian phylogenetic dating of language families
13. Sino-Tibetan
14. Afroasiatic
15. Proto-Indo-European
16. Sir William Jones
17. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
18. Glottochronology proposes to date language splits arithmetically
19. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
20. The comparative method
21. The language isolate
22. SIL International (Ethnologue)
23. Sumerian ceases to be a mother tongue
24. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, third edition
25. The International Decade of Indigenous Languages
26. The comparative method
27. Language in the Americas, and its rejection
28. The comparative method
29. Grimm's Law — the first Germanic sound shift
30. Grimm formulates the first sound shift as a system
31. The Neogrammarian doctrine: sound laws admit no exception
32. Evidence
33. Supports the general account in this pack of the comparative method, the regularity principle, contact and borrowing, glottochronology and its critics, and the definition of a language isolate. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No chapter or page is cited, because the book was not opened in this session; the citation identifies the work a curator should check the general account against. This is the source named in the Journey declaration.
34. Supports the statement that Jones argued in 1786 for a common lost source of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin on the evidence of verb roots and grammatical forms. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The discourse is paraphrased, never quoted verbatim, and the delivery date of 2 February 1786 is taken from the standard accounts rather than from the publication itself.