Introducing English Linguistics

linguistic reconstruction
. Reconstruction involves
examining languages for which we have surviving records and which we
know are related and then inferring what an ancestral language for these
languages might have looked like. The assumption underlying linguistic
reconstruction is that if so-called “sibling” languages within a language
family all possess a specific group of words, then the parent language
from which these languages are descended must have also had these
words.
The process of examining languages, grouping them into language fam-
ilies, and reconstructing ancestral languages is known as the