Reconstruction and the comparative method

Current research into the Indo-European language family largely involves linguistic reconstruction. Reconstructing aspects of the parent language is both an end in itself and an aid to understanding the links between the languages in the family and explaining their historical development. In Indo-European studies, reconstruction has enabled linguists to interpret texts in languages which have left only scanty linguistic remains and which would be otherwise largely obscure (as in the case of Lusitanian discussed in section 1.2). It is possible to reconstruct any aspect of the parent language, but the crowning achievement of comparative linguistics is phonological reconstruction. There is a broad consensus among scholars that the phonemic inventory of PIE can be reconstructed fairly accurately, although there is still debate about the phonetic realisation of the phonemes. Most Indo-Europeanists would place greater confidence in the reconstructed phonemic system than in many of the reconstructions of individual lexemes or morphological or syntactic phenomena.

How does this confidence in reconstructed phonemes come about? As an example, let us consider the comparison of English, Dutch and German, which are all members of the Germanic branch of Indo-European. Any speaker of one of these languages will see similarities in the vocabulary and grammar of the other two. An English speaker learning Dutch and German, for example, cannot fail to notice that the words for ‘bread’ and ‘water’ in the two languages (brood and water in Dutch, Brot and Wasser in German) are extremely close.