5 - The nature of reconstruction

Summary

But how is it

That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

(The Tempest I.ii.48–50)

Beyond filiation

The previous chapters were largely about interpreting representations in dead languages, and establishing filiations, i.e. determining originating nodes for cladograms, and sorting characters into putative phylogenetic series (as well as discriminating descent from diffusion, and ancestry from convergence). There was a certain amount of reconstruction as well, since aspects of the (purported) past were brought into being by the processing: phonetic or other interpretations, relationships and ancestral segment-sequences designed to warrant phylogenetic claims, etc. Regular correspondences provide ‘proof’ or at least a strong index of relationship; positing protoforms and constructing etymologies concretize these relations and project them onto a (quasi-)historical plane.

This chapter deals in more detail with phonological reconstruction, and includes some consideration of the rather different kinds of problems that may arise outside phonology. Here I consider not only transmuting relations into the forms that underwrite them, but uncovering occult change hidden by previous procedures; I also deal with some of the special properties of non-phonological levels that invoke more than the simple additive results of segmental reconstruction.