ABSTRACT

The process and result of investigating older written or printed works, especially poetic ones, with the purpose of reconstructing the original version. When too many original authentic manuscripts are missing, as is especially the case with texts from antiquity and to a certain extent with medieval texts, or when there is a large temporal gap between the earliest preserved version of a text and the date of its original composition, reconstruction of the original text must depend primarily on an exact understanding of the linguistic features of the work as well as the time of its origin and transmission. Important tools for linguistic analysis include dialectology, graphemics, phonetics, phonology, as well as any linguistic investigations and descriptions of previous stages of the language, especially historical grammars and glossaries, among others.