ABSTRACT
First and fundamental to the process is the existence of a historical linguistic reconstruction of the language family, or the branch of a family, in which the relevant lexicon occurs. Because sound change histories in languages proceed according to regular rules, the systematic formulation of such changes in a language family constitutes the essential analytical apparatus for determining whether the surface similarities between two words of like meaning are due to chance, to borrowing, or to actual common
derivation from a root word in the proto-language. To somewhat oversimplify a complex process of analysis, words in diff erent languages of a particular family can be considered refl exes of an ancient root word only if their modern-day forms show regular sound correspondences throughout the stem portion of the word. (By stem we mean the root element of the word, with any prefi xes or suffi xes disregarded; English ‘oxen’, for example, consists of the stem ox-plus an old plural suffi x, -en.) Th e lack of regular correspondence at any point in a word stem normally indicates that we are dealing with a later word borrowing or with a chance resemblance. (For an introduction to this kind of analysis see Ehret 2000).
