ABSTRACT
The comparative method is the most important of the historical methods, but it can be used only when we have identified two or more languages sharing a common ancestor. It cannot be applied to a language with no known relatives, and it may be of minimal use with a language whose only identifiable relatives are very distantly related to it. In such circumstances, we must fall back on a second method, one which requires no data from related languages. This is the internal method, which can sometimes be applied to a single language so as to allow us to reconstruct important characteristics of earlier stages of that language; such reconstruction is internal reconstruction. In this chapter, we’ll look at how internal reconstruction can be carried out.
