Linguistic reconstruction: Uncovering Qaqet’s family history
Marc Hausdorf; visualisations by Marc Hausdorf, Melanie Schippling
Qaqet is not alone – it is part of a language family. To reconstruct its common ancestor, we start by comparing vocabulary from the different languages and looking for sound correspondences. Find out more about how we reconstructed Proto-Baining on this page. For a list of Proto-Baining roots, click here.
Historical Reconstruction in a nutshell
- Just like German, English, Dutch, and Swedish are all Germanic languages, Qaqet and four other languages of the area – Mali, Ura, Kairak, and Simbali – form the Baining family.
- They are all distinct languages, but so similar to each other that we can assume they must have come from a common ancestor, Proto-Baining.
- Unfortunately, we do not know what that ancestor language sounded like, since the Baining have only recently started writing their languages down.
- What linguists do in that case is called historical reconstruction. Basically, we try to reconstruct hypothetical Proto-Baining by triangulating back from what we know about the modern Baining languages.
Let’s first consider a straightforward example: The word for ‘mother’ in all Baining languages is nan – we can thus assume that *nan was the Proto-Baining word for ‘mother’, too. Things get a little more interesting when we compare the words for ‘father’: mam in Qaqet, Mali and Ura, but mem in Kairak. Looking at other, similar words, we see that the correspondence of e in Kairak to a in the other Baining languages is not a coincidence, but regular: ‘spiders’ is qumang in Mali and Ura, but qumeng in Kairak; Mali and Ura matka ‘older brother’ correspond to Kairak metka, and so on. From this we infer that there was a sound change in the development of Kairak, where a Proto-Baining a changed to e when it followed an m.
The Baning languages have undergone many different sound changes. Go ahead and explore some of them on the following subpages:
Isoglosses and some of their notation conventions
- The geographic boundary of a linguistic feature is called isogloss.
- The maps display some of the Baining isoglosses in the form of coloured lines plus a description.
- The descriptions use the following linguistic conventions:
- '>' gives the direction of change, e.g. 'a > e' means 'a becomes e'.
- '*' flags reconstructed elements, e.g. the reconstruced Proto-Baining words or syllables.
- '⌀' means that an element disappears ('becomes null').
- If there is a condition for the change, we use:
- '/' to introduce the condition for the change,
- and '_' as a placeholder for the element that changes.
- E.g. 'a > e /*_ik' means 'a becomes e if it occurs before ik in a reconstructed word'.
In case you would like to get an immediate overview of some salient sound changes and isoglosses, consider this map (click to enlarge). But beware, it includes a spoiler for each of the subpages linked above. The notation conventions are explained in the side bar.