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.

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:

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.