Comparative method: Difference between revisions

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During the late 18th to late 19th century, two major developments improved the method's effectiveness.

First, it was found{{by whom|date=November 2017}} that many sound changes are conditioned by a specific ''context''. For example, in both [[Ancient Greek|Greek]] and [[Sanskrit]], an [[Aspiration (phonetics)|aspirated]] [[stop consonant|stop]] evolved into an unaspirated one, but only if a second aspirate occurred later in the same word;<ref>{{harvnb|Beekes|1995|p=128}}.</ref> this is [[Grassmann's law]], first described for [[Sanskrit]] by [[Sanskrit grammarians|Sanskrit grammarian]] [[Pāṇini]]<ref>{{harvnb|Sag|1974|p=591}}; {{harvnb|Janda|1989}}.</ref> and promulgated by [[Hermann Grassmann]] in 1863.

Second, it was found that sometimes sound changes occurred in contexts that were later lost. For instance, in Sanskrit [[velar consonant|velars]] (''k''-like sounds) were replaced by [[palatal consonant|palatals]] (''ch''-like sounds) whenever the following vowel was ''*i'' or ''*e''.<ref>The asterisk (*) indicates that the sound is inferred/reconstructed, rather than historically documented or attested</ref> Subsequent to this change, all instances of ''*e'' were replaced by ''a''.<ref>More accurately, earlier ''*e'', ''*o'', and ''*a'' merged as ''a''.</ref> The situation could be reconstructed only because the original distribution of ''e'' and ''a'' could be recovered from the evidence of other [[Indo-European languages]].<ref>{{harvnb|Beekes|1995|pp=60–61}}.</ref> For instance, the [[Latin]] suffix {{lang|la|que}}, "and", preserves the original ''*e'' vowel that caused the consonant shift in Sanskrit: