Linguistic paleontology

Linguistic paleontology infers aspects of past cultures and environments from vocabulary reconstructed for ancestral languages, especially words for plants, animals, technologies, and social institutions.

Comparative method: A method for reconstructing ancestral languages by comparing systematic similarities among related languages. It identifies inherited vocabulary that can support cultural and environmental inferences.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how they are related over time. Linguistic paleontology applies its reconstruction methods to historical questions about culture.
Proto-Indo-European homeland: The proposed geographic region where Proto-Indo-European was spoken before its languages dispersed. Reconstructed terms for flora, fauna, and terrain have been used to locate this homeland.
Archaeogenetics: The study of past populations and migrations using genetic material from archaeological remains. It traces biological ancestry, unlike linguistic paleontology's inferences from inherited words.
Proto-language: A hypothesized ancestral language reconstructed from similarities among its descendants. Its reconstructed lexicon is the primary evidence linguistic paleontology interprets.
Cognate: A word in one language that descends from the same ancestral word as a word in another language. Cognates across related languages provide the comparative evidence for ancestral vocabulary.
Indo-European migrations: The movements that spread Indo-European languages across much of Europe and parts of Asia. Linguistic reconstructions contribute hypotheses about the societies and routes involved.
Archaeolinguistics: The interdisciplinary study of how linguistic evidence relates to archaeological evidence and human prehistory. It places vocabulary-based reconstructions alongside material evidence and migration models.
Proto-Indo-European: The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family, inferred through comparison of its branches. Its vocabulary has supported influential reconstructions of early Indo-European life.
Sound change: A regular alteration in the pronunciation of a language over time. Regular sound correspondences help establish that compared words are inherited cognates.

Linked from 11 pages