Sound correspondence

A recurring relationship between sounds in words with related meanings across languages. Regular sound correspondences provide evidence that languages share a historical ancestor.

Comparative method: A method for reconstructing language history by comparing systematic similarities across related languages. It uses recurring sound correspondences to infer ancestral forms and establish language relationships.
Historical linguistics: The study of how languages change and how they are related through time. Sound correspondence is a central kind of evidence used in this field.
Proto-Indo-European language: The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its reconstruction draws on recurring correspondences among daughter-language words.
Onomatopoeia: The formation or use of words that imitate sounds associated with their meanings. Imitative similarities may recur independently and need not indicate common descent.
Sound change: A transformation in pronunciation that spreads through a language over time. Regular sound changes create predictable correspondences between related languages.
Language family: A group of languages descended from a common ancestral language. Regular correspondences help identify which languages belong to the same family.
Grimm's law: A set of regular consonant shifts between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic. It is a landmark demonstration that consonants correspond systematically across related languages.
Language contact: The interaction of speakers and languages that can lead to shared linguistic features. Contact can spread similar words across languages without inherited sound correspondence.
Proto-language: A reconstructed or documented ancestral language from which related languages descend. Correspondences can reveal sounds in a shared ancestor that no longer survive unchanged.
Semantic change: A change over time in the meaning of a word or expression. Related meanings help identify candidate word pairs, though meaning alone cannot prove cognacy.

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