Internal Reconstruction as a Creative Tool for Unearthing the Linguistic Past
Paul Newman
Internal Reconstruction, the traditional stepchild of the Comparative Method, is usually presented as a formal discovery technique limited to the analysis of morpheme alternants. This unduly restrictive characterization overlooks the great potential of Internal Reconstruction for uncovering the earlier history of a language. It also undervalues the scientific ingenuity, resourcefulness, and imagination and the knowledge of a language in depth and detail that are essential to this approach.
Important discoveries in the history of Hausa (a Chadic language of Nigeria and Niger) that were uncovered by Internal Reconstruction include: consonantal sound laws (especially Klingenheben's Law and the corollary Law of Codas in Reduplication), the emergence of glottal stop and /h/ as new phonemes, expansion and changes in the vowel system, the recovery of an unattested Proto-Chadic pronoun, the creation of new verb forms by back formation, the explanation for asymmetry in noun plural formatoin, and the massive reconstitution of nominal gender by a process of overt characterization. In this talk, I shall describe the empirical anomalies and creative insights that led to a number of these discoveries. A theme running throughout is taht whereas Internal Reconstruction is by definition internal, it is enriched and strengthened by a comparative perspective.