In article ,
K writes:
|
| And also - languages apparently mutate in a fairly consistent pattern
| (ie the sounds drift in the same direction, rather than an 'a' drifting
| one way and an 'e' in another) ... and so, it is possible to work
| backwards ad deduce what the older language sounded like. Apparently.

To a limited extent. As with most such extrapolations, the reliability
goes rapidly down as the distance increases. Remember that there are
phonetic measurements for only a century back; the analyses of
separated communities have to assume that they have not changed (and
why shouldn't they have?) and go back a few centuries only. Latin
hasn't been spoken as a mother tongue for 1500 years, and classical
Latin was 500 years before that ....


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.