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Abstract

Although it is well-known to most historical linguists that the comparative
method could in principle be used to predict hitherto unobserved words in
genetically related languages, the task of word prediction is rarely discussed
in the linguistic literature. Here, we introduce ‘reflex retrodiction’ as a
new task for historical linguistics and report an ongoing experiment in
which we use a computer-assisted workflow to retrodict reflexes for so far
unobserved words in eight varieties of Western Kho-Bwa (a subgroup of
Sino-Tibetan). Since, at the time of writing this report, the experiment is still
ongoing, we do not report concrete results, but instead provide an estimate
of our expectations by testing the performance of the computational part
of our workflow on existing language data. Our results suggest that reflex
retrodiction has the potential of becoming a useful tool for historically
oriented fieldwork.