English 'foot' and Latin 'ped-' share the same meaning and show the correspondence English /f/ : Latin /p/, and this same /f/ : /p/ correspondence also appears in father/pater, fish/piscis, and fire/pyr-. What does this pattern constitute evidence for?
AExtensive Latin borrowing into Old English, since Latin /p/ weakened to /f/ in borrowed words
BChance resemblance — four pairs is not enough to establish genetic relationship
CA systematic sound correspondence suggesting both languages descend from a common proto-language, with the original proto-sound shifting differently in each language
DConvergent evolution — unrelated languages independently developed similar words for common concepts
Systematic sound correspondences — the same /f/ : /p/ pairing appearing consistently across multiple unrelated words — is the signature evidence for genetic relationship in the comparative method. Four consistent pairs is substantial. The correspondence is as probative as identical sounds would be; what matters is regularity, not similarity. This particular correspondence is explained by Grimm's Law: Proto-Indo-European *p shifted to /f/ in the Germanic branch (including English) while remaining /p/ in Latin.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
A student notices that English 'much' and French 'beaucoup' both mean 'a large quantity.' They claim these are cognates descended from a shared Proto-Indo-European root. What is wrong with this reasoning?
AFrench and English cannot share cognates because French is a Romance language and English is Germanic
BThe words would need to be more similar in form to count as cognates
CShared meaning alone does not establish genetic relationship — cognates require systematic sound correspondences, not semantic similarity
DThe student should first apply Grimm's Law to check if the sounds correspond
'Much' and 'beaucoup' have completely different forms with no systematic sound correspondence — they happen to share a meaning, but meaning alone is not evidence of common ancestry. True cognates like English 'night' / Latin 'noctem' / German 'Nacht' show regular correspondences at each sound position. The comparative method requires ruling out chance resemblance and borrowing through formal correspondences, not semantic similarity. (French and English do share many cognates via their shared Indo-European ancestry, but this is not one of them.)
Question 3 True / False
Two words are cognates if they look similar and share the same meaning across two related languages.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Similarity and shared meaning are necessary but not sufficient for cognate status. Words can look similar due to borrowing (which may postdate the split), chance resemblance (any language pair will have some coincidental lookalikes), or onomatopoeia. True cognates require systematic sound correspondences that fit the established correspondence table for those languages — even very dissimilar-looking words can be cognates if the correspondences are regular (e.g., English 'tooth' / Latin 'dens-'). Conversely, similar-looking words may not be cognates.
Question 4 True / False
Reconstructed proto-forms marked with an asterisk (like PIE *bher-) are best understood as systematic formulas encoding relationships between daughter languages, not as literal recordings of how the proto-language was actually pronounced.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is an important epistemic point about what reconstruction produces. The asterisk notation signals that a form is inferred, not attested. Reconstructed PIE *bher- says: 'there was a form that regularly yields Sanskrit bhar-, Greek pher-, Latin fer-, and English bear through known sound change rules.' It encodes systematic relationships — its value is predictive precision, not historical realism. We have no recordings or witnesses; reconstruction is inference from patterns in daughter languages.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why does the comparative method require sound change to be regular (the Neogrammarian hypothesis)? What would happen to the method if sound change were irregular?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Regular sound change is what makes reconstruction possible. Because each proto-sound predictably yields the same reflex in every word in a given phonetic environment in a daughter language, attested systematic correspondences unambiguously point to a specific proto-sound. If sound change were irregular — if the same proto-sound sometimes became /f/ and sometimes /p/ arbitrarily — correspondences would be random noise, indistinguishable from chance resemblance or borrowing. There would be no principled basis for positing a common ancestor or reconstructing its sounds. The rigidity of the Neogrammarian assumption constrains the hypothesis space enough that a consistent, testable system can be recovered.
The Neogrammarian hypothesis also reframes apparent exceptions: when a word violates the expected correspondence, the method requires finding an explanation (borrowing, dialect contact, analogical change, misidentified cognate) rather than allowing irregular change. This makes the system falsifiable and forces rigorous analysis of each anomaly.