This is mostly correct so I’ll focus on small specific details, OK?
Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you’ll also see them before things that you don’t expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example *me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn’t use it.
It is kind of “guesswork” but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an “anything goes”.
The sounds represented as *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, *h₄ and *H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they’re simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that *h₁ was [ʔ], it’s more like the sound in “oh-oh” than like [h]. And some argue that they aren’t even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).
This is mostly correct so I’ll focus on small specific details, OK?
Asterisk means not directly attested. In reconstructions it goes as you say, but you’ll also see them before things that you don’t expect speakers to use, in synchronic linguistics; for example *me apple eat gets an asterisk because your typical English speaker wouldn’t use it.
It is kind of “guesswork” but it follows a very specific procedure, called the comparative method. As in, it is not an “anything goes”.
The sounds represented as *h₁, *h₂, *h₃, *h₄ and *H do not necessarily sound like [h]. At this point they’re simply part of the notation. For example, a common hypothesis is that *h₁ was [ʔ], it’s more like the sound in “oh-oh” than like [h]. And some argue that they aren’t even the sounds themselves, but rather the effect of the sounds on descendant words (the difference is important because, if two sounds had the same effect, they ended with the same symbol).
Thanks for the details! I forgot some of the details since I last took a course in linguistics like almost 10 years ago