Sound change is not random chaos
Historical linguists often treat sound change as regular. That means a sound shift is expected to affect all words with the same sound pattern, not just one word at a time.Language Change: How linguists recover vanished sounds
But ancient speech left no recordings
For most of history, there was no audio archive. Linguists have to reconstruct older pronunciation from written texts, plus clues from rhyme and rhythm.Language Change: How linguists recover vanished sounds
