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INTERNAL AND COMPARATIVE RECONSTRUCTION
As in the above instance, they should be availed of whenever they lead to economy.
Phonemic analysis, which itself is a sort of initial 'reconstruction', regards all allophones as positional variants of a phoneme. This is all right on a synchronic level. But when we come to diachronic linguistics we know that allophones of a phoneme do not always arise because they have developed as positional variants, but because sometimes a gap has occurred somewhere owing to merger. Our aim in historical linguistics is to sort this out and try to understand as far as possible the history of each phoneme. Therefore if we get a correspondence like -V :-bh where -bh is phonetically [-v], this should be taken to yield a set -v/ -v and not -v/ -bh. Once this is done, all unnecessany combinations due to partial similarity with-bh will disappear and economy will be achieved at the very outset.
Madhu Vidyā/353
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