Overview

The goal of the reconstruction team is to articulate the concrete reconstruction of West Nilotic lexicon and morphology, employing ground-breaking methods for identifying cognate suprasegmental morphological processes and analogical changes, as well as extrapolating from parallel processes in other language families. The profoundly collaborative approach to reconstruction envisaged here marks a step change from typical practice. The inclusion of team members with prior expertise on other families allows much more ambitious goals to be envisaged—ultimately, a universally applicable (panchronic) account of how suprasegmental morphology emerges from segmental morphology.