Definition: The Comparative Method is used by historical linguists to determine what an ancestral language might have looked like. By looking at languages of today, linguists deduce which processes could have produced one word/rule in one language and another in a different language when both are believed to have come from the same mother language. Specifically, linguists look for phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical changes and their causes.
Proto-Indo-European is thought to be the mother language for most of the European languages, and the languages of Iran and India. Nostratic is, more controversially, thought to be an earlier language that covers the families of Indo-European languages, the Hungarian and Finnish languages, and others. Both Nostratic and Proto-Indo-European linguists use the comparative method.
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Linguists noticed the words for "father" in Sanskrit (pita), Greek (pater), Latin (pater), Gothic (fadar), and English
(father) were cognates. Once many such cognates were found, they could use the comparative method to determine what the ancestral protoform must have been. The protoform for father is presumed to be *pəter-.See The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe on the LanguageLog Blog.
