Aschmann Richard P. Proto Witotoan

Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics and The University of Texas at Arlington, 1993. — 171 p. — (Summer Institute of Linguistics and The University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics 114).Richard Aschmann’s Witotoan book is an excellent example of the kind of work that is now needed in historical linguistics, both for its methodology and for its results.
The methodology applied in historical linguistics has been developed largely on the basis of investigation of the Romance and the Germanic subgroups of the Indo-European language family. For the Romance languages we have the source, as well as a large amount of data; for the Germanic languages we have extensive documentation of the several subgroups over a period of a thousand years and more. Accordingly, linguists have been able to draw their conclusions without examining all of the available materials. Moreover, stages in each of the languages have been determined largely on nonlinguistic grounds.