Board Thread:Linguistics/@comment-24226155-20131201100959/@comment-2040889-20131201231707

Well, I'd say you have to pick either a starting point to work from or a final product with which to go back in time - having both is going to be ridiculously hard business having to connect them. You could do sound changes either by hand, sure, or via a programme such as Zompist's SCA or Phonix (which I dearly love). As for advice, you'd really have to be more specific since diachronics (the huge chunk of linguistics that deals with sound changes and language history) is an extremely huge area. You might want to read a book on that very topic, and I would heartily recommend Herbert Schendl's "Introduction to Historical Linguistics", published by Oxford Press as it is a brilliant, brilliant starting point, or you might want to go into diachronics without much paperback theoretical backing, in which case I'd suggest you drop a message on my talk page :]