Role in Historical Linguistics
When undertaking a comparative study of a hitherto un(der)analyzed family of languages it is worthwhile to get an understanding of their systems of alternations, if any, before tackling the greater complexities of analyzing entire linguistic structures. For example, the Type A forms of verbs in Samoan (as in the example, below) are the citation forms, i.e., the forms in dictionaries and word lists, but when making historical comparisons with other Austronesian languages it would be a blunder to use Samoan citation forms with parts missing. (And an analysis of the verb sets would alert the researcher to the certainty that many other words in Samoan have lost a final consonant.) Another way of looking at it is that internal reconstruction gives access to an earlier historical stage, at least in some details, of the languages being compared, and this can be valuable: the more time that passes, the more changes accumulate in the structure of a (living) language, and for this reason we always try to use the earliest known attestations of languages when working with the comparative method.
Internal reconstruction, when not a sort of preliminary to the application of the comparative method, is most useful in cases where the analytic power of the comparative method is unavailable.
Internal reconstruction can also draw limited inferences from peculiarities of distribution. Even before comparative investigations had sorted out the true history of Indo-Iranian phonology, some scholars had wondered if the extraordinary frequency of the phoneme /a/ in Sanskrit (20% of all phonemes together, an astonishing total) might point to some historical fusion of two or more vowels. (In fact, it represents the final outcome of five different Proto-Indo-European syllabics two of which—the syllabic states of /m/ and /n/—can be discerned by the application of internal reconstruction.) But in such cases, internal analysis is better at raising questions than at answering them. The extraordinary frequency of /a/ in Sanskrit hints at some sort of historical event, but does not lead, and cannot, to any specific theory.
Read more about this topic: Internal Reconstruction
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