Il ruolo delle lingue di frammentaria attestazione nella ricostruzione

The paper focuses on the languages – often named Trümmersprachen or rather Restsprachen –, which show fragmentary documents. Those languages can play a role in linguistic reconstruction, especially in the field of the Indo-European family, but their importance must be carefully weighed up. In particular, a qualitative analysis led some prominent Italian scholars – Prosdocimi, Gusmani, Campanile, Belardi – to taking advantage of the data emerging from the Restsprachen which show a decent textual corpus and discarding the data inferred from questionable etymologies of proper nouns. Nevertheless, the contribution of Restsprachen in order to solve some problems pertaining to PIE phonology or morphology can be occasionally outstanding – the reconstruction of three series of Indo-European dorsals is conclusively supported by the documentary evidence from Luwian, Lycian, Carian.