We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
In scholarship, a form nobody attested — reconstructed, not recorded.
Also known as: Reconstruction asterisk, Star before a word in a linguistics book
Outside the footnote, the asterisk has a precise scholarly job: it marks a form that no surviving source contains and that has been reconstructed by argument. In historical linguistics it is the standard mark of a proto-form.
An asterisk placed before a word or form to indicate that it is unattested in any surviving source and has been reconstructed by comparative argument.
Contexts: History
Standard in historical linguistics, where every Proto-Indo-European form carries one: no such text survives, and the whole vocabulary is inference from descendant languages.
In descriptive grammar the same mark is used for the opposite purpose — to flag a form that native speakers reject as ungrammatical — which is a genuine ambiguity between subfields.
Reconstructed or ungrammatical: the same asterisk, and only the discipline tells you which.
A small star of five or six short strokes radiating from a common centre, set before a word rather than after it.
The scholarly reconstruction mark uses the asterisk glyph in a sense unrelated to footnoting.