| Preface | p. xiii |
| Conventions, abbreviations and symbols | p. xxi |
| General prologue: time travel and signal processing | p. 1 |
| The past, the present and the historian | p. 4 |
| The historian as mythmaker | p. 4 |
| Messages from the past: historical understanding and the problem of 'synchrony' | p. 9 |
| Making history: witnesses and interpretation | p. 16 |
| Making history: reconstruction | p. 21 |
| Making history: the role of uniformity constraints | p. 24 |
| Metaphor and access | p. 32 |
| Metaphor and metalanguage | p. 41 |
| Summary | p. 42 |
| Written records: evidence and argument | p. 44 |
| Prologue | p. 44 |
| Hearing the inaudible | p. 45 |
| Graph interpretation: generalities | p. 45 |
| What does writing represent? | p. 47 |
| 'Defective' alphabetic representation and the shape of reconstructive argument | p. 50 |
| Allophonic spelling | p. 57 |
| Orthographic conservatism: good and bad news | p. 58 |
| What do texts represent? Variation and etat de langue | p. 61 |
| Spelling variation | p. 61 |
| The import of variation: a test case | p. 63 |
| Morphological variation | p. 66 |
| Literary evidence: rhyme and metre | p. 68 |
| Metalinguistic evidence | p. 78 |
| Premodern phoneticians | p. 78 |
| Glosses and translations | p. 83 |
| What is a 'word' anyhow? Or a sentence, or text? | p. 93 |
| Desperate remedies: interpreting vs. disappearing | p. 96 |
| Relatedness, ancestry and comparison | p. 104 |
| 'Family resemblances' | p. 104 |
| Historicity: how are families possible? | p. 109 |
| Replication and shared errors | p. 111 |
| Cladistic concepts in language filiation | p. 113 |
| Homoplasy | p. 118 |
| 'Sound laws', cognateness and families | p. 123 |
| Diagnostic characters and regular correspondences | p. 123 |
| 'Regular sound change' | p. 132 |
| Comparative method: apomorphies, ancestors and etymologies | p. 135 |
| Problems and pseudo-problems | p. 139 |
| Variation, diffusion and competition | p. 139 |
| Subgrouping: non-arboriform genalogies and character-weighting | p. 143 |
| Multiple descent and 'hybridization | p. 158 |
| Etymologies and 'etymologies': the hypertaxon problem | p. 159 |
| Non-phonological evidence for relationship | p. 169 |
| Convergence and contact | p. 172 |
| Preliminaries | p. 172 |
| Homoplasy vs. plesiomorphy | p. 173 |
| A test case: Afrikaans diphthongization | p. 173 |
| Excursus: motivated and unmotivated naturalness | p. 177 |
| The north-European diphthongization area | p. 179 |
| Contact | p. 184 |
| The constraints problem | p. 184 |
| Sorting, 1: 'synchronic foreignness' | p. 190 |
| Sorting, 2: asymmetrical correspondences | p. 195 |
| Sorting, 3: non-substantial ('structural') loans | p. 197 |
| Contact agendas and etymology | p. 201 |
| Endogeny vs. contact as a methodological issue | p. 207 |
| Etymologyia ex silentio: contact with lost languages | p. 209 |
| The nature of reconstruction | p. 215 |
| Beyond filiation | p. 215 |
| Projection vs. mapping | p. 216 |
| Principles | p. 216 |
| 'Quanta' and phonetic gradualism: a few suggestions | p. 221 |
| Morphoclines, quanta and borrowing | p. 225 |
| Projection again: conventions and justifications | p. 228 |
| Internal reconstruction | p. 232 |
| Tautolinguistic cognates and reconstruction | p. 232 |
| Internal reconstruction and 'abstract' morphophonemics | p. 234 |
| The limits of internal reconstruction | p. 237 |
| Chronology and sequence | p. 241 |
| Morphosyntactic reconstruction | p. 246 |
| Preliminaries | p. 246 |
| Reconstructing morphology: a non-example | p. 251 |
| Simplification and cyclicity | p. 252 |
| Morphological portmanteaus | p. 257 |
| Plesiomorphous residue | p. 263 |
| Directionality and morphoclines | p. 267 |
| Postscript: realism in reconstruction | p. 270 |
| Phonetic realism: the art of coarse transcription | p. 270 |
| What is a protolanguage? | p. 272 |
| Time and change: the shape(s) of history | p. 277 |
| The nature of 'change' | p. 277 |
| Language in time: when is a change? | p. 281 |
| Linguistic time | p. 290 |
| Arrows and cycles | p. 290 |
| Epigenetic landscapes | p. 293 |
| Point attractors: grammaticalization and other sinks | p. 295 |
| Cyclical attractors | p. 297 |
| Chreods: conspiracy and drift | p. 300 |
| Stasis and punctuation | p. 303 |
| The emergence of novelty | p. 305 |
| Ex nihilo nihil fit? Setting the boundaries | p. 305 |
| The joys of junk: decomposition and bricolage | p. 309 |
| Exaptation | p. 316 |
| Non-junk exaptation: inventing new systems | p. 318 |
| Explanation and ontology | p. 325 |
| The issues | p. 325 |
| Conceptual preliminaries | p. 325 |
| The logical structure of explanations | p. 328 |
| In which the author revisits an earlier self, and is not entirely satisfied by what he sees, but not entirely repentant | p. 332 |
| Hermeneutic explication | p. 336 |
| The 'hermeneutic challenge' | p. 336 |
| Does the mind 'shun purposeless variety'? | p. 340 |
| Function: hermeneutics and the individualist error | p. 352 |
| Is change 'functional', 'dysfunctional' or neutral? | p. 352 |
| Functional explanation: an example | p. 355 |
| Prophylaxis and therapy | p. 359 |
| Whose function? Individuals vs. collectives | p. 361 |
| 'Agents': structure, pragmatics and invisible hands | p. 366 |
| A modest ontological proposal | p. 370 |
| The locus of change: societies vs. populations | p. 370 |
| A medium-neutral evolutionary model | p. 376 |
| Consequences of the population model: bottlenecks, universals and 'mind' | p. 382 |
| Envoi | p. 384 |
| References | p. 391 |
| Index of names | p. 416 |
| Subject index | p. 420 |
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