What do all the asterisks before word forms or sentences mean?
Linguists use asterisks for several reasons, which can be rather confusing. An asterisk before a word form usually means that the word is reconstructed, which means that the word is not preserved anywhere but can be intelligently guessed at by looking at similar words in various stages of the language in question or at similar words in related languages. An asterisk before a sentence, however, usually means that the sentence is ungrammatical, that there is something so wrong with it that a native speaker of the language would not accept it as a possible sentence. Unfortunately, the two usages sometimes become conflated, so that an asterisk before a word may denote an unacceptable word formation. To get around this problem, some people prefer to use one asterisk before a word to denote reconstruction, and two asterisks to denote unacceptability.
