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How do the Germanic words for “guest” help linguists reconstruct Proto-Germanic?

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Thematic map of Europe displaying the distribution of Germanic languages, with different colors indicating regions where English, German, Netherlandic (Dutch), Frisian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese are spoken. Striped areas mark regions where bilingualism is common, and language regions cover countries such as the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and parts of surrounding countries. — West Germanic languages Distribution of the Germanic languages in Europe.

Linguists use the comparative method to reconstruct Proto-Germanic by analyzing cognates—words in related languages that share a common origin. Because no written records of the parent language exist, scholars compare the forms of words across various early Germanic languages to deduce the original, ancestral term.1

The word for "guest" serves as a primary example of this process. By comparing Runic gastiz, Gothic gasts, Old Norse gestr, Old English giest, Old Frisian iest, and Old Saxon and Old High German gast, linguists can reconstruct the Proto-Germanic form *gastiz.1

These reconstructions are marked with an asterisk to indicate they are theoretical forms. Beyond simply identifying relationships, these comparisons allow linguists to understand how Proto-Germanic sounded and how its vowels and consonants evolved into the diverse West Germanic and other Germanic languages spoken today. Further analysis links this root back to the dialectal Indo-European *ghost-i-, meaning "outsider" or "guest".12