Erasmus' reconstruction was based on a wide range of arguments, derived from the philological knowledge available at his time. In the main, he strove for a more regular correspondence of letters to sounds, assuming that different letters must have stood for different sounds, and same letters for same sounds. That led him, for instance, to posit that the various letters which in the iotacist system all denoted must have had different values, and that , , , , , were all diphthongs with a closing offglide. He also insisted on taking the accounts of ancient grammarians literally, for instance where they described vowels as being distinctively long and short, or the acute and circumflex accents as being clearly distinguished by pitch contours. In addition, he drew on evidence from word correspondences between Greek and Latin as well as some other European languages. Some of his arguments in this direction are, in hindsight, mistaken, because he naturally lacked much of the knowledge developed through later linguistic work. Thus, he could not distinguish between Latin-Greek word relations based on loans (e.g. — ') on the one hand, and those based on common descent from Indo-European (e.g. — ') on the other. He also fell victim to a few spurious relations due to mere accidental similarity (e.g. Greek 'to sacrifice' — French "", 'to kill'). In other areas, his arguments are of quite the same kind as those used by modern linguistics, e.g. where he argues on the basis of cross-dialectal correspondences within Greek that must have been a rather open "e"-sound, close to .