Zompist Bboard Again

Since there's activity going on with the Index again, this should be a good place to note a few of my projects & plans (and to remind myself) : 1) I spent the lion's share of the last academic year assembling an overview bibliography on Uralic historical phonology: first version here . (There wa...

One more interesting reference I saw a few years ago was a talk Tresoldi (2020) referring to "the case of the Index Diachronica" without much further comment.

I am not even ankle-deep into Tungusic myself but, if it's anything like the research history of e.g. Uralic, the primary literature is instead going to be very piecemeal things like "I propose the existence of *x, here's what happens to it in the following eight varieties" (the fate in s...

Suspect yes.

By the way, how many of you have read / browsed Martin Kümmel's Konsonantenwandel (2007, Wiesbaden: Reichert)? At its core it's basically a 300-page Index Diachronica of consonant sound changes in IE + Semitic + Uralic, primarily in order by type of sound change, but already has also a by-language i...

how reliable is this source? It would be good if you could track down the original source where these sound correspondences were published Yeah fair question, just wanted to put out something to start with (that we might be able to later cite in more detail). And I know the conlangers of the forum ...

It's that time of the year again... I have heard multiple people pronounce pączki as [ˈpʰũʔtʃci(ː)] as of late. How in the world do you get from [ɒ̃], which would be close to the original Polish, to [ũ] of all things is beyond me... Spelling pronunciation from "punchkey", i.e. the "P...

Since this was asked, here are some outlines of consonant changes, primarily from the materials of an Intro to Tungusology course I took with Janhunen. The original source seems to be some publication (or also course materials?) by Doerfer from sometime between 1973 and 1984. I do not know if the A ...

I'm not sure why Wiktionary stopped at 37. They might follow the principle of seeing what is accepted in both of the two published Proto-Afrasian reconstructions; like bradrn's linked paper discusses, there's a different one from Orel & Stolbova, etymology-wise it agrees about almost nothing wi...

Isn't Afroasiatic mostly defined by shared morphology, with hardly any accepted cognates? The number of 35 is widely bandied around; I note that Wiktionary has 36 Proto-afroasiatic terms. There will probably be way more findable eventually, but it's hard to distinguish matches from noise until ther...

I think the typological universal about the distribution of implosive POAs isn't as much of a problem as it's made out to be - there's close precedent in Maay. (Where did implosives in Maay come from? How well reconstructed is Cushitic?) And there are a few languages with /ɗ/ and no other implosive...

do consume carrot! is taste good and vitamin and maybe purble ^_^

yes I grew up on Internet forums circa 2000 and I still always think "random" threads are intended to work like this

various thoughts I have about how it might be turned into a serious academic resource Straight off it's easy to say though that the most important point for more-than-conlanging usability would be improved sourcing . And I don't mean settling just for giving or requiring "a" source for a ...

Does anyone know how to contact Tropylium? I want to ask them what the capital I in the Finnic sound changes means but their last activity here was 2 years ago. I do check back here every … few years … currently, though this would probably have been more often if I knew about this sub-forum — a gre...

The point is that sometimes you might expect certain things to be grammatical (for whatever reason), and they aren't—and that naturally leads you to wonder why. No, I don't mean that there's anything bad with this if you already have ended up with an expectation… The original observation I made is ...

some sentences — e.g. ‘on cat the sitting see mat I the’ — are clearly unintelligible, and get rejected as nonsense, so clearly there must be some rule which they are violating. I do not think this follows. If "copybat" is rejected as not being a word, this doesn't mean that there has to ...

Consider the following sequence of sentence: I know that. I know that you know that. I know that you know that I know that. I know that you know that I know that you know that. I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that. … ad infinitum All these sentences are acceptable and gra...

It appears to me that most arguments in theoretical syntax have the form "sentence X is bad/ungrammatical, therefore we shall explain this happening because…". Where does this come from ? This seems to me to be unlike anything else in linguistics. Nobody thinks it needs a particular explan...

Ruin a language name by changing one letter Think got me thinking how much is it possible to move between language names just by changing one letter. Probably a fair amount between simple CVCV and CVC names, other examples are going to be rarer. – Romanian ↔ A romanian (possibly should be considere...

That would probably be a correct answer in the spirit of the game even if not the letter; so sure, I award thee Nine Points (points not redeemable for cash).