Zompist Bboard Again

A recent dream involved an underground train station where growing amounts of people were stuck due to all the outgoing escalators being currently under maintenance. There was, however, still a working incoming escalator, and there were even street vendors coming in with snacks to hawk to the people...

KathTheDragon wrote: ↑Fri Aug 31, 2018 4:18 pmAblaut is PIE is extremely limited and unproductive

Depends on who you ask; at minimum Roland Pooth would disagree.

Found some very nice blue leather shoes today (no, not suede, it's some proprietary method for indigo-dying regular leather).

I have the feeling that Proto-Uralic is especially conservative (though Bomhard at least rejects that notion); the Uralo-Siberian phonology reconstructed by Fortescue, which is quite similar to, but not the same as, the PU one, perhaps gives a good idea of what Proto-Mitian phonology may have looke...

Consonants: /b d f g h j k l n p s t ts tʃ v x z ð ŋ ɲ ɹ ʃ ʔ ʟ θ/ Vowels: i u æ ɑ ɔ ɛ ɪ ʊ ʌ plus eɪ , aɪ , oʊ Syllable Structure (c)(c)v(c)(c) Got any consonant clusters planned out yet? This sounds fairly close to English so far (esp. the vowels), but it could also end up quite far apart if you al...

That said, there are other weirdly specific lexical matches, such as Egyptian ḫnt "face" ~ PIE *h₂ent- "forehead", which can't be so easily explained away. To drill into this case in some more detail: I've a WIP index of Bomhard's Nostratic roots, as some of you may know. About ...

and here we have a wild Isolationist thinking that they're saying something new and insightful Okay, less snarkily: probably everyone in this thread already knows that look-alikes without supporting data aren't really worth much. However, any good look-alike is still very much a reason to go at lea...

and here we have a wild Isolationist thinking that they're saying something new and insightful

It's been a while since I've done this, but this may be a good point to give it a re-spin. Name : J. P. Nicknames : no Birthplace : Helsinki region, Finland Place of residence : " Occupation : junior Uralicist Pets : no Gender : http://66.media.tumblr.com/d8a04b2ecdf90f1a9b3c1b52211e5486/tumblr...

I'm not ready to throw ALL single consonant Hungarian suffixes into the garbage bin of 'unexplained innovations of Hungarian' just because Hungarian lost so many old single-consonant suffixes and innovated so many new ones. I don't do so either; I only suggest that whatever they come from, it shoul...

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Fri Aug 24, 2018 12:58 pmAnd what effect does sulcalisation often have on neighbouring consonants?

I'd say "no one knows well enough, because sulcalization as a distinct articulation almost never comes up in any language"…

the 1st person subjective -k and plural -k of Hungarian must come from somewhere. And that somewhere is not *ŋ, since it regularly produces g in Hungarian, not k. What might be happening here is that Hungarian doesn't retain the medial -k- in nouns and verbs, but does retain the final -k in inflect...

The problem is, palatalization is still only marginally contrastive in the initial consonant, owing to a couple of vowel shifts, which seems like an odd situation to me. This is exactly how palatalization works in Veps, for example. Estonian is even more limited and only has contrastive palatalizat...

Another morphological difference between active and inactive verbs were the personal endings. Each of the two classes had its own set of endings. Active verbs used a set related to the personal pronouns, which is reflected in the active non-perfect endings in PIE3, the mi-conjugation in Hittite and...

I'd say a specific melody is the most salient part of mhm, roughly long low-mid in the first syllable, high falling on the second.

It goes in a couple of phases. The following outline is adapted from a 1975 paper by Sammallahti: 1) some distinct glide losses and epentheses in the early Northern Samoyedic dialects (e.g. Nenets-Enets *jilɛ- 'to live' versus Nganasan *elɛ-; Nen-En *ïnta 'bow' versus Nganasan *jïntå) 2) general epe...

My English is usually pretty heavy on spelling pronunciations; /hɑːf ~ hæ[ː]f/, /tɔːk/, /wɔːk/ might be the only words I have with consistent silent <em>l</em>. But /pɑːlm/, /ɔːlmənd/, /sɔːlmən/, /fɔːlk/, /jɔːlk/ (not /foʊlk/, /joʊlk/ for some reason). This can be velarized as far as [ʟ] or mere vow...

Don't feel like transcribing the Korean/Japanese/Armenian rn, but let's start by roughly aligning the rest and sketching a rough initial reconstruction. Greek/Old Italic has been mostly translitterated. 4. p a zzinë åb lånn a zzë du tre r i gë rammi b lë r emmë rror ----- 5. p e ndin ab lonn a nd ti...

Non-phonemic longer vowels, such as more open vowels (/a/ [aˑ] versus /i/ [i]) or vowels in open syllables can also be stress attractors (at least as long as there are no phonemic long vowels).

Most of this thread seems to presume that bilabial vs. labiodental is some kind of surface phenomenon to be explained away, based on an underlying labial stop vs. labial fricative phonological structure. But note that the opposite analysis is possible as well: bilabial vs. labiodental as underlying ...