Zompist Bboard Again

As for PIE lacking post-velar consonants other than the laryngeals, Proto-Semitic is reconstructed in a similar way (though some Semitic languages at least have shifted /k'/ to /q/), and this is indeed the reason why Indo-Europeanists call them "laryngeals". Thing is, the *k *kʷ *q hypoth...

As for PIE lacking post-velar consonants other than the laryngeals, Proto-Semitic is reconstructed in a similar way (though some Semitic languages at least have shifted /k'/ to /q/), and this is indeed the reason why Indo-Europeanists call them "laryngeals".

That's a dangerous and twisted logic, Torco. Just because the present world (dis)order is bad (I do not like the term "neoliberalism" because it 1) is ill-defined and 2) denotes something illiberal), doesn't mean that a Trump presidency wasn't any better. In fact, it would be much worse - ...

Might the paper in question be Fenwick (2016) ? That's an interesting paper, thank you! Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author . My thanks to Ketsuban and Zju as well. It's funny that Fenwick's ideas are partially close to what Taskubilos...

Get better soon. My best wishes.

For me, the fun in conlanging lies in figuring out what I want, personally, and investigating the richness of language myself. Why would I get a computer to do the fun bits for me? (And, if I want to describe languages created by someone else, actual linguistic fieldwork would give me far more inte...

I spot a Nineteen-Eighty-Four reference in the words listed.

I have long been entertaining the notion that the impression that languages change faster in times of social upheaval than in times of social stability may be a mirage resulting from the conservatism of written norms which are only broken up and realigned with the spoken vernacular in times of soci...

Wikipedia is not an authoritative source here. :P David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language : "The year 1066 marks the beginning of a new social and linguistic era in Britain, but it does not acutally identify the boundary between Old and Middle English. It was a long...

Might the paper in question be Fenwick (2016) ? That's an interesting paper, thank you! Indeed that's it! Regarding the Kartvelian form, it's discussed in another paper by the same author . Also interesting. The similarities between IE and Kartvelian may be due to Kartvelian also having been influe...

I fully concur with zompist here.

Right, begining of the Old English period , not language. It's not like the ol' Angles went to bed one night speaking Proto-Germanic and woke up the next morning speaking Old English. "English", "Old English" and "Proto-Germanic" are all labels we arbitrarily tack on a...

Getting a bit off-topic here, but a couple of interesting observations: One is that the Web is already filling up with AI-generated crap. When you feed an AI AI-generated stuff, quality goes way down. A metaphor I'd like to invoke here is the state of your water jar after you've been painting for a...

Indeed, substratum theories that don't even specify the substratum are cases of ignotum per ignotius and thus not particularly useful. What do you gain by saying, "Word X is from a substratum language, but we don't know which language"? Such a statement is not falsifiable and just a fancy ...

I feel sorry to hear that.

The points made in the back-and-forth between bradrn and Linguoboy illustrate fairly well why, while I absolutely don't support Israel, I'm not really interested in supporting the pro-Palestinian movement, either. No, I don't care if people think that that's the worst kind of bothsidism. When one s...

I have noticed an issue with Stifter's idea. The place names with the element *hal(l) do not all refer to sites where salt was produced by boiling brine, but also to salt mines (e.g. Hallstatt ). This doesn't strictly mean that Stifter was wrong (there may have been a sematic shift from 'crust formi...

This is not true I rarely ever agree with xxx, but they have a point there. Natural languages were created by human beings, after all, so you could interpret them as a form of collaborative conlangs. I think there’s a fundamental and very important difference: natural languages have evolved under t...

Mine too.

keenir wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2024 1:57 am Not really; yes, primates leaned into the development of color vision to better pick out ripe fruits...

Yep.