Zompist Bboard Again

As I think I mentioned last thread already, Uralic *d just has very few IE correspondences at all, and some semantically good-looking cases don't offer any regularity: #śedäm ~ *ḱerd- 'heart', *edə- ~ *h₂ant- 'front' (well, both have an *RT cluster in IE, but *nt ~ *nt would seem more expected). one...

Akangka wrote: ↑Mon Feb 04, 2019 6:32 am

Tropylium wrote: ↑Mon Feb 04, 2019 6:07 am I near-shitposted about a "prosodic" reconstruction on Tumblr about a year back, dunno if any of you are thinking about this though.

Why do it affect P instead of B?

Meta-answer: 'cos it's Wild Speculation and not hole-poking-proofed ¯\_(ッ)_/¯

I near-shitposted about a "prosodic" reconstruction on Tumblr about a year back , dunno if any of you are thinking about this though. However you have a problem reconciling this with Germanic - a suprasegmental which produces aspiration in Greek and Indo-Aryan and is lost elsewhere also so...

Akangka wrote: ↑Wed Jan 30, 2019 10:01 amAs gw -> ɣw, it's not possible without g -> ɣ.

Latin shifts *gw to /w/ except after a nasal (e.g. veniō, vīvus, vorō) but retains /g/.

Ethiosemitic is a much deeper and more diverse branch of the family than many people realise, to the extent that it might actually be better to posit the PS Urheimat in the horn of Africa No, not really. Ethiosemitic probably does have more diversity than any other clear group within of Semitic, bu...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Mon Jan 28, 2019 4:04 pmoriginally, I bumped this post as a favor to mae, as I saw it had been buried on the last page with no replies. I wont do that anymore.

I dunno, you seem to have been successful in sparking some conversation in the process.

If you can first prove that Kurukh-Malto is a branch coordinate with all of the others, rather than just a third-order descendant, then you can propose that the sound change only happened once. Are you prepared to delve into the arguments required to prove that? This is shifting the burden of proof...

Chroneme as a distinct phoneme is not a universal analysis; chroneme as a segment even less (similar to the Thai issue above). Even if you do subscribe to that, monosyllabic content words do not have a contrast between [V] and [Vː], and they could be analyzed as /CV/ with length being predictable… C...

Finnish is not going to be faring well in this race most of the time, but an arguably two-phoneme pii for 'silicon' could be tough to beat.

When you have a lot of languages with a common ancestor, you can argue by appeal to consensus, at least once internal family structure has been worked out. When you only have two languages to compare, it's much harder. If Anatolian has a feature LPIE doesn't, did it innovate it, or retain it? If it...

It also seems to me that Proto-Eskimo-Aleut suffers from a similar problem as Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan: it is basically Proto-Eskimo with some fudging to get Aleut to comply with it. On that note, you might be interested in the Comparative EA Collection from Alaska Native Language Archive (recentl...

This sure sounds like imminent loss of prestige, but starting from healthy and assuming it's all language shift rather than speakers literally being killed off, languages take a good while to really die after even thorough marginalization. There are minority languages that were observed to be at > 1...

While IE and Uralic are geographically closer to each other than to other "Mitian" languages (if we assume, as most linguists do, that Turkic, the next closest neighbour, originated somewhere around the Altai mountains), but that still of course does not mean that they are most closely re...

My "favorite stupid" transcription for /ŋ/ is ɳ , which is for some reason common in Hungary. I believe this is derived as a mis-Latinization of η , which was often used as a substitute for the proper thing. Today Unicode also has Latin Ƞ ƞ though, probably for some recently-written langua...

LGBTQI+ me and half the board Huh, I indeed count about 50% so far, and that's without subtracting replies that have no info either way. The LGBTQ lean in linguistics is a known phenomenon, but over here it seems still stronger yet than IRL. (No especial concentration of lefthanded Lithuanians visi...

Zaarin wrote: ↑Sat Nov 17, 2018 8:32 pm

Tropylium wrote: ↑Sat Nov 17, 2018 5:56 pm An English monosyllable for once (for those who care about them):
flense v. 'to strip off blubber from the body of a marine mammal'

I learned that word thanks to Sue Harrison.

My credits are to Michael Fortescue.

An English monosyllable for once (for those who care about them):
flense v. 'to strip off blubber from the body of a marine mammal'

Nouns in my current proto-language inflect for class and number, quite a lot of classes as in Bantu languages. I also quite like the prefixal shape of them but I had an idea that the root word that gets inflected has sort of "slots" for lack of a better term, where placement of the class/...

I'm not sure where there is anything geminate in here. Also, have you explained anywhere what your third declension in general looks like? (Certainly not in this thread so far.) Taking a wild guess, you perhaps mean that (1) you want to retain a moraic v in your adjective for 'military', but (2) you...

I'm trying to get from strictly CV to CRV without vowel drops, onomatopoeias or borrowings. Doesn't seem like the most probable thing to happen (clusters almost always come from vowel drops). Dipthongizations could readily give you CjV CwV though, and these could then dissimilate etc. to yield some...