Zompist Bboard Again

We discussed the possibility of a *h₂ʷ in PIE a few times in the old thread. I now have a summary write-up of this on my blog, including some new typological arguments. I dropped a line to the Suter guy too; he reports that his paper was rejected by several dedicated IEist journals and that reviewer...

And how does Sahara drying out force people in the Near East to die out? As we can see from the current situation, one can be overwhelmingly a desert while the other mostly isn't. Do we have some kind of biogeographical data showing massive desertification periods also in the Near East? Additionally...

What about what I wrote (multiregionalism within Africa and several times humans went to the Middle East and died out there), which is also what I've seen in most of the literature I've read (published by professors within the field, not bloggers)? It seems far more simpler (Occam's razor) than ref...

Hausa is probably a better example, IIRC it turns all coda *p *k into /u/. (Finnish only does this for *p *k before /n r l/.)

bbbosborne wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 9:02 pm pronouns
ㅤㅤㅤsg.ㅤpl.ㅤpolite
1
2
3m
3f
3d
3h
3s
3c
3l
3a
3b
3cl
3t
3an
4

What, no 2.5th person?

Well yeah, I already agreed that my 2nd suggestion seems more likely, I'm really only protesting you claiming that *ḱ…ḱ would be outright impossible (even in pre-PIE?)

— Or indeed, just as distant even from any of the sub-Saharan African families, now that it's starting to look like Homo sapiens sapiens actually rather evolved in western-to-southern Asia all along, and only backmigrated to Africa later on. Evidence? This is the first time I have heard of such a h...

What makes gender a stable marker in IE is not simply its presence but the fact that the gender markers are cognate . I don't think you're following. The fact is that there is, across west-to-south-central Eurasia, a large belt of languages having some kind of a 2-or-3 noun gender system; a typolog...

Also, I am no longer sure that the GVC collapsed all the affected vowels into one vowel, though this seems to be the most parsimonious assumption. However, there are many unexplained irregularities in PIE ablaut which may make the assumption of more than one vowel besides *i and *u necessary. My kn...

I'm more inclined to follow a theory where the palatovelars represent an innovation of the satem languages, though clearly relatively early, and probably any pre-satem dialect(s) may have co-existed during the time of PIE itself, but I am not convinced that the system currently reconstructed in a s...

You conveniently neglect the root constraint against identical consonants, according to which *ḱenḱ- is impossible. This "constraint" already has a dozen or so counterexamples (LIV has *dʰewdʰ-, ¹*h₁reh₁-, ²*h₁reh₁-, *h₂elh₂-, *h₂reh₂g-, *h₂sews-, *prep-, *ses-, *skek- plus, if you count ...

And if you read the introduction of NIL you would know that it is far from comprehensive. In other words, there are serious gaps in the data set you are using. Which simply means that you can't draw any conclusions from the absence of anything in your data set. No, statistical discrepancies can be ...

For the root *kes 'to comb, to scrape' I can find reflexes in all branches except Tocharian and Armenian. I'm using a slighly more closely division with e.g. Northwest Germanic, Gothic, Old Prussian, East Baltic and Slavic counted separately. Not to suggest that Germanic or Balto-Slavic aren't bran...

I don't know where the story comes from that PIE has few plain velars. But when I eyeball the data in LIV2 , I get a different impression. Look at their distribution too. E.g. the median distribution for roots beginning with clear *g- is 3 subgroups, none is found in more than 6, none have reflexes...

What IMHO also has a good chance of being archaic is Eskimo-Aleut (though the vowel system may have once been richer, as if EA had its own GVC). Possibly, but is it archaic enough ? Proto-Eskimo is only a few thousand years old. PEA could be older than has been usually thought (some recent work sug...

Kümmel adduces not only Brugmann's law as evidence for *o being "stronger" than *e, but also *o becoming Proto-Tocharian *e (to merge with PIE *ē) in contrast to *e merging with *i and *u in PToch *ä, as well as certain effects in Anatolian. Specifically, in Luwian, we have *éC(C)V > aCCV...

At some point we will have to move from just proposing hypotheses to comparing them though, and at that point typological parallels start being of great value: e.g. explaining Brugmann's Law is much easier from a starting point of *a *ā than from *e *o with *o equipped with an ad hoc feature "[...

I would argue that the lack of any vowel anywhere in the entire Anatolian branch that could only reflect such a schwa is as close to proof as you can reasonably get when trying to prove a vowel did not exist. But there are meta-reasons to assume no schwa epenthesis - it provides a simpler explanati...

we could also assume that consonantal *h₁ had already been lost, but vocalic *h₁ was still continued as *ə — so *nh₁s > *nəs, *th₁y > *təy. The third doesn't seem to imply retention of the contrast beyond PAA. Can we assume laryngeal vocalisation in Anatolian when not a single language has any vowe...

Three interesting indirect lines of evidence for laryngeals from Anatolian, from Anthony Yates, The Phonology of Anatolian Reduplication : – in Proto-Anatolian, *-ns- > *-ss-, but the nasal remains in *-nh₁s- (> Luwic ns , Hittite nz ) – in Hittite, *ti *tyV > zi zV (/tsi tsV/), but *th₁i *th₁yV > t...