Zompist Bboard Again

*bak- "club, peg, stick" is a classic; it seems nobody can ever fully dismiss it despite it stinking like week-old fish because there's no other conclusive explanation for the things it ties together. The semantics are terrible: Germanic *pagilaz (English pail ) is just about defensible a...

There is no reason that *h₃ could not have become voiced in the daughter that spawned Indo-Aryan. For instance, I have heard it posited that ME /x/ may have become voiced in the daughter that spawned StdE in positions where it did not merge with /f/ prior to disappearing altogether. (Of course, tha...

Back when I had just discovered this forum and was reading through the discussion on PIE (and it might have been here or on the old forum), I seem to recall someone hypothesizing that *h 3 was a rhotic rather like the one in English. Does anyone have any unconventional ideas on the pronunciation of ...

I think that the lack of a native etymology for the word for "seven" isn't really that much evidence. Proto-Indo-European is a language with just as much of a complex and layered history as English, and the lack of many (or any?) apparent etymologies for English numerals does not mean the...

Though I'm not sure I follow your line of thought. Surely it's possible that just a single numeral is a loanword? And no native etymology being proposed by such an extensive source and review of the earlier literature surely gives some weight to the notion that *septm is a loanword. I think that th...

What dialect of NAE realizes the rhotic as uvular?

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include: Australia Mainland SEA, including South China Insular SEA Eastern Siberia and Nearctic Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa Subsaharan Africa Eastern South America Western South America Ea...

It's well understood that tonogenesis in Southeast Asia was probably an areal change. But do we know if it originated in one language family in particular, or did it happen to all involved languages around the same time, before which none of the languages in the region were tonal?

Does a similar sort of argument work for the Proto-Germanic a-stem masculine accusative singular?

I suspect that, even if, through some kind of magic trick or something, we would get a table with accurate numbers of currently spoken languages for each year of the past 30,000 years, it would still be difficult to sum them all up through time, since for that, you'd need some kind of standard for ...

Maybe the peak of language density is somewhere between the neolithic revolution and the bronze age? Just a possibility. This is actually a really interesting question about language density that I hadn't thought of! That sounds roughly reasonable. Although perhaps it occurred in places on the brin...

How many languages have ever been spoken? There are seven-thousand-odd spoken today, roughly, but I'm wondering if we have an estimate for how many have been spoken at any point in time. I know this question is not very well-defined but even still there might be some way to put a rough number to it....

All that being said, what are people's thoughts on the stop system of PIE? Personally, I think it's likely that the glottalic viewpoint was true at some point in pre-Proto-Indo-European history (which would account for things like the absence of *b), but then evolved into the traditionally reconstru...

In my personal opinion, the "typological universals" are distributions of various stop consonants does not really have as much bearing on PIE phonology as people tend to assume. Such "universals" are found to be false all the time (like Northwest Mekeo and the idea of all languag...

I have heard this lowering in m i lk, van i lla, s i nce, dis i ntegrate, and antisem i tic, by speakers of various dialects of American English. (Further, I have heard the first vowel in "miracle" pronounced as [eɪ], which may be the realization of the DRESS vowel before /r/ here in Ameri...

I'm a newer member to this board but back when I was excitedly reading the entire history of this thread and its predecessor, I remember seeing your name quite a bit back then. Welcome back!

In my dialect of English (Western American English), the word "the" is pronounced consistently as [ðə] before consonant-initial words and [ði:] before vowel-initial ones. I was under the impression that this distinction was widespread, but I've recently found that many speakers of Midweste...

hwhatting wrote: ↑Mon May 29, 2023 9:31 am Slavic later formed something called aorist under Iranian influence.

What evidence is there that it was specifically Iranian influence that caused this?

But now that you mention it, I never really noticed how much other IE branches have a tendency to do something weird with the voiced aspirates.

Of course it's historical happenstance. It would be odd if each IE branch were conservative about one thing in particular. "Keeping the three stop series distinct" is also shared with Hellenic and Indo-Iranian. I'm wondering about things that Germanic preserves unusually well compared to o...