Zompist Bboard Again

While there may be merit to the idea that PIE *o was a long vowel, there is one problem. If PIE *o in PIE *genos was actually **genōs, then what was the PIE *ō in dʰéǵʰōm? More generally, if you are going to reconstruct a PIE/pre-PIE vowel system, the first question you should ask is: which vowels a...

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...

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 > ...

Howl: read through the argumentation again. Jasanoff's reasoning can only yield *-is, since *-oyh₁s wouldn't be expected to lose the laryngeal, or lengthen the *o, nor would *-bʰih₁s be expected to have a short vowel reflex anywhere. And when you consider that this ending ought to have a surface vo...

I'm suspicious about this reconstructed instrumental plural -is. Perhaps -h1s is a better reconstruction here. That would also follow the pattern case-ending + plural *s of the PIE accusative (-ms > -ns). This could also be applied to the allative plural -os (also reused for the dative plural) from ...

Jasanoff's article fits in pretty easily, in that it's just clarifying the original early PIE forms. However, I'm skeptical of the base claim, that the Anatolian indifference to number should be projected back to PIE. Unpacking morphemes is always a bit speculative. I could for example say that the...

@Howl: It seems to be fashionable among Nostraticists to reconstruct Proto-Nostratic as an analytic language, but the Mitian languages are generally synthetic, ranging from agglutinating to fusional, so I think an agglutinating Proto-Mitian language is more plausible. I did not know it was fashiona...

(Side note: we're probably ripe for a fork into a Great Indo-Uralic Thread about six posts ago.) I agree. But I liked the great macrofamily thread like the previous board had. So here is a thread for all the proposed macrofamilies. I am now also growing increasingly skeptical of Seefloth's Paradigm...

Sure, though the main problem is that we then have no supporting evidence for an original 1PS marker *-k anymore (reaching over to PIE is surely much too prone to false positives). Even in more general, no original word-final single-C suffixes seem to survive in Hungarian at all; the accusative *-m...

According to my personal hypothesis, Proto-Indo-Uralic was an active-stative language. I don't know of any trace of an active/stative system in Uralic, which is one of the reasons why I don't think Proto-Indo-Uralic would have had one. There probably were no case markers otherwise in Proto-Indo-Ura...

The thematic adjective in Common IE aligns with a neuter in a very strange way. It uses the accusative -om when referencing a neuter noun as subject or agent. For example take this Latin sentence: Animal magnum templum sacrum destruxit. Why would Common IE use an accusative marker for an agent? That...

Hittite ergativity in inanimates is secondary since the ergative "case" is a derivative in *-ent-, so it can't be projected back to PIE. The ergative case of inanimates in Anatolian is a real ergative case. See 'The Problem of the Ergative Case in Hittite' by Craig Melchert http://linguis...

I think it is very likely that nominative -s had a pronominal origin. In my own view early PIE had a fluid version of the system in Anatolian. It used ergative (-n/-nt?) -absolutive (-ø) case marking for passive/stative participants, while using nominative (-s) /accusative (-m) case marking for acti...

The canonical Erlangen amphikinetic is CéC-ōC ~ CéC-oC-m̥ ~ CC-C-és ~ loc. CC-éC, which is attested more-or-less as such in Germanic (though with analogical spread of the e-grade suffix the zero-grade forms) I don't see any vowel change in the first syllable in the attested Germanic forms. All I wa...

There is a reason why Kloekhorst uses kessar and not tekan, even though he argues for the same ablaut pattern in tekan. It's pretty solid in the case of kessar. First of all, a form ǵʰésr is attested in Greek χέιρ (not χέωρ <*ǵʰésōr or ξέρ <**ǵʰsér). But it is somewhat dangerous to assume that any w...

To kick off, I read this article by Kloekhorst the other day, on the origin of nominal accent-ablaut paradigms and ultimately the case-endings. He's got some interesting ideas, but I'm not sure how plausible some of his assumptions are. What do you guys think? Another paper with the Leiden model, w...