Zompist Bboard Again

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. Even before considering evidence, it smacks of the trendy new position to automat...

Well, the PIE3 plural case endings are a conundrum. They clearly did not originate from plural marker + case marker (there is, for instance, no way from something like *-es-ei to *-bhyos ), so something else must have happened. But what? For the genitive, Kloekhorst has found, as I have written, a w...

People tend to change only what doesn't feel like working well enough . Underspecifiying scripts (and that's what an abjad is) are not the exception but the norm. Also, I doubt that any Greek ever thought, "Hmm, that's nice, But what about the vowels?" and went forth inventing vowel letter...

An interesting article. Thank you.

I am thinking about the Late PIE ("PIE3") plural cases. It seems as if Early PIE ("PIE2" in my terminology, the ancestor of PIE3 and Anatolian) may have been a language where only the nominative and the accusative case distinguished number, perhaps from the loss of phonetically f...

Is this Welsh sound changes applied to Gothic? And why is it posted here and not in the Conlangery forum?

@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 have the feeling that Proto-U...

Your observation that emigrants are usually poor people brings me to a possible solution of the Fermi Paradox. In order to be able to colonize other planets, a planetary society must obviously be technologically highly advanced - way more advanced than we are. But unless they allow for a ridiculous ...

As we have no Indo-Uralic sound correspondences yet, we can't tell whether the "Southeast Uralic" indefinite conjugations are in any way related to the IE "h2-conjugation", but is it out of the question that the Hungarian and Selkup forms are cognate to each other, even if the PU...

I am now also growing increasingly skeptical of Seefloth's Paradigm. The paradigms compared by Seefloth may just be parallel developments of Northern Samoyedic and Eskimo - perhaps built from cognate Mitian morphemes, but not as such reconstructible for Proto-Mitian.

Another morphological difference between active and inactive verbs were the personal endings. Each of the two classes had its own set of endings. Active verbs used a set related to the personal pronouns, which is reflected in the active non-perfect endings in PIE3, the mi-conjugation in Hittite and...

According to my personal hypothesis, Proto-Indo-Uralic was an active-stative language, and PIE may have been the same as late as PIE1. There were two classes of nouns: animate and inanimate, and two classes of verbs: active and inactive. Active verbs were either transitive or intransitive, while ina...

Thanks. I am probably not the first to come up with such a theory, though I arrived at it by my own means and don't remember any references.

My major problem with The Art of Language Invention was its totally misleading title. It's not about how to conlang; it's about how DJP made some specific conlangs, with a bit of other linguistic data thrown in. There's nothing wrong with the information in the book, but it's not what I thought I w...

I have a new idea about the sigmatic nominative. According to this idea, it is not related to the genitive. Rather, in late PIE1, animate subjects were reinforced by postposing the pronoun *sa (> PIE3 *so ), in constructions similar to those found in colloquial German ( Mein Freund, der singt im Kir...

I see. So I was wrong - I thought that they were mainly a Hittite thing.

Could you give an example of these 'clitic chains'? AFAIK, those "clitic chains" are a Hittite thing, more prominent in late than in early texts (which is a pretty sure sign of an innovation), with little evidence in favour of them in other IE languages, though Gamkrelidze and Ivanov reco...

@hwhatting: Very true what you say about the typological diversity of Indo-European. Most people who say "IE" when it comes to typology of conlangs in fact mean "SAE" (Standard Average European), which in itself is poorly defined and controversial. True enough, in fact I'd proba...

If Grassmann's Law had been productive in PIE, why are the stops deaspirated by it voiceless in Greek? One would expect voiced stops instead. I think this is good evidence that this happened after the PIE breathy-voiced stops lost their voicing in Greek. Also, there are no traces of such a dissimila...

@Frislander: Apparently there was a contest (I dimly remember a call for participants on the CONLANG list), and David won it. That said, David's conlangs are far better than Klingon - which is actually a good demonstration how not to create a conlang. It's one of the worst conlangs I have ever seen,...