Zompist Bboard Again

Mostly that Hittite doesn't have a letter for it. I can't work out what you mean. Hittite mostly doesn't have symbols for consonants; it has syllabograms for CV, VC and CVC. I mean there are no ʔV, Vʔ, ʔVC syllaboɡrams. Which is a pretty weak argument, given that Akkadian VC also serves as ʔVC. Wri...

Whimemsz wrote: ↑Tue Jan 08, 2019 12:38 amWhat I want to see is a good nonconcatenative conlang that doesn't look Semiticky.

Is there a natural non-concatenative language that doesn't look Semiticky. I was struck with how Semitic Tagalog looked - and that's despite the skeletons including vowels.

Mostly that Hittite doesn't have a letter for it. I can't work out what you mean. Hittite mostly doesn't have symbols for consonants; it has syllabograms for CV, VC and CVC. So please explain your statement, rather than leaving me to guess wrong. In the appropriate contexts, Akkadian VC implies an ...

Are South Semitic languages mainly VSO either historically or currently? Also, I'm not sure about the relationship between Semitic and Egyptian Really? Ancient Egyptian looks super Semitic to me. Do you think that's just an artefact of the reconstruction? There are some weird features, though, like...

But split ergativity only evolved recently in Indo-Aryan, in the early to mid second millennium, not even reaching unrecognized languages that are considered dialects of Hindi, like Bhojpuri. But one can see the early stage in Pali, and I believe the history of Sanskrit shows it gathering strength....

What's the evidence that *h₁ didn't survive into Hittite as /ʔ/ word initially?

In terms of language, note that the Buddha (c. -500) didn't speak in Sanskrit, but in Magadhi. So classical Sanskrit was already old then... and Vedic Sanskrit is quite a bit more archaic than classical Sanskrit. Isn't the point that he chose to teach in Magadhi (or some pre-Prakrit), rather than i...