Zompist Bboard Again

Getting back to my former example, the correspondence between IE *don- 'reed' ~ *ned-o- 'reed, rush' and East Caucasian *ttsˀwǝ̄nHē/*Hnǝ̄ttsˀwē 'reed, cane' (§3.15 in Starostin's article ) would correspond to PIE, whereas *yoini- 'reed' would be a loanword, with ttsˀw ~ yo . Different sound corresp...

When I was studying Levenshtein distances (I did a paper on the Romani dialect differences a few years ago for my Bachelor), it occurred to me that Levenshtein distances are much more suited for establishing literal language distance or mutual intelligibility rather than any actual genetic distance....

I'm not very knowledgeable on IE but I found this paper fascinating. I think he overdoes it a little bit at the end comparing Germanic *wisund 'bison' with OPruss. wissambs’ , Lith. stumbras , Latv. sumbrs, sūbrs and OCS zǫbrь . The possible link between the pre-Germanic and pre-Greek substrates su...

That said, some people opine that the Sea Peoples spoke Luwian, which, while not really a satem language, at least develops its palatovelars into coronal affricates. However, if that was the case, Etruscan cannot come from there as Etruscan is as surely non-IE as Luwian is IE (yet, there are people...

Πρέπει να μελετάω περισσότερο τα ελληνικά μου μα είμαι πρόσφατα πολύ πολυάσχαλος και κουρασμένος. I ought to practise my Modern Greek more, but I've been really busy and tired recently. Μαθαίνω ελληνικά γιατί ξεκίνησα πρόσφατα να εκκλησιάζομαι. Γνωρίζω πώς να διαβάζω τα αρχαία ελληνικά αλλά θέλω να...

Kuchigakatai wrote: ↑Tue Oct 13, 2020 8:49 pm strength

Anyone got [ŋkθ] in this one?

What do you think of [stɹ̥ɛŋθ], [stɹ̥ɛnθ], [stɹ̥ɛntθ]?

[ŋkθ] is natural for me, maybe [ŋθ] too.

[nθ ntθ] aren't part of my idiolect, but they don't feel too unfamiliar to me. Maybe they're more American pronunciations?

The etymology of some pre-Latin loanwords in Romance languages is quite interesting. For example, Spanish barranco 'ravine' is related to Greek pháranks id., purportedly from IE *bʰerH- 'to pierce, to strike'. Also páramo 'moor' would related to Greek palámē 'palm, hand' < IE *plh₂-m- , with rhotac...

The question is this, though - why does choice have /tʃ/ and not /k/ or /s/, considering the usual outcomes of palatalization in Gallo-Romance and OF? The original vowel was /au/ (/a/ undergoes a different palatalisation in Old French): PG *kaus(i)janą >> VL *causire > OF choisir Compare CL causa >...

Speaking anecdotally, and based mostly on the evidence of my own personal experience as a person with Asperger's and my limited exposure to other individuals on the spectrum, we generally seem to be aware that we're lacking something in the social skills department, particularly when we find oursel...

It's pretty common. The obvious example is Japanese. Isn't the distinction more imperfective vs. perfective than past vs. non-past? The Germanic languages as a family are certainly past vs. non-past; I think North Germanic certainly have no particular future tense. English is debatable because we h...

Just a thread to informally post about things my mind is guzzling up on and then reshaping. I'm not necessarily going out at this point to make things super-straightforward to understand, but if there's anything you'd like me to talk more about or elaborate on, let me know below. Animoiné This is an...

... I didn't see many posts about conlangs or non-Indo-European languages on the old Zompist Bboard by you, either. So you got a website or something that I'm missing? Google: KathTheDragon site:http://www.incatena.org/ Mate, a lot of us are doing work in the background still even if we don't post ...

I was reading up about Gaulish (and by extension pre-Roman Celtic) phonetics as hypothesised by analysing Gaulish writing, and one writer brought up this interesting observation: at least in the Narbonensis dialect area of Gaulish, there is some confusion between which graphemes should represent par...

This is much like how kw later became p in Gallic/Welsh, but gw did not merge with the already extant b. Contentious! The existence of * gw in Proto-Brythonic is far from assured. To add to this, Insular Celtic languages (and Celtic loanwords in Romance languages in part) underwent a sort of initia...

Pabappa wrote: ↑Thu Dec 12, 2019 7:18 pm Is /b/>/m/ widespread, though, or sporadic? /b/ > /m/ in the neighborhood of a nasal might be common without it applying across the language.

Yep, the Turkic example is b > m / _...N. If b > m~w is likely for PIE, I would think *w is the most common output.

I suppose this question belongs here better than in other threads. What's the rationale for m > b~w in proposed macro-language sound changes, eg. in Altaic and Indo-Uralic rather than the opposite: b > m~w? I would have thought b > m~w works better, as on one hand it's already attested in Turkic (fo...

How common are rhotic trills vs. flaps crosslinguistically (where rhotics are distinct from laterals)? And where they pattern allophonically, in what environments does one tend to be more common than the other? I'm not personally familiar with any languages that prefer a rhotic trill over a flap.

Can anyone point to any papers, or have here any arguments, that argue for or against Ancient Egyptian having implosive stops for its "voiced"/emphatic stops? I've been trawling through the net and only really found arguments for voiced, tenuis, and ejective stops without a fourth option. ...

<snip> This is all so fascinating to think about! It makes me wonder about the various "experiments" that we've had here on the ZBB, and on the CBB, and elsewhere, where we've engaged in reconstructing the proto-languages of (designed) conlang families. I must admit I'm not terribly famil...

And to Tropylium's points <snip> I'm reminded of a similar case concerning the Mandarin Chinese dialects: some dialects have a number of words with a nasal initial /n-~ŋ-/ where all other dialects have a null initial. People have been tempted to treat these as a new correspondence, but historical a...