Zompist Bboard Again

hwhatting wrote: ↑Fri Jan 09, 2026 5:21 am Hrrrm. Graeco-Phrygian keeps coming up, although it has been shown that all demonstrable isoglosses are either rententions (so proving nothing about a closer genetic relatedness) or shared with wider groups (e.g., the augment with what some people have called Graeco-Aryan - the core group that comes closest to the Brugmannian model.)
I agree that for anything after the split-off of Tocharian, we don't seem to have clean split-offs of single branches anymore, but a dialect continuum in which developments spread to a differing extent before it dissolved into indivudual branches.

Yes. As I said, those internal nodes are controversial - only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic are generally accepted - and there are numerous intersecting isoglosses (you mention the augment, which unites Indo-Iranian with Greek against Balto-Slavic which seems otherwise closer to Indo-Iranian). Many "Greco-Aryan" traits, though, are just archaisms, and one must not forget that Greek, Vedic and Avestan are simply attested earlier than Italic, Celtic or Germanic, let alone Balto-Slavic, whence it is no surprise that they preserve more (Late) PIE traits than the latter.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Jan 09, 2026 6:41 am Yes. As I said, those internal nodes are controversial - only Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic are generally accepted - and there are numerous intersecting isoglosses (you mention the augment, which unites Indo-Iranian with Greek against Balto-Slavic which seems otherwise closer to Indo-Iranian). Many "Greco-Aryan" traits, though, are just archaisms, and one must not forget that Greek, Vedic and Avestan are simply attested earlier than Italic, Celtic or Germanic, let alone Balto-Slavic, whence it is no surprise that they preserve more (Late) PIE traits than the latter.

That was the default assumption of the Brugmannian model, but Anatolian has shown that many of what were assumed to be shared retentions from PIE may actually be innovations; the augment is one of the main suspects here.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 08, 2026 2:12 pm ... and I have the feeling that the goalposts are no longer where they used to be ...

No, it's just the Urheimat of the Uralic language family that has been moved from Yakutia to Kazakhstan or thereabouts by Travis

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:54 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 08, 2026 2:12 pm ... and I have the feeling that the goalposts are no longer where they used to be ...

No, it's just the Urheimat of the Uralic language family that has been moved from Yakutia to Kazakhstan or thereabouts by Travis

Nostravic theory

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:54 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 08, 2026 2:12 pm ... and I have the feeling that the goalposts are no longer where they used to be ...

No, it's just the Urheimat of the Uralic language family that has been moved from Yakutia to Kazakhstan or thereabouts by Travis

Nah, it's still in Yakutia, it's just that the Uralic speakers rapidly moved westwards from there, which is why early Uralic speakers came into contact with Pre-PII, which is also why we now have Yakutian genes in Finland.

Man in Space wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 6:52 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:54 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 08, 2026 2:12 pm ... and I have the feeling that the goalposts are no longer where they used to be ...

No, it's just the Urheimat of the Uralic language family that has been moved from Yakutia to Kazakhstan or thereabouts by Travis

Nostravic theory

As I have said before, I have no problems at all with both IE and Uralic having eastern roots. In fact, I'd place Proto-Mitian somewhere near Lake Baykal, from where the Mitian languages fanned out all over Siberia at the end of the ice age, with spillovers into Eastern Europe (Indo-Uralic) and North America (Eskimo-Aleut). The genetic evidence even plays ball here, it seems that such a migration actually happened. Of course, genetics says nothing about the languages those people spoke; only linguistic comparison can tell us whether the languages are related to each other or not. The situation with Mitian is somewhat paradoxical: we have similar pronoun systems that are best explained by a common ancestor, but not enough correspondences to actually build a family on. There is an interesting paper by Martin J. Kümmel which makes an attempt at reconstructing Indo-Uralic sound correspondences which seems reasonable to me, though I'd reconstruct voiced spirants in place of his implosives and *x in place of his *q.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 8:21 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:54 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 08, 2026 2:12 pm ... and I have the feeling that the goalposts are no longer where they used to be ...

No, it's just the Urheimat of the Uralic language family that has been moved from Yakutia to Kazakhstan or thereabouts by Travis

Nah, it's still in Yakutia, it's just that the Uralic speakers rapidly moved westwards from there, which is why early Uralic speakers came into contact with Pre-PII, which is also why we now have Yakutian genes in Finland.

I understand. But I still feel as if you were trying to falsify Indo-Uralic by genetics, which doesn't work.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 8:29 am

Man in Space wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 6:52 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:54 am

No, it's just the Urheimat of the Uralic language family that has been moved from Yakutia to Kazakhstan or thereabouts by Travis

Nostravic theory

As I have said before, I have no problems at all with both IE and Uralic having eastern roots. In fact, I'd place Proto-Mitian somewhere near Lake Baykal, from where the Mitian languages fanned out all over Siberia at the end of the ice age, with spillovers into Eastern Europe (Indo-Uralic) and North America (Eskimo-Aleut). The genetic evidence even plays ball here, it seems that such a migration actually happened. Of course, genetics says nothing about the languages those people spoke; only linguistic comparison can tell us whether the languages are related to each other or not. The situation with Mitian is somewhat paradoxical: we have similar pronoun systems that are best explained by a common ancestor, but not enough correspondences to actually build a family on. There is an interesting paper by Martin J. Kümmel which makes an attempt at reconstructing Indo-Uralic sound correspondences which seems reasonable to me, though I'd reconstruct voiced spirants in place of his implosives and *x in place of his *q.

If your hypothesis is correct, then we have to account for how Pre-PIE-speakers ended up in Eastern Europe without really bringing eastern genes with them, unlike the PU-speakers. You would need a scenario similar to what happened with Uralic in Hungary where a small foreign elite (horse warriors?) brought Pre-PIE to Eastern Europe but then were submerged amongst the Yamnaya, practically disappearing genetically.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 4:26 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 8:29 am

Man in Space wrote: ↑Mon Jan 12, 2026 6:52 am Nostravic theory

As I have said before, I have no problems at all with both IE and Uralic having eastern roots. In fact, I'd place Proto-Mitian somewhere near Lake Baykal, from where the Mitian languages fanned out all over Siberia at the end of the ice age, with spillovers into Eastern Europe (Indo-Uralic) and North America (Eskimo-Aleut). The genetic evidence even plays ball here, it seems that such a migration actually happened. Of course, genetics says nothing about the languages those people spoke; only linguistic comparison can tell us whether the languages are related to each other or not. The situation with Mitian is somewhat paradoxical: we have similar pronoun systems that are best explained by a common ancestor, but not enough correspondences to actually build a family on. There is an interesting paper by Martin J. Kümmel which makes an attempt at reconstructing Indo-Uralic sound correspondences which seems reasonable to me, though I'd reconstruct voiced spirants in place of his implosives and *x in place of his *q.

If your hypothesis is correct, then we have to account for how Pre-PIE-speakers ended up in Eastern Europe without really bringing eastern genes with them, unlike the PU-speakers. You would need a scenario similar to what happened with Uralic in Hungary where a small foreign elite (horse warriors?) brought Pre-PIE to Eastern Europe but then were submerged amongst the Yamnaya, practically disappearing genetically.

I am not a geneticist, and don't know the genetic study you are referring to (it is mentioned here, but without a link to the paper itself); what I know is that the Yamnaya people, who probably spoke PIE, were a mixture of "Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers" (EHG) and "Caucasus Hunter Gatherers" (CHG), with the EHG descending mostly from "Ancient North Eurasians" (ANE) with an European admixture, so there are eastern genes in them, though this may already be out of date - genetics advances so blazingly fast. What I see in the blog post is an attempt at disproving Indo-Uralic by means of genetics, which doesn't work because languages can of course spread without genes.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jan 13, 2026 5:06 am What I see in the blog post is an attempt at disproving Indo-Uralic by means of genetics, which doesn't work because languages can of course spread without genes.

I'd say that is more true today, and was more true during the last couple thousands of years, than it was during earlier times in (pre-)history.

During the last couple thousands of years, it was common that people conquered large empires, and then some or many of the people ruled by these empires ended up speaking imperial languages even if they weren't closely genetically related to the initial speakers of the language. Or languages got cultural or commercial importance, usually as a side-effect of that empire-building, and spread even among people who weren't ruled by the empires connected to them.

I don't know what the counterpart to that in times and places where you had small groups of nomadic hunters and gatherers moving back and forth, or even in early agricultural societies without empires, would have been.

Raphael wrote: ↑Tue Jan 13, 2026 5:48 am

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jan 13, 2026 5:06 am What I see in the blog post is an attempt at disproving Indo-Uralic by means of genetics, which doesn't work because languages can of course spread without genes.

I'd say that is more true today, and was more true during the last couple thousands of years, than it was during earlier times in (pre-)history.

During the last couple thousands of years, it was common that people conquered large empires, and then some or many of the people ruled by these empires ended up speaking imperial languages even if they weren't closely genetically related to the initial speakers of a language. Or languages got cultural or commercial importance, usually as a side-effect of that empire-building, and spread even among people who weren't ruled by the empires connected to them.

I don't know what the counterpart to that in times and places where you had small groups of nomadic hunters and gatherers moving back and forth, or even in early agricultural societies without empires, would have been.

Fair. There were of course no empires in the Neolithic which could enforce their language on people with different native languages (or just create incentives for a language shift), but encounters of different cultures can result in language shift even without them. My point, though, is that only linguistics can tell whether two languages are related to each other or not, while genetics and archaeology cannot - they can at most provide additional information, e.g. about where and when a reconstructed ancestor language was likely spoken. There were language families spoken by genetically quite different people even before the rise of empires. How, for instance, did the Hausa and other speakers of Chadic languages come to speak Afroasiatic languages when they have genetically very little in common with Semitic speakers? There probably was some kind of language shift going on, even without an empire.

The author of that blog post not only tries to disprove Indo-Uralic by means of genetics, he also does so because the evidence in favour of Indo-Uralic is inconvenient to him, as he thinks that IE was a branch of Afroasiatic. It is somewhat funny that Travis cites this blog post while rejecting the latter hypothesis of its author.

Of course, "a blind hen may sometimes find a grain", and a text arguing for a misguided hypothesis may contain evidence for another hypothesis. For instance, this essay posits an obviously misguided hypothesis (namely that Etruscan descends from Luwian), but the list of lexical resemblances it gives in order to argue for it, if these aren't spurious, could be used to argue in favour of the Trojan Etruscan hypothesis, in which case the resemblances between Etruscan and Luwian would have been loanwords in Proto-Tyrsenian from an Anatolian language, from the time when Proto-Tyrsenian was spoken in Troy.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, WeepingElf.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Jan 13, 2026 6:17 am
Of course, "a blind hen may sometimes find a grain",

I think the standard English version of that is, "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

Not to get me wrong: I do not consider the Indo-Uralic hypothesis proven, but plausible; Kümmel's evidence is IMHO good, but certainly not sufficient to establish the relationship and reconstruct Proto-Indo-Uralic. It is similar with some other ideas I have spoken about favourably here, such as Italo-Celtic, a Cimmerian origin of Armenian or the former existence of an IE language related to Anatolian in Western Europe which was spoken by the Bell Beaker people and is reflected in the Old European Hydronymy (and which I am trying to re-create in my Hesperic conlang project). All of these things seem plausible to me, but none of them I consider proven yet.

Really, my big problem with Indo-Uralic is that too many of its posited forms just really feel like loans -- they're too close, and when they're not very close to the PIE forms themselves they feel like they either went through a loaning filter (e.g. systematically stripping out laryngeals while keeping the other sounds as close as possible) or were borrowed from a PIE daughter, and furthermore they're often best linked not to PIE but to Pre-PII.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 13, 2026 4:00 pm Really, my big problem with Indo-Uralic is that too many of its posited forms just really feel like loans -- they're too close, and when they're not very close to the PIE forms themselves they feel like they either went through a loaning filter (e.g. systematically stripping out laryngeals while keeping the other sounds as close as possible) or were borrowed from a PIE daughter, and furthermore they're often best linked not to PIE but to Pre-PII.

Sure. Most of the posited cognates are probably just loanwords. The PIE phonemes are usually represented by the closest PU phonemes, even such things as ablaut grades or the (still younger) vowel-colouring effects of laryngeals, which are hardly of Indo-Uralic age. Such trivial sound correspondences between two languages that can't be as close to each other as, say, English and German, are indicative of borrowing. Yet, the words Kümmel lists in the presentation I cited yesterday, show less trivial sound correspondences such as PIE *d: PU *n, which are more likely due to Urverwandtschaft than borrowing. And how does one language borrow an entire pronoun paradigm from another? Not impossible, but not particularly likely, either. (EDIT: This is more a matter of definition than anything else: What makes the "core" of a language it is classified by? Morphology, or basic vocabulary? If we classify languages by morphology, which seems reasonable to me, IE and Uralic are indeed quite close together, and probably have a common source for their morphology and thus form a family. If you insist on a substantial shared vocabulary, there is not enough reason to classify them together. As I wrote earlier, I am into the theory that PIE was a kind of mixed language of a source related to Uralic, which provided most of the morphology, and one related to NW Caucasian, which strongly influenced the phonology, such as the ablaut system and the palatalized and the labialized velars, reflecting the mixed genetic composition of the Yamnaya people who probably spoke it.)

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Jan 14, 2026 4:31 amAnd how does one language borrow an entire pronoun paradigm from another? Not impossible, but not particularly likely, either.

Apparently Pirahã borrowed its pronouns from Mura, if Everett’s data is good.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Jan 14, 2026 4:31 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Jan 13, 2026 4:00 pm Really, my big problem with Indo-Uralic is that too many of its posited forms just really feel like loans -- they're too close, and when they're not very close to the PIE forms themselves they feel like they either went through a loaning filter (e.g. systematically stripping out laryngeals while keeping the other sounds as close as possible) or were borrowed from a PIE daughter, and furthermore they're often best linked not to PIE but to Pre-PII.

Sure. Most of the posited cognates are probably just loanwords. The PIE phonemes are usually represented by the closest PU phonemes, even such things as ablaut grades or the (still younger) vowel-colouring effects of laryngeals, which are hardly of Indo-Uralic age. Such trivial sound correspondences between two languages that can't be as close to each other as, say, English and German, are indicative of borrowing. Yet, the words Kümmel lists in the presentation I cited yesterday, show less trivial sound correspondences such as PIE *d: PU *n, which are more likely due to Urverwandtschaft than borrowing. And how does one language borrow an entire pronoun paradigm from another? Not impossible, but not particularly likely, either. (EDIT: This is more a matter of definition than anything else: What makes the "core" of a language it is classified by? Morphology, or basic vocabulary? If we classify languages by morphology, which seems reasonable to me, IE and Uralic are indeed quite close together, and probably have a common source for their morphology and thus form a family. If you insist on a substantial shared vocabulary, there is not enough reason to classify them together. As I wrote earlier, I am into the theory that PIE was a kind of mixed language of a source related to Uralic, which provided most of the morphology, and one related to NW Caucasian, which strongly influenced the phonology, such as the ablaut system and the palatalized and the labialized velars, reflecting the mixed genetic composition of the Yamnaya people who probably spoke it.)

At first glance the pronoun paradigms seem convincing, but apparently there are issues with regard to things like number (e.g. /m/ in PIE is singular while /m/ in PU is plural).

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Jan 14, 2026 11:13 am At first glance the pronoun paradigms seem convincing, but apparently there are issues with regard to things like number (e.g. /m/ in PIE is singular while /m/ in PU is plural).

AFAIK, /m/ is both singular and plural in PU. I have even seen a paper by Jens Elmegård Rasmussen in which he reconstructs a set of pre-PIE pronouns that are closer to the PU ones, though that was just speculation, and I can't find it on the Web.

I wonder why Kümmel doesn't reconstruct *h₃ as labialized in his vision of PIE/PIH...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Jan 14, 2026 2:34 pm I wonder why Kümmel doesn't reconstruct *h₃ as labialized in his vision of PIE/PIH...

I don't know. In fact, I am not sure at all that *h₃ was a labialized *h₂. The only thing that suggests that is that it adds the feature [+round] (in addition to [+back]) to a preceding or following *e - but the feature may originally have been something different, maybe pharyngealization or whatever (a shift [ɑˤ] > [ɒ] is IMHO not out of the question). There are apparently good reasons to assume that *h₃ was voiced while *h₂ wasn't, so that may have been the original difference between the two; the developments in Hittite seem to suggest that *h₃ was a "weaker" sound than *h₂.