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Going over some recent threads, this one caught my interest. When I was developing the vocabulary of Tundrian, I was aware of the fact that it is not realistic to derive all words in a conlang from its putative ancestor – in this case, Vulgar Latin. I of course did borrow some words from Celtic and ...

Thank you guys. It's always nice to feel welcome. I may not have made it to Prague, but I did manage to spend 5 days in London. Among the treasures I found in its bookshops (ex-Dillons, Foyles and that of the London Transport Museum) were the 2nd ed. of Beekes's Comparative IE grammar, the Little Pr...

This is not the place to analyze all the data, but let me just give a quick overview of the situation of *k before (original) *a. On a quick count in Pokorny, there are 50 PIE etyma beginning with *ka- and 11 beginning with *k'a (palatal). Only 5 of these 11 have no alternate explanations: *k'ad- '...

Why would these branches have the uniform change *H^we > *Ho, when *k^we is retained in the same branches (with Grimm's law *k^we > *x^we in Germanic)? But isn't this a reason against having a labiovelar sibilant series at all? I am referring to attempts at identifying the phonetic nature of laryng...

Hello, everyone. Oh, I haven't been lurking (much) - if I visit, I usually say something. I am not known for my reticence. :) It's just that life in retirement, in beautiful (if somewhat rainy) Vancouver BC, has turned out to be busier in some ways than work in Geneva. I do many things, and visiting...

I'm a Nostraticist of a sort, but I think most stuff out there is pure fantasy. A big problem, IMO, is that they try to force Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian into it. IMO there is, at the very least a grouping WeepingElf has called "Mitian", so-called because so many of the languages in Northern Eurasia...

This is a great idea. I certainly intend to come back and learn more about the North Germanic languages, especially as I find insights from a native speaker of one of the languages in a family (or subfamily) more useful than those from outsiders, no matter how well they know a language. One question...

Hungarians tend to leave of diacritics in e-mails, which can make reading their e-mails idfficult, but rarely incomprehensible. Context helps enormously. They may leave off diacritics even if most are available (the ones that are hardest to locate are the long umlauts: Ő ő Ű ű), as there is a proble...

It didn't have state backing when there wasn't a state. Plus, so far as I know most of the settlers were Yiddish speakers from Russia, so Yiddish might easily have won out instead. Were they predominantly Russian? I thought Russia tried to prevent Jewish emigration. Czarist (imperial) Russia? The m...

5. In Irish, intervocalic d and g often disappear, although occasionally a weakly articulated /G/ is pronounced. The original consonant is retained in the spelling <dh>, <gh>. This is part of the process of lenition, and affects even initial consonants, when they follow a word formerly ending in a ...

There's also a few irregulars, like "sé" where we would expect *sabo, from Latin sapere. If anything, we'd expect * sepo since the Latin 1S.PRS was SAPIO and the parallel form CAPIO yielded quepo . Quoth Penny "The form sé is best explained as analogical imitation of he ." It may well be so, but th...

Of course the Japanese have swearwords, although I was never close enough to the kind of crowd who would use them (or if they did, I probably wouldn't catch on). But Japanese people are certainly aware that other languages have such words, which suggest to me that their own must too. On my first tri...

EB: haha. :D gsandi: Yes - thanks! It seemed strange to me because I only ever heard of fricatization of voiced stops (as in Modern Greek and Spanish), but not of complete ellision. And I should have thought of août , really :roll: The interesting thing is that the -g- in Spanish agosto (1) was ret...

Is this a widespread phonetic process? I'm asking because it seems to be happening quite a lot in certain Slovene speech styles, It's quite a widespread phenomenon in fact. It is also correlated with the parallel voicing of intervocalic voiceless stops, but it doesn't have to be. Examples: 1. Inter...

I usually trust Sihler, so give me chapter & verse so that I can see what he actually says in context. The relevant passage is on page 91 of his New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin ; it's a commentary on item 2 in section 93: a resonant is syllabic "between a resonant and a following obstrue...

Sihler says that in a sequence of two resonants between non-resonants, the second is always syllabic. This means that, say, dwrt is realised as /dwr.t/ rather than /durt/, which strikes me as strange since [r] is less vocalic than [w] and so /durt/ would be more natural. Where's the flaw? I usually...

In the case of the "mouth" word, why does it begin with H2, by the way? It could just as well be *H3oH1-, *H3eH1- and who knows what else. Sorry, typo. It was probably H1 (if it started with a laryngeal at all). Hittite doesn't retain the laryngeal in the mouth word ( ais ). On H1 I actually agree ...

There wouldn't be two adjacent laryngeals within a root, Theoretically, in zero grade there could be. Some roots are reconstructed with two laryngeals, e.g. *H2eHs-eH2 ashes, hearth and *H2oH1-(e)s- mouth . At least in Hittite I've seen a zero grade reconstructed for the genitive hassas, possibly f...

Is there any regular development of adjacent laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European? There wouldn't be two adjacent laryngeals within a root, but it is certainly possible to have a cluster of two laryngeals across a morpheme boundary. Take the verb "to give", whose root is probably *deh3. Make it into t...

The verb "to be" has suppletion in many, many languages, IE and not. In my native, Uralic, Hungarian the infinitive is lenni , from which are also formed the future leszek, leszel, lesz etc. and the imperative légy, legyetek . Other forms are from another stem altogether, beginning with v-: Present ...

Wouldn't this be in Spanish Hasta que me llamas, quedo en casa?. Ungrammatical to me. I'd say "Hasta que me llam e s (thus using the subjunctive), me quedaré/quedo (both are possible, it depends on the context) en casa." Thanks. Yes, I asked a Spanish colleague, and she (of course) she said the sam...

I am studying (Brazilian) Portuguese right now, and the subjunctive is causing me quite a lot of headache, as often I just don't see why it is used at all. The past subjunctive is the least problematic, because it seems to be used similarly to what I was taught in Spanish: Se tivesse dinheiro, compr...

There seems to be only one author who has published grammars of the two main Hmong languages: Thomas Lyman. I have no way to know if they are any good, but both books are available in my favourite university library (UBC, Vancouver), according to its online catalogue: Grammar of Mong Njua (Green Mia...

Discussion is over. This is now WE's Europic thread. Right. This thread is for discussing my Europic hypothesis. There is another thread for discussing Vasco-Caucasian, which is a matter whose relevance for Europic remains questionable. At least you must recognize they're partly competing theories,...

Unfortunately, he's on the crackpot side as he follows Vennemann in thinking Basque is a descendant of OEH. It's a review paper, and doesn't claim anything . I think it's a very good summary of current thinking, and it gives the pros and cons of the ideas it covers. Most importantly, it insists on ...