zompist bboard

Thanks for porting that. Intriguing, also the quoted proposal by Oettinger that *sH2V- > *dV. I'm really curious what the justification is for that, but I didn't spot it. It seems to be [sχ] > [d] or [ɗ]. Edit: There also seem to be a number of words in various languages with the initial sequence *...

On some PIE allomorphies induced by s-mobile

An interesting PIE-ish soundlaw / morphophonological rule: *s mobile + labialized voiced velar yields *sw-. This seems to resolve several apparent doublets, e.g. *swel- ~ *gʷel- 'swallow', *swenH- ~ *ǵʰwen- 'sound'.

I keep wondering if there really are two entirely unrelated changes creating /ʃ/ there, or if we have instead the following:
1) s > ʃ / _C
2) k > ∅ / ʃ_
(If the second had a stage /ʃx/ similar to Dutch /sx/, that could also explain where the spelling "sch" came from.)

I'd sort of expect instead a chainshift S S' > Z S actually, but anything involving ejective fricatives sounds very difficult to find actual precedents for.

The month I will be meeting again with my long-distance girlfriend has arrived!

Certainly, most people get their L1 from (one of) their germane parents. This is already sufficient to allow for language shift, FWIW. It's relatively common for parents to raise their children in a language they are not native speakers of; perhaps not even fluent in. Gaps will be filled in as long...

Meanwhile, we're left wanting a) Uralic and IE to be closely related, and yet b) to have almost no shared vocabulary. PIE and PU share way more vocabulary that PIE and several modern IE languages, when considered in proportion to how well their vocabulary has been recorded/recovered. "A few dozen, ...

I think it's worth pointing out the methodological problem of judging potentially 'common as dirt' changes. If a change IS so common, or so easy, that it can occur many times independently, then it is only to be expected that there is relatively little evidence of it. Good point. True in principle,...

A number system that's recursive without being exponential might be interesting to attempt. Usually number systems seem to switch to a particular multiplicative base. But e.g. something based on factorials might be doable as well; e.g. by employing sub-counting systems where every position allows in...

Retroflexes are often velarized, so I could imagine *nʂ > ŋʂ (> ŋkʂ) happening as well. Sanskrit has a sort of similar change: *tʂ, *cʂ > kʂ.

WeepingElf wrote:I'm in a band now - a progressive rock band named Path of Vision. So far, we are preparing for our first rehearsal, and it will take a while until we can present something.

Sounds good. Which instrument(s) are you playing?

OK, it is not "common as dirt" then. But I still think it is not out of the ordinary. Probably not that either, no. My bad if "[citation needed]" came off as too belligerent. (But this is getting into PIE Thread territory, of course.) Indeed it does. In an attempt to steer back on course, I could n...

Cheshirization of that sort is possible, yes. Most commonly this turns a more marked type of vowel into a less marked one (e.g. Cy > Cʲu or Cʷi) but it could happen otherwise as well. A very similar change *oːK > *ɤːKʷ is known from Mansi.

I'll add a few then: Thank you! Quite interesting. I don't think this is sufficient evidence to make the change "common as dirt", though. It seems to me that precedents for a merger of velars and uvulars are actually difficult to find. But this assumes that the distinction was velar-uvular at the t...

I've seen a recent presentation by Blench that I think comes much closer to forming a sensible hypothesis of what's going on with correlations like "more trees ~ more vowels". The presentation identifies two global waves of linguistic expansion (11-8000 BP and 5-3500 BP) leading to the current majo...

Tenseness makes sense if it refers to multiple characteristics, but if it only affects vowel height it's bogus, like the use of /ʌ/ rather than /ɐ/ for many Enɡlish accents. (Some may prefer to write 'bogus' as 'traditional'.) Are there any commonly seen analyses where tense/lax distinctions are in...

I thought of a sort-of exception to what I said above: there are a fair number of languages I can think of with voicing contrast in labial plosives, no native /f/, but that have something like /v~ʋ~w/. I don't think any of them count as a clear-cut /p b v/ though; the general pattern is that/v/ is ...

A serious theory I've seen along these lines (though I do not have a reference offhand, sorry) similarly accepts only three main components of vowel timbre: I, A and U. However, instead of assigning values for each separately, it ends up positing that a vowel can have one or more secondary timbre in...

[-ATR] [-high] [+back] uvulars proper [-ATR] [+high] [-back] "palatalized uvulars" (≈ palatalized pharyngealized velars) [+back], non-ATR-specified "uvulars" that can even be [-high] (≈ postvelars) He also posits that [-ATR] is not the same thing as [+RTR] though, which is what regular pharyngealiz...

A key confusion here, with respect to phonemic feature theory, seems to be the idea that velars are [+back]. AFAI have seen, they are usually rather modeled as [+high], which can easily enough combine with [+front]. What this does predict though is that you'll never find a contrast between /c/ and /...

I see no reason whatsoever to assume that 'centum' languages were the result of an IE substratum (which, after all, Tocharian and Anatolian did not have!). The centum change - a merger of palatalised and unpalatalised velars (or velars and uvulars, etc) - is so common and expected that there is no ...

Some relatively nontrivial Game of Life / general cellular automata jargon: – ark (n.): any nontrivial combination of two switch engines (by backformation from a particularly fruitful combination initially named "Noah's Ark") – ash (n.): the stationary periodic objects generated by a pattern that ha...

The correlation might be onto something. The proposed form of causation is obviously bonkers. It might be productive to rather consider an indirect approach along the lines of: – what kind of societal organization do different biomes encourage? – what degree of linguistic diversity (in terms of line...

In my opinion, root extensions fall under the same class as compounds, and so don't count as roots. Yeah, it's clear I'll have to trim the data pretty heavily of derivatives (there are some very sticky-out cases, like *dʰgʷʰey- '(durch Hitze) hinschwinden, zugrunde gehen'), extensions and dubious r...