Search found 510 matches

by Tropylium
Wed May 16, 2018 10:47 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

WeepingElf wrote:Alwin Kloekhorst seems to think that *h2 and *h3 were uvular stops in PIE; his web site teases us of a manuscript in which he says that there is evidence of this in Anatolian;
If I had to guess, probably the Lycian reflexes as k q g.
by Tropylium
Wed May 16, 2018 10:40 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Grand Phonological Theory of Everything
Replies: 13
Views: 9706

Re: The Grand Phonological Theory of Everything

Straightforward feature theory (Jakobsonian?) can't cope with scalar-valued features like vowel height, Note however that "scalar-valued" is itself an analysis here, not the base level of data. Featural models of vowel height usually seem to go with /i/ [+high -low], /e/ [-high -low], /a/ [-high +l...
by Tropylium
Mon Apr 23, 2018 2:31 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Sound Change Quickie Thread
Replies: 2827
Views: 613715

Re: Sound Change Quickie Thread

Does this set of changes look legit? pʰ > ʰp > xɸ, x _[C#] tʰ > ʰt > xθ, θ _[C#] kʰ > ʰk > xː > x, xk V_V Preaspiration to /x/ is reasonable, but intermediate *xp *xt fricativizing further seems odd. Clusters like these seem to often resist even fairly general fricativization. Compare Proto-Germani...
by Tropylium
Mon Apr 23, 2018 1:28 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

However, in so far as it is useful to ascribe a language to a family, Vlürch has a valid point. As a less extreme example, modern English seems to show enough North Germanic features that it may not be useful to classify it as a West Germanic language. And is it actually useful to describe Frisian ...
by Tropylium
Wed Apr 04, 2018 8:46 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

A interesting idea, Tropylium, and IIRC also proposed by Kortlandt. Sorry, I what now? This sounds like you missed a part of a phrase somewhere. I don't recall having suggested *h₂ as /q/ in PIE (though I know some people think *h₂ comes from a Nostratic *q). My own reshuffle speculation along thes...
by Tropylium
Sat Mar 31, 2018 11:01 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

the Amerind languages almost certainly do form a valid language family. This is clear from population genetics - the Amerind population is genetically homogenous, descends from a very small founder population, and shows so far no evidence, outside ND, EA, and possibly some other extinct groups in t...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 26, 2018 5:17 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

the trivial nature of the sound correspondences in the largest part (not all ) of the resemblances strongly points at direct borrowings from PIE to PU. Most of the trivially loan-looking cases can be also routed through early Indo-Iranian, early Tocharian or even early Balto-Slavic. This is perhaps...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 26, 2018 5:02 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

The shared drift that happens in Sprachbunds can also produce lots of shared changes. Standard Average European has features in it that were definitely not inherited from PIE, the ancestor of most of the languages in this Sprachbund. For example, the definite and indefinite articles and the periphr...
by Tropylium
Sun Mar 25, 2018 8:59 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

by default true soundlaws are much less common than borrowings and coincidences I'm pretty sure that there are way more regular sound correspondences than loanwords between e.g. Tocharian and Latin. But that's a biased sample - because we know Tocharian and Latin are related! That's however not pri...
by Tropylium
Sat Mar 24, 2018 9:54 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

when your sound changes are: *t, *d, *r, *l, *n > *d and *ǵ,*g, *gʷ, *ǵʰ,*gʰ,*gʷʰ > *x ...you've got two options: a) the language underwent some massive mergers that cut across all of MOA, phonation and secondary articulations, and that yielded seemingly random outcomes (a voiced stop at one POA, a...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 19, 2018 8:33 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

If Eskimo-Aleut is so Mitian, where are the M-T pronouns? When I look at the pronouns of various EA languages, they're not M-T. And that puts it in the same category as Afroasiatic, Dravidian and Basque for me. What counts as "Mitian" on the surface kind of depends on what specific person markers w...
by Tropylium
Tue Mar 13, 2018 5:02 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

This pdf about Indo-European loanwords in Uralic languages is really interesting. The author makes a bunch of implications that could be used to support any side of the debate, like seems to almost always be the case when it comes to the historical relations between Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 12, 2018 1:40 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Etymology Compound of 名 (na, “name”) +‎ 前 (mae, used as a suffix in words describing a person to emphasize a quality or feature).[1][2][3] Appears as a term only in the last couple centuries, becoming more widely used during the Meiji period (starting 1868). OK fair, this is a pretty good example o...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 12, 2018 1:33 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

The branches of Uralic with the best vocab preservation are generally assumed to be th European ones, even Hungarian with its massive tables of sound changes... This "general assumption" is news to me. Hungarian is pretty much the Albanian of Uralic, with a generally poor track record of retention ...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:12 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Continuing from what I just wrote in the Nostratic thread: At this point we should consider that much like Germanic retains inherited ablaut besides innovative umlaut, what we call "PIE ablaut" is also too complex to have a single origin: it probably contains a few different layers, the main ones of...
by Tropylium
Mon Mar 12, 2018 8:11 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 78932

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

The "Haida and Na-Dene" thread is thoroly derailed by now, so let's move on to the proper location anyway: it is abundantly clear that the PIE ablaut system can't be of Proto-Indo-Uralic age, for otherwise there would be traces of it in Uralic, which are absent except in those "cognate" words which ...
by Tropylium
Wed Mar 07, 2018 3:42 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63696

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

That said, an effort by somebody who isn't a Starostin to identify cognates and propose sound correspondences might yet prove fruitful. Sadly, I don't think anybody has been doing that sort of thing, and if they have, I am not aware of it. You will have to go back to the mid-1900s to find work that...
by Tropylium
Tue Mar 06, 2018 8:51 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63696

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

(…) Haida could easily be thrown into the mix, but I couldn't find anywhere what exactly the Haida word for human is; according to this pdf dictionary it's the same as their endonym, X̱aadas , but I'm not sure about its pronunciation. If Wikipedia's chart is correct, it should be /χaːd̥as/, but I d...
by Tropylium
Sun Feb 18, 2018 6:16 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Sound Change Quickie Thread
Replies: 2827
Views: 613715

Re: Sound Change Quickie Thread

new maxim: all discussions of historical phonology eventually degenerate into being about either the PIE stop system or about the English vowel system (and, apparently, sometimes both).
by Tropylium
Sun Feb 18, 2018 5:55 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

That seems like a possibility, actually: maybe *Dʰ-t roots (secondary or not) have tended to get reanalyzed as *t-suffixed derivatives of shorter roots?
by Tropylium
Wed Feb 14, 2018 11:06 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Any languages show h > j?
Replies: 10
Views: 6412

Re: Any languages show h > j?

Livonian: *h > j between a front vowel and any other vowel, e.g. lejā 'meat' ~ Finnish & Estonian liha . How likely is it that that was actually lehā > leā > lejā ? Not strictly ruled out, but that would make it the only case in Livonian where something is either lost or epenthesized intervocalical...
by Tropylium
Wed Feb 14, 2018 10:47 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63696

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

- the Asian componant of na-dene isn't particularly closely related to the asian componant in Ket. The closest connection was to Koryak, then to Saqqaq, THEN to Ket. [the siberian admixture into Ket seems even more divergent from that into everything pacificky, so was probably later]. This may mean...
by Tropylium
Wed Feb 14, 2018 10:18 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Also, all but one (*bʰrekʷ) of these bʰRk roots have a question mark before them in LIV. The question mark means 'that the material from the individual languages is not enough to accept this root with certainty'. Probably yes, but that makes the issue all the weirder. The individual daughter langua...
by Tropylium
Sun Feb 11, 2018 6:51 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448263

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Is there no evidence of breathy consonants in Iranian? Martin Kümmel suggests that some cases of *Tʰ in Indo-Iranian can be explained by "aspiration throwback" in Iranian: *TanDʰ > *TʰanD, followed by spirantization (*pʰ *tʰ *kʰ >*f *θ *x). (This suggests loss of aspiration after nasals would proba...