Search found 75 matches

by Etherman
Wed Sep 29, 2010 6:00 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Linguistic Quackery Thread, take 2
Replies: 812
Views: 203500

I checked it out - it basically says that Biblical Hewbrew is the original garden of Eden language, My favorite is the guy behind it all - you see his bio page, and all his degrees are in English lit. Well this makes perfect sense; after all, El Shaddai spoke the world into creation using Hebrew. Z...
by Etherman
Sat Sep 04, 2010 12:18 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 193093

There were defintely pre-PIE languages in Europe. Too many European IE languages have words from non-IE substrates for me to think that they entered Europe from phantoms who disappeared without a trace after the arrival of IE speakers.
by Etherman
Thu Sep 02, 2010 7:02 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: PIE Noun
Replies: 8
Views: 2608

But how do I know what the nominative singular ending of the suffixed stem looks like, whether the noun is declined thematic or athematic and what gender it has? A root might form different words through suffixing different stems. For example, the root *wlk "wolf" was a thematic noun for a male wol...
by Etherman
Thu Aug 19, 2010 6:51 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Ellision of intervocalic voiced stops
Replies: 16
Views: 4387

IIRC it happened in Albanian prehistory.
by Etherman
Thu Aug 19, 2010 6:50 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Diachronics of demonstratives
Replies: 23
Views: 11320

I can't think of any attested examples off-hand, but I'm pretty sure that they can come from verbs of motion.
by Etherman
Tue Aug 17, 2010 7:06 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Languages of Antiquity
Replies: 22
Views: 4665

I've been studying Akkadian but I haven't had the time to really dedicate myself to it so progress is slow.
by Etherman
Fri Aug 13, 2010 10:41 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: Most difficult aspect of your native language for foreigners
Replies: 128
Views: 55678

English's piss poor spelling.
by Etherman
Sun Aug 08, 2010 8:53 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Question about syllabic resonants in PIE
Replies: 2
Views: 1277

I've never heard of this, but it sounds similar to the Sievers-Edgerton Law. This law effects all sonants and basically says that a sonant is vocalized after a long vowel or pause. This occurs across word boundaries, as well as within a word. It only effects sonants in word initial clusters if the w...
by Etherman
Sun Jul 25, 2010 5:46 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Accentual types of PIE
Replies: 6
Views: 2277

The accentual patterns are important as far as ablaut patterns go and are partially correlated with gender.
by Etherman
Fri Jul 23, 2010 7:12 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: Creativity of the day
Replies: 1704
Views: 323130

An Octavian comparison of Finnish and IE-langs and Japanese. Finnish word – meaning Other language word – meaning Notes -kO - INTERROGATIVE SUFFIX Jp: ka – INTERROGATIVE PARTICLE anoa – beg (for money or help) Jp: tanomu – to ask a favor antaa – to give Jp: watasu – to hand ei – no, not Sw: nej – n...
by Etherman
Sat Jul 17, 2010 12:55 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

What of common exo-Anatolian, tho? Seems that stage includes at least -initial loss -merger elsewhere. Albanian supposedly retains initial *h4. Armenian retains initial *h2, but not consistently. Kortland explains /h/ in Anatolian, Armenian, and Albanian the same way: *h1 is lost everywhere, *h2 an...
by Etherman
Sat Jul 17, 2010 11:51 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Yes. The wikipedia article on Glottalic theory makes the same bizarre statement: "Hopper (1973) also proposed that the aspiration that had been assumed for the voiced stops bh, dh, gh could be accounted for by a low-level phonetic feature known to phoneticians as "breathy voice." " Surely that's a ...
by Etherman
Sat Jul 17, 2010 11:47 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Surely that's not just a hypothesis, but what "voiced aspirates" actually are . A voiced consonant accompanied by a voiceless release is unattested in PIE's descendant languages, so why reconstruct it at all for the parent? Isn't there supposed to be some Armenian dialects with true voiced aspirates?
by Etherman
Fri Jul 16, 2010 8:39 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

That only follos if PIE actually had aspirates. True. I'm not fully convinced of it myself. In fact I lean towards the Breathy Voice Hypothesis. It seems plausible it's a later development from original mediae, and in the branches that clearly have or had them, there either also develops a /h/ (Gre...
by Etherman
Fri Jul 09, 2010 5:50 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

In any case, there seems only marginal reason to propose laryngeals beyond the original three. More interesting is the case of Grk hippos , which I have seen suggested is actually the product of two word-initial laryngeals, such that Greek would have a rule HH > hi / #_C Are there any other words w...
by Etherman
Fri Jul 09, 2010 3:08 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Please reread the entire thread. Twice. I did. And I don't think I'm mistaken about the mindset I've mentioned above. At any rate, I've seen no evidence to the contrary. The "offending parties" were TaylorS and myself and we've both explained what our mindsets were.TheGoatMan gets it (and everyone ...
by Etherman
Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:35 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Also, and correct me if I'm confused in this account, *h2 is not preserved as a consonant before *o in Hittite. Sometimes. My information might be out of date, but last I heard there was still debate about it. Kortland, at least in 2001, subscribed to the theory that *h2 and *h3 were retained befor...
by Etherman
Fri Jul 09, 2010 12:13 am
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Basilius wrote:But this also means that you're working on a reconstruction for a different entity, and both entities are called "Nostratic" due only to a long-lasting confusion.
I prefer to call it Proto-Siberian, but if I do that most people have no idea what I'm talking about.
by Etherman
Wed Jul 07, 2010 1:43 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

No, I don't wish to be insulted. You haven't been. But I'm feeling the urge. Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky reconstruct 50 consonants and 7 vowels. Your sense of humor is weird, then. Even with this specific version (Illich-Svitych's original one had 39 consonants IIRC), I don't see what's so funny...
by Etherman
Tue Jul 06, 2010 7:49 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Interesting. "Russian Nostraticists" who included Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian in Nostratic might refer to Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky. Whose reconstructed phoneme inventory is "ridiculously complex", I wonder? Or is this an example of how North American universities teach people to quote their so...
by Etherman
Sun Jul 04, 2010 12:35 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Personally I'm still a bit iffy on exactly what the laryngeals were and how many of them there might have been but I have a hard time imagining that if there were six of them that they'd all be between the velar and glottal POAs or that they'd all be fricatives. Nobody really knows how they were pr...
by Etherman
Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:36 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Re: h4 and h5

I believe Gsandi's personal version of PIE has h4 and h5, maybe even h6 as well. If so, his site has justification. However, I'm not 100% sure on that, even though it would be utterly trivial for me to go to his website and check. Too lazy. He has six, but two of these are labialized versions of *h...
by Etherman
Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:21 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

Shm Jay wrote:Why not postulate h6, h7, and h8, while we’re at it, and then we can put the words on a chessboard.
Szemerenyi mentions one hypothesis that has about a dozen laryngeals. One can hardly take such a hypothesis seriously.
by Etherman
Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:19 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

It reminds me of the ridiculously complex phoneme inventories Russian Nostraticists propose for Proto-Nostratic, mostly, IMO, because they are insistent that Afro-Asiatic and Dravidian are Nostratic languages, which I think is a load of bull. Most of those reconstructed phonemes are a form of handw...
by Etherman
Sat Jul 03, 2010 9:14 pm
Forum: L&L Museum
Topic: h4 and h5
Replies: 92
Views: 38033

From the sound of all this, would it not be simpler to just propose that there had been some kind of irregular shifting or elision of such somewhere in what could be called pre-Anatolian, rather than assuming, in a quasi-Neogrammarian fashion, completely regular sound changes between Anatolian and ...