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Liburnese (Livurnez): u o ɨ a i e p b f v m t d c ʒ s z l r n č ǯ š ž ʎ ɲ k g kʷ gʷ This took me by surprise: a Romance language with labiovelars. I never intended them, they just turned up. Paledhesi (North Semitic): u o a i e p v m t d θ δ s z ɬ l n y k g h r Tengol: u ɨ i ~ o a e (± retracted ton...

Conversely, we must use a past or perfect tense in English to talk about actions in the past. Have you never heard of the historic present? Many languages allow a present tense for vivid narative in the past, and that doesn't mean they have no past. That's why I don't think the use of a present ten...

I find it difficult to say how I'd tell what constitutes a pure future. Every form must have an origin, and a modal origin is obviously going to be common for the future. But there is a clear contrast between modal forms that talk about possible worlds and futures that talk about the actual world: I...

As far as I can see, adjectival agreement was originally in number and case. In Homer and the Rig Veda, you can still find neuter plural nouns with masculine adjectives, as well as adjectives with no distinction of masculine and feminine. Unlike, say, Afroasiatic and Bantu where gender is very ancie...

Steauă, which means "star", should (I think) be [ste̯au̯ə], in two syllables. I do know that the diphthongs {ea} and {ia} are supposed to be different: [e̯a] and [i̯a] (when it's not [ii̯a]).

Five essentials

http://www.innergeek.us/
http://www.engrish.com/
http://xkcd.com/
http://tashian.com/multibabel/
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/

The contrasts of [kw] [kj] with [kʷ] [kʲ] can be looked at in two ways. Firstly there's a phonetic difference. The first pair are two sounds, the second pair are one. In other words, if you look at a spectrogram, the first pair take more time to produce. Secondly there's a phonological difference. I...

In French, we borrowed the suffix -te from Ancient Greek, giving: Sparte > Spartiate Sybaris > Sybarite Stagire > Stagirite Is that suffix used at all in English? I can't find anything conclusive; "Sybarite" gives a few Google hits, but that's all I could find. Spartiate exists as an occasional adj...

As far as I know, Brazilians don't drop their final -s. This is a bit odd, considering that -l > -w and -r > -h (for some, at least). The change of -s to [š ~ ž] is characteristic of Rio.

Yet, in recent years, a Sumerian-Uralic hypothesis has been proposed. Piotr Michalowski wrote "Over the years various unsuccessful attempts have been made to link it with ... Chinese, Tibetan, Hungarian, Turkish, and Indo-European. These attemps have sometimes been flavored with nationalalist fervo...

Aeetlrcreejl wrote:

David McCann wrote:There's an interesting article on the web by Alexander Militarev.

Is it this?

That's it!

Why only one vote for <ï>? It does make sense to have front rounded: ü ö back unrounded: ï ë Unless, of course, you have tone, length, or stress to mark, and end up with something like Vietnamese. Incidentally, isn't it strange that the Vietnamese don't mind writing vowels with two or three diacriti...

There's an interesting article on the web (I can't remember where): Root extension and root formation in Semitic and Afrasian, by Alexander Militarev. He discusses various suffixes and prefixes applied to biconsonental roots, with examples.

Speaking of that, why are things such as "Parliament" treated as a plural object? Parliament is a singular entity, so it should accept a singular verb... that's one thing that confused me about British English. It depends on context. Thus "The Cabinet is split..." you have to think of them as an en...

The pitch is the only thing described by the grammarians (with some non-trivial details mentioned), so it's fair to put onus probandi onto those who deny pitch accent; and IMO they fail to carry the load to their chosen destination point. What do we know besides pitch? That (vowel/syllable) duratio...

Latest books: The enchantment emporium, by Tanya Huff, and The evolution of the soul, by Richard Swinburne. Latest CDs: Des Knaben Wunderhorn, by Mahler, and Nothing was sweeter than the Boswell Sisters (my attempt to sing along with Heebie Jeebies should probably be illegal...) Watching: not my thi...

Really? I thought the conventional explanation for the sudden standardizaton of spelling was the printing press. In England it made things worse! Early printers didn't have a variety of spaces, so they couldn't justify the lines by adjusting the spacing as a scribe could. In Latin, they could short...

The interaction between Latin and Romance could get very complicated. Latin was pronounced like the vernacular, especially before Charlemagne's reforms. In the early Middle Ages, Italians would not have pronounced the -s even when they they read Latin. The old Spanish and Portuguese pronunciations w...

Gender in IE is clearly very late, and the agreement patterns are anomalous in the light of other languages groups that possess it (e.g. North Caucasian, Afro-Asiatic, Bantu, Australian, etc). 1. Gender is unmarked in the verb. 2. Not all adjectives show the masculine/feminine distinction, and the m...

For Phoenician and Punic, see The languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia , which is a reprint from The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world's ancient languages . The problem with including Phoenician influences is getting a list of vocabulary. With Berber, you could cheat and use the modern dialects.

Is there necessarily a single rule? 1. Copper Island Aleut has replaced the conjugational suffixes of the verb by Russian ones. So much for the persistence of morphology. 2. Sardinian speech is a continuum from Sardinian influenced by Italian to Italian influenced by Sardinian. It's not always easy ...

Right, so, I've refreshed my pathetic HTML skills, and one serious issue with this is converting various unicode characters (á ë ñ î etc. as well as 90% of the IPA) into HTML entities. One thing I am certain of is that I am not going to do it, because I am not a walking database of HTML entities co...

Well we have a Vasco-Caucasian thread, and a Ural-Altaic thread, so why not an Indo-Uralic thread? The Indo-Uralic hypothesis (with or without the wider Nostratic hypothesis) is nothing new (been around for decades) but not accepted by mainstream linguists. However, it's not a crackpot idea either....

There's a PIE verbal root *deik^j- meaning "to show, to point out" (in Lat. dicere, digitus; Goth. gatihan "announce, tell", NHD zeihen, zeigen, r Verzicht; Eng. teach, token (from Pokorny)). => Possibly the PIE numeral root *dek^j- "ten" and the verbal root *deik^j- "to point out" can be related. ...

Also, sorry to break into the colour-coded fantasy, but no, there weren't Irish and Scottish slaves - it being illegal to enslave people (and, in most of the slave-trading period, to trade christian slaves). While it is true that some Irish were enslaved, it was by the Arabs, and they were shipped ...