zompist bboard

I'm super late to the game, but Ancient Greek also had " ephelcystic nu " which was an optional -/n/ at the end of some forms which was employed to avoid hiatus or for metrical purposes, but also frequently drops in at the end of clauses or verses. e.g. Archilochus 6, line 5 ... ἀλλὰ θεοὶ γὰρ ἀνηκέσ...

Also, this was a whole few pages back, so I apologize for bringing this back up... The latter is very rare though. LIV has 9 examples, most of them not very good-looking. Just two of them seem to be found in three branches: – *gwel- 'to swallow', in Armenian + Latin + Baltic. Only found as the zero ...

Does anyone know of a single source that lists all or most of the PIE athematic nouns where accent shift & ablaut occur (probably excluding all the proterokinetic deverbals... that would be a very long list)? The Wiktionary pages on PIE athematic nouns are less than exhaustive.

Why should all PIE words ultimately derive from CVC roots or CVC+CVC compounds? It makes it look like a conlang. I’m not proposing this at all (I’m not really proposing anything, just noticing patterns & speculating). I was just rolling with Tropylium’s idea that the verbal roots in *wr- and *mr- “...

For example, for *(h₂) regʰ - vs. *w re n gʰ - & *st re n gʰ - & *g re n ǵʰ -, there is also *we rǵʰ - ‘(zu)binden’; for ‘ *h₃ reǵ - vs. *w re n g - & *w reg -, there is also *h₂we rg - ‘sich umdrehen, sich wenden’; and for * rek - vs. *w rek - (?& *bʰ rekʷ -), there is also *te rkʷ - ‘sich drehen....

Also, I'm not saying that there had to have been an original *f/ɸ -, just offering an explanation of where it could have gone if there had been one. I figured you were; I was genuinely asking (non-rhetorically) whether anyone had noticed Nostratic (or at least Indo-Uralic) cognates with labials whe...

Is there any indication of correspondences with Uralic or Afro-Asiatic that could support a proto-phoneme *ɸ or *β, for example sets with some labial sounds in other languages and *h₁ in PIE? I’ve yet to see anyone reconstruct any labial fricatives for Nostratic. Other idea semi-related to this: May...

Tropylium has written an interesting blog post about Anatolian and PIE vowels. The bottom line: The Anatolian data points at a system like *i *e *ɜ *a *u instead of the traditionally reconstructed *i *e *a *o *u for Proto-Anatolian, and he points out that the former may be more archaic than the lat...

I’ve been thinking a lot about *h₂ lately and I kind of had this random idea. I realize like this may simply be a matter of notation, but what if, instead of */h₂/ having a syllabic allophone in *[ə₂], it was the other way around, i.e. *h₂ was really a semivocalic variant of some */a/ phoneme that w...