Search found 64 matches

by Howl
Wed May 30, 2018 5:41 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

And my point is the reflexes are inconsistent enough to point to non-agricultural terms in Indo-European that became agricultural terms only after the family started breaking up, which is consistent with migration from a non-agricultural region into an agricultural region. There is a consistent voc...
by Howl
Wed May 30, 2018 2:14 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Also most of the existing IE language families like Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Balto-Slavic, Italic, Celtic and Germanic are (or were once) spoken close to the Balkans. I thought the consensus is that Germanic has it's urheimat in Southern Scandinavia, and only in later times did they migrate to th...
by Howl
Tue May 29, 2018 2:43 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

So let me explain what my thoughts are. First of all, I am definitely NOT proposing that IE came from Anatolia. The focal point of dialectal diversity within IE is in the Balkans. There we had IE languages like Dacian, Thracian, Phrygian, etc. And we know more about them than just the names of these...
by Howl
Mon May 28, 2018 1:09 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

The early Neolithic farmers can't have brought PIE with them because they did not know wheeled vehicles and some other things which PIE has well-reconstructed words for (and hunter-gatherers are a fortiori out for the same reasons). The Yamnaya did know these things, and could have brought PIE to t...
by Howl
Sun May 27, 2018 8:03 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I don't believe that language always has to follow the genes. For example, there are numerous cases in history where an invading people eventually ended up speaking the language of the native people. And mechanisms like elite dominance and the need for a lingua franca make it possible that a populat...
by Howl
Sat May 26, 2018 7:49 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

nota bene: there are no Hittite samples. There are a small number of samples from the Hittite polity (some of which iirc have been argued to have steppe influence), but none of them are from clearly ethnically Hittite, high-caste burials; they may therefore be Hattians, who formed the majority of t...
by Howl
Fri May 25, 2018 2:25 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I am very skeptical about theories in which the Caucasian languages influenced PIE. These theories always serve to give PIE more of a profile like the Caucasian languages of today. But we don't have a clue what those languages were like more than 5000 years ago. And I don't believe in linguistic ref...
by Howl
Sat May 19, 2018 11:52 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I take things Kloekhorst says with a pinch of salt and a very critical eye, since he's said several things which I think are utter bullshit. Yes, many things he has written are ones I do not agree with at all, such as his reconstruction of the Proto-Anatolian (and Early PIE) stop system, and his re...
by Howl
Sun Apr 22, 2018 12:47 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

And I think the best way to do this is bottom-up, by first looking at the language pairs/groups that may be more closely related, like Koreo-Japanese and Indo-Uralic. Pair by pair reconstruction is the worst way to do it. For example, consider reconstructing the Swadesh list. Every time at least on...
by Howl
Sun Apr 22, 2018 6:39 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Now I'm confused because it's impossible to reconstruct any of the proposed families in the title... And yet, there are people claiming that Nostratic has been reconstructed already by the likes of Illich-Svitych, Starostin, Dogopolsky and Bomhard. I think that is nonsense, and those macro-reconstr...
by Howl
Fri Mar 30, 2018 1:10 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

What's interesting from all of the above, is that we have a large group of languages, that very, very likely descended from a single language (because of all the points Salmoneus pointed out above) but are very difficult to classify as a single language family because all "normal" ways to establish...
by Howl
Thu Mar 29, 2018 11:41 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

If you take the plain voiced stops as the last stop series that PIE gained, why couldn't you explain their distribution simply by the distribution of their originating condition? You could for example easily imagine a Pre-PIE stop system with a plain two-way distinction of [-voiced] and [+voiced] s...
by Howl
Tue Mar 27, 2018 12:14 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

WeepingElf wrote:Hence, I consider the Afroasiatic and Mitian groupings to be of similar quality (and time depth), the difference in acceptance being due to the fact that Africanists are more ready to accept far-flung relationships than Eurasianists for historical reasons.
I fully agree with that.
by Howl
Sun Mar 25, 2018 11:46 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

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 periphra...
by Howl
Sun Mar 25, 2018 6:38 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

The odds that two languages are genetically related also depend on how much they have in common, and how much the geographical distance is between the places where these languages were spoken. For example, the chances of a relationship between Bantu and Quechua (close to zero) are much lower than be...
by Howl
Tue Mar 20, 2018 5:42 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

My own hyper-speculative theory is that mV/tV were originally demonstratives. And a path to 1st/2nd person via possession (this thing (near me) -> my thing; that thing(near you) -> your thing) would fit in nicely with that. The "determinativity" contrast in Uralic also has parallels with the IE stat...
by Howl
Mon Mar 19, 2018 9:11 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

I'll reiterate that this paper does contain good examples of PIE *D ~ PU *N that can't be explained as "nasalisation". I'll put a more detailed evaluation of that document on my big to-do list. It does contain some useful etymologies that should be added to my list. I also should do a more detailed...
by Howl
Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:32 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Realistically, Uralic need not tell us very much - assuming a shift ejective > implosive > voiced stop, there's no reason to assume that it was still in the 'ejective' phase in PIU. My own Indo-Uralic material (a draft version is now at academia.edu) does not have very much to tell here. I don't se...
by Howl
Sun Mar 18, 2018 4:05 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

I concur with you that IE and Uralic are probably more closely related to each other than to Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic. It is uncertain, though, whether the latter three form a valid node or not. Turkic looks as if it was closer to Indo-Uralic than the other two, but that may be deceptive (the ...
by Howl
Thu Mar 15, 2018 4:50 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79137

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

I do think that there is probably a core-Eurasiatic family with at least Indo-Uralic and micro-Altaic. But it will be very difficult to prove something like that. We do have a good sense of what the proto-languages of Indo-European and Uralic were like 5000 years ago. We don't have that for Turkic, ...
by Howl
Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:46 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63829

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

I know it's more or less political, but honestly if Swedes and Russians got any kind of justification for calling Finnish the rape baby of their languages (no matter how much of a stretch would have to go behind it), that would be like the end of the world for me. With my luck that means pretty muc...
by Howl
Tue Mar 06, 2018 5:20 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63829

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

WeepingElf, you might find this paper interesting. Some of the nasal correspondences there can also be explained by nasal infixes. Compare: PU: lämpi 'warmth' [HPUL] ~ PIE: leh₂p 'to glow' [LIV2] -> Ancient Greek lámpō 'to shine' and lampás 'torch, light'. PFU: päŋi 'head' [HPUL], ? PFU poŋï 'bosom...
by Howl
Tue Mar 06, 2018 3:14 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63829

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

Well I mean what's to say with the sound subsitutions that they could be inherited from a Proto-Indo-Uralic, but that the system underwent extreme simplification à la Tocharian? (I'm not trying to say your ideas don't have weight, I'd just like some elaboration). Whatever the Proto-Indo-Uralic phon...
by Howl
Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:21 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Haida and Na-Dene
Replies: 161
Views: 63829

Re: Haida and Na-Dene

For example, I haven't read all that much on it, but I tend to hear from outsiders that Core Altaic "was disproven decades ago" or some dismissive thing like that, whereas I almost never see that same attitude from actual specialists in TM&T. I think the problem with research into Altaic is that at...
by Howl
Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:05 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448587

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...