zompist bboard

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'. Because there was no /b/. Whether you believe in b>bh, allophonic aspiration, or neithe...

exotic glottalic or implosive stops Ejectives, implosives, or glottalised stops are not "exotic", whatever that's supposed to mean. See the map at http://wals.info/chapter/7 In the Indo-European languages, ejectives are only attested in some Eastern Armenian dialects. And implosives are only attest...

I think the unvoiced stop series was aspirated in earlier PIE. This would give a much saner stop system: Tʰ : T~D : Dʰ. Such a stop system can easily explain all the peculiarities of the late PIE stop system. And it does not need any exotic glottalic or implosive stops to do so. Early PIE would have...

There are no "missing" voiceless aspirates. The notion that the system *t *d *dʰ is missing anything is a misconception based on the misleading notation used for the breathy-voiced stops, which is a Sanskritism. I also don't think that deriving the laryngeals from Kʰ is the right way. It would leav...

I don't have a preferred phonology of the laryngeals. I find that the more I learn about them, the more uncertain I become about them. But if I had to make a guess, it would be something like this: H (uncolored, e.g. adjacent to apophonic o) was 'x' but turned into 'h' before the syncope. h1e was 'ç...

To clarify what I mean by being unsure of his theory - I don't know if it's correct ; I know exactly what he claims, having read his papers on it several times. As I recall, the main piece of evidence for *h₄ is Hittite alpas "cloud", claimed to be cognate with Latin albus "white" from *h₄elbʰos, b...

The theory I'm referring to (By Kloekhorst) says that h₃e was preserved but h₃o/h₃C was not. But how does one determine if the correct reconstruction was h₃e or h₃o? What Kloekhorst usually does is appeal to theoretic considerations, such as ḫi -conjugation verbs always having o/zero-ablaut. That s...

There is one issue with this. Initial h₃e is assumed to preserved as 'ha' in Hittite. For example: 'hastai' bone from h₃estoi and 'haran' eagle from h₃eron. Yes, there are some instances where a *h3 is preserved in Hittite. I don't know yet what to make of that. The theory I'm referring to (By Kloe...

There is one issue with this. Initial h₃e is assumed to preserved as 'ha' in Hittite.
For example: 'hastai' bone from h₃estoi and 'haran' eagle from h₃eron.

Sure, but if one were to propose such an etymology in a long-range comparison, the response of the critics would be scorching. So now you have to actively make persuasive the idea that a certain formal correspondance has in fact simply arisen by pure coincidence (which is unlikely). To do that you ...

I'm warming up to the idea that Howl just might see how humans might associate increases in temperature with concepts like desire and hope. Sure, but if one were to propose such an etymology in a long-range comparison, the response of the critics would be scorching. Still, *kwep is a very interesti...

I'm trying to find in PIE where there are roots containing *kw as opposed to *kʷ in reference to a remark where Celtic and Italic languages treat them differently diachronically; namely, Celtic merges them but Italic does not. In a cursory search, I've only found *kwep- which yields "cupio" in Lati...

Also: laryngeals are real!! Everyone, even scholars, keeps trying to make connections like *teh2r~dór (dummy example) as if the laryngeal was just a relic of vowel coloring. Sure,that's a theory,but most people think it was the other way aeound.. if anything, a laryngeal should get stronger the fur...

Speaking of which, I have a fondness for a possible correspondence between Indo-Hittite *meh1w- {4} and Uralic *neljä {4}, though that might be a bit of a stretch. It just strikes me as interesting since this older(?) PIE word for {4} has a nasal onset, and the Uralic shows a tendency towards palat...

A quick Google on neolithic boats seem to suggest they were mostly dugout canoes, unsuitable for transportation across large swaths of water. The closest to crossing dangerous waters is the colonization of various islands (e.g. Orkney), but that's a far stretch from steady long-distance see-faring ...

We know that some Eurasian people went back to Africa. We know people in the stone age had primitive boats. There was probably some trading going on across the Black Sea and Mediterranean. So why would we be surprised that we find similar words in Semitic and IE? If you don't mind me bringing up the...

I'm just reading through Kloekhorst's etymological Hittite dictionary, and I can't find one mention of where the Anatolian -ni plural verb marker comes from; by which I'm referring to as in both the -mi and -Hi paradigms. If you don't mind me bringing up the Indo-Uralic hypothesis, there is a very ...

I have though long and hard about the criticism. What I posted was ongoing exploratory fast-and-loose dictionary comparison. This is of course can't withstand the critical debate that is normal within historical linguistics. And this approach is not very resistant to any prior assumptions that may c...

Both pastoralist nomads and some sorts of hunter-gatherer can be extremely mobile; and large-scale, even intercontinental trading routes have existed for thousands of years. Trading routes can exist without people moving much, only the goods need to be moved. Living people however, need food, even ...

That is indeed a good point. In any language group with that much vowel qualities, the vowels tend to be unstable. See for example the development of the Romance languages (Latin had different vowel qualities for short and long vowels). And the Germanic languages also offer plenty of examples like t...

It's not impossible. There are more signs of language contact between IE and Semitic than this. http://paleoglot.blogspot.nl/2008/03/semitic-and-ie-in-neolithic-how.html What happens below in the comment section really lends the writer less credibility unfortunately. I couldn't stop laughing, it be...

It's not impossible. There are more signs of language contact between IE and Semitic than this. http://paleoglot.blogspot.nl/2008/03/semitic-and-ie-in-neolithic-how.html And there has actually been some migration of Eurasians to Africa. Some tribes in Africa have Y-DNA haplogroup R1b. See: https://a...

The principal way to make progress in comparison from the mere look-alike stage is to identify some non-trivial sound changes . If we have, say, word-initial examples of PIE *h₂- ~ Uralic *k- in isolation, they could always be simply analyzed as loans, since PU did not have word-initial *x- or *ħ- ...

OK, 'water' looks related. How would, say, 'fire' fare? Generously enough, we find two reasonably well-established roots for 'fire' in both IE and Uralic: – PIE *h₁n̥gʷnis 'fire (animate)' – PIE *peh₂wr̥ 'fire (as substance)' – PU *tulə (widespread) – Ugric *tüɣVtV Whoops: we would have had four di...

Some of this "eerie similarity" between these might be not because they come from the diversification of a single root , but rather from containing a common numeral suffix . There's a clear doublet with the forms for "one": forms like Finnish yksi : yhte- suggest *üktə, while a few others have no t...