zompist bboard

IMO the Q-Celtic languages represent an older Celtic-speaking stratum that existed before 2 waves of expansion of P-Celtic speakers during the Hallstatt and La-Tenne phases (the last expansion brought Gaulish speakers like the Parisi to the SE Britain).

I'm thinking of maybe creating a fictional Western European isolate that would be a relic of the languages spoken on the Atlantic fringe before the Neolithic. Essentially the substratum beneath WeepingElf's Hesperic languages My own gut feeling is that things like VSO and SVO word order as well as d...

@TaylorS: Glen Gordon ought to be taken with a few grains of salt. His ideas on Etruscan often do not agree with the scholarly mainstream, and he is so convinced of the relationship between "Aegean" and IE that he sometimes slips into circular reasoning. Also, he has a history of flaming people who...

For example, Japanese uses markers for what seems like a lot of things, yet I come across very few people talking about that language as having cases. vokzhen describes what I'm going for better than I can. I believe these are clitics: Syntactically they behave like separate words, but they are pho...

Anyone notice a similarity between the Etruscan -sa or -isa, "son of" patronymic suggested here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language#History_of_Etruscan_literacy and the Eteo-Cypriot <a-ri-si-to-no- se a-ra-to-wa-na-ka-so-ko-o- se > "to Ariston (son of) Aristonax" suggested here http://e...

Another example from my own dialect: the loss of /U@/. Other than following /j/, when it tends to head in the direction of /u@/, it otherwise tends to merge with /O/. But this varies word-by-word. "Poor" and "moor" are usually now with /O/ - although in both cases I have variation, partly as a resu...

Interesting, 400 miles southeast of you, I maintain a cot-caught as [a ɒ] except I only have [ɒ] before /l/. That makes sense, people in Iowa and southern Minnesota generally maintain the caught-cot distinction. Meanwhile, I have [ər] in words like card, bard, guard, carve, and [ɑr] in car, bar, ga...

Speaking of tone, I have noticed that along with English vowels preceding lenis/voiced consonants being longer than those preceding fortis/unvoiced consonants, there is a tone difference as well. So the vowel in "lift" has a high tone and "lived" has a low tone. In Future English I have made this to...

Tropylium: yes, it's surprising; that's why linguistics is exciting. Lexical diffusion wasn't postulated based on examination of historical sound change, but on observing ongoing sound change— an effort pioneered by Labov. He discusses the subject in three 500-page books, which aren't light reading...

PIE *septm seems suspiciously similar to Proto-Semitic *sabʕatum. I wonder if PIE borrowed from a Semitic source.

Some verb charts: Personal agreement affixes. Personal | NOM | ACC | ----------------------------- 1SG | e- | -mi | ----------------------------- 2SG | yi- | -yi | ----------------------------- 3SG animate | ši- | -hur | ----------------------------- 3SG inanimate | é'- | -é' | ---------------------...

Yes. He was hilarious in an unintended way. He meant everything he wrote seriously, but it was so far off the mark that one can only laugh about it ;) His blog is still up, almost daily posting etymologies of random words in random European languages that have, according to him, faulty accepted ety...

Many English dialects distinguish a "schwi" sound (near-close central vowel) distinct from schwa (mid central vowel).

I actually have the distinction and I still have trouble hearing it!

Where do evidentiality morphemes come from?

Nouns, Adjectives and the Noun Phrase The Noun Phrase is ordered thusly: 1. preposition (and accusative pre-clitic) 2. determiners 3.demonstratives and plural clitic 4. numerals 5: adjectives 6: noun The plural suffix has been lost in Future English. In it's place is a plural pre-clitic mey , from ...

Phonology /m m̥ n n̥ ŋ ŋ̥/ <m hm n hn ŋ hŋ> /p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ ʔ/ <b p d t g k '> /pf ts kx/ <pf ts kh> /f v s z ʃ ʒ x ʁ h/ <f v s z š ž x r h> /w j l/ <w y l> /a e i o u ə/ <a e i o u ur> / æː ɛː eː iː ɑː ɔː oː uː/ < aa er ee ii ar or oo uu> High Tone: á Mid Tone: a Low Tone: à ----------------------...

I'll be posting random stuff on Future English here until I get the ambition up to start an article on it, and decide on a name.

I decided to revive this thread because Jorg has his Hesperic languages spoken by the Bell Beaker Culture, but in a book on European Prehistory I have by Jean Manco called Ancestral Journeys the author argues that the Bell Beaker Folk were speakers of Proto-Italo-Celtic. Also, Manco argues based on...

So probably all of you have looked as the name "Westeros" and had the same thought: looks like a PIE word. Anyone played around with the etymology at all? I guess the most plausible root is *wes- "stay, dwell", but there are plenty of other possibilities, including some which incorporate *wekʷspero...

I decided to revive this thread because Jorg has his Hesperic languages spoken by the Bell Beaker Culture, but in a book on European Prehistory I have by Jean Manco called Ancestral Journeys the author argues that the Bell Beaker Folk were speakers of Proto-Italo-Celtic. Also, Manco argues based on ...

Some parts of Middle Indo-Aryan as well. Yep, Sanskrit /st/ becomes Pali /ttʰ/, for example. The Buddha's hometown in Sanskrit is Kapilavastu , in Pali it became Kapilavatthu . And that is probably one of the LEAST strange assimilations that happened from Sanskrit to Pali. Nirvana became Nibbana , ...

Soap wrote:

NYC English bird > boid!

Isnt it really just /ɜɪ/, though? Ive only heard the full-blown /ɔɪ/ in cartoons and other mock accents.

I swear I've heard it come out of Regis Philbun's mouth.

Yeah, so I've redone Future English's phonology again, so shoot me! I decided to do something different with /ɹ/ :wink: /m m̥ n n̥ ŋ ŋ̥/ <m hm n hn ŋ hŋ> /p pʷ t tʷ k kʷ / <b bw d dw g gw> /pʰ pʷʰ tʰ tʷʰ kʰ kʷʰ/ <p pw t tw k kw> /pf pfʷ ts tsʷ kx kxʷ/ <pf pfw ts tsw kh khw> /f fʷ v s sʷ z ʃ ʃʷ ʒ x x...

Theta wrote:not to go off-topic, but how did adjectives shift to post-noun?

Spanish influence and typological reasons.

Some parts of Middle Indo-Aryan as well. Yep, Sanskrit /st/ becomes Pali /ttʰ/, for example. The Buddha's hometown in Sanskrit is Kapilavastu , in Pali it became Kapilavatthu . And that is probably one of the LEAST strange assimilations that happened from Sanskrit to Pali. Nirvana became Nibbana , ...