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Or was the Armenian borrowed from Germanic via Syriac burgā , like Arabic burj ? So how is Syriac in any way closer to Armenian than Germanic is? Guus Kroonen proposes in his Germanic etymological dictionary that the Balto-Slavic cognates suggesting *bʰergʰ- would be actually loans from Germanic. T...

it's been recently shown that e.g. Proto-Mongolic, Proto-Tungusic and Proto-Korean should be reconstructed with pharyngeal harmony (*u̘ ~ *ʊ̙ etc.), as still in Khalkha, instead of palatal harmony as in Uralic (*y ~ *u etc.). Turkic has also been proposed to have shifted from pharyngeal to palatal ...

However, we do know that most modern Uralic speakers, with the exception of Hungarians (who look like their neighbours) (and also the Estonians have had a fair bit of interbreeding with their neighbours too, though not to Hungarian levels), have very strong genetic similarities to one another, and ...

Like you, I am very skeptical about Kloekhorst's conclusion that PIE must have had *t: *t *t' simply because Anatolian does; I see no reason why we can't have *t *d > *tʰ *t > *t: *t, even if I can't pluck any attestations of it out of the air. Kloekhorst's argument in favor of an initial geminatio...

Afaict "Mitian" is based on the MT isogloss... which is probably about as skimpy as it gets. The definition of a "Mitian" subset just on the basis of the 1st and 2nd person pronouns is of course far from airtight. E.g. modern English is not strictly "Mitian" since the 2P general pronoun is you ; Hu...

In Altaic, btw, the "M" is often /b/, and it's apparently widely believed that there must have been borrowing of pronouns between the three altaic families. Which even means they might plausibly be a part of an original cluster of "W-pronouns" instead, as in English we . In Indo-European, of course...

My pet theory is that the PIE reflexives are based on the personal pronouns with a *-w- suffix. I seem to remember reading somewhere that such a reflexive suffix exists in Uralic, but I don't know where. There certainly is such a suffix, but it derives reflexive verbs (e.g. nearly all u -stem verbs...

We've been throwing around the idea that PIE *h₂w was actually a single phoneme *h₂ʷ (maybe a more consistent notation would be to call it either *ḫʷ or *h₄). Turns out that this has indeed already been proposed! I've just run into Edgar Suter (2014), Das hethitische Phonem /xʷ/ . He also reconstruc...

Numerals from a selection of Mansi varieties ("dialects", arguably separate languages) as of around 1905. Transcription's basically phonetic. I use [a] here as a central vowel; you could probably unify this and [ɑ] without too much trouble. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Proto-Mansi *ük *kitə *kuurəm *nilää *...

Well, the triple reflex does directly imply that the three laryngeals remained distinct beyond the breakup of PIE, at least within pre-Proto-Greek, so it is at least thinkable that colouring persisted as well. Also, it does seem that colouring was a synchronic rule, so if the pre-Proto-Greek speake...

One reason to assume that *h3 was labialized is IMHO perhaps the famous "triple reflex" of the syllabic laryngeals in Greek, which happened well after the breakup of Late PIE at a time (since it happened only in Greek) when *o was most likely already rounded. What do you think about this? Did it ha...

…If I say "anywhere from the Caspian Sea to the Bering Strait" , that obviously does not mean that I think that we should assume a flat probability distribution across that area, or that the vicinity of the Caspian Sea would be an especially likely candidate. It means I've chosen it as a (somewhat a...

While suggestive, such long-distance comparison is hardly conclusive, and you'll also note such exceptions as *kewe "female animal" = *h₂₃ówi- "sheep" which doesn't fit the pattern whichever laryngeal you reconstruct. Also of detriment is that at least one of his PIE roots doesn't even exist! (It's...

The more vaguely you define "Nostratic", the more credible it is, of course. "At least some of these dozen language families are related" is, intrinsically, a lot of more likely than "all of these dozen language families are related, and here's a list of 1253 word roots and 183 grammatical endings f...

Right, that's a feature. If the goal is to explain why voicing assimilation doesn't affect this set of phonemes, then not being plosives is a good explanation because it's normal for non-plosives to be unmarked for voicing. Which is a good point, but also, it does not point to (af)fricatives specif...

Zaarin wrote:What is the earliest recorded IE language that lost vowel length?

On that note, how many IE languages still have the original vowel length contrast? West Germanic (sort of, heavily modified) and Baltic do, but Romance lost it, Slavic lost it, Greek lost it, modern Indo-Aryan generally lost it…

I believe I've heard that Proto-Indo-European *ǵ and *ǵʰ have palatal reflexes in Uralic, but I'm not sure if the same correspondence is attested for *ḱ. It is. For example, '100' is *śëta > sata in Finnish, száz in Hungarian, čuohti in Northern Sami. (Contrary to the traditional transcription, *ś ...

(Though I've still been aware of the Finnish equivalent term for long. And that's a fun thought: I wonder how far one could get with this same topic in Finnish. Probably not very…) If you're talking about Finnish päistärikkö , could the word be a loan from Slavic (cf. Polish pstrokaty “multicolored...

What are some possible outcomes of velarized consonants? ɫ > w or ɫ > ɣ are common as dirt, but you probably knew that. Velarization > pharyngealization > voicing, as in Arabic & co., would probably be reasonable. Proto-Oceanic *pʷ may also have been simply [pˠ] (as it is in e.g. Marshallese, IIRC)...

(…) there're only so many ways to form verbs from any other morphological category, and obvious structural limits (for instance, you cannot verbalize a pronoun or preposition or adverb in IE languages.) On the other hand, nouns tend to be easier to nominalize. Just slap on noun endings, thematic en...

The only examples of backing of palatals/alveolopalatals that I am familiar with are all more-or-less /ʃ/ > /x/ (Spanish is the main example that comes to mind, but also Slavic /x/ from PIE /s/ after ruki, and I think some Iranian languages have this). Which is interesting, since /tʃ/ is also prett...

Could be a kind of a "pull" due to the fact that PIE only had a single sibilant *s. Later palatalizations in Satem languages, where these have happened (Law of Palatals in Indo-Iranian, the First/Second/Third palatalizations in Slavic) tend to remain at affricates. Albanian is an exception (*kʷ, *gʷ...

Tropylium once suggested, either in a private e-mail or in a post to Nostratic-L, that Pre-Proto-Uralic may have undergone a chain shift of the sort *o > *u > *ü, which would mean that Proto-Indo-Uralic probably did not have front rounded vowels. A quite interesting suggestion. May I ask what's the...

I recently ran into roan (a.) "with a mixture of black and white hairs, so as to appear gray-haired from a distance". Not a big fantasy fan, I take it! Evidently not the horsey kind of fantasy at least. (Though I've still been aware of the Finnish equivalent term for long. And that's a fun thought:...

As far as pure statistics go, this is a pretty good study. On the other hand, if we really wanted to show that there's some kind of an onomatopoetic motivation for given words, we really should be looking at historical innovation events, not just at whatever currently exists. When we're analyzing ba...