zompist bboard

– *kwath₂- 'to froth', in Germanic + Slavic + Indic. We could perhaps entertain a possibility that *ḱ-fronting was blocked for *ḱwa-? I'm not entirely sure why they posit *a for this root - there's no obvious need for it. Besides, the Slavic words probably aren't even cognate. The Slavic root is ac...

I recently ran into roan (a.) "with a mixture of black and white hairs, so as to appear gray-haired from a distance".

I don't know what particular dialect it comes from, but I see eye-dialect spellings such as "partay" or "kitteh" often enough (these two seem to be known relatively widely but it's by no means limited to them); which presumably aim for a vowel closer to FACE than FLEECE . Another question though is ...

3) /q/ seems to be mostly in complementary distribution with /k/, yet there is apparently no corresponding /qʷ/ to pair with the labiovelar. (Unless it, too, merged without a trace in all four lineages.) On the other hand, as I think we've covered before on here, there is a possible candidate for a...

All your theories have a serious flaw. You assume that PIE has ever been a uniform language. Well, it needn't have been uniform, but I don't think it counts to have a "last common ancestor" language that is actually two (or more) dialects that have pretty diverging phonologies. This is a common mis...

A few bugs in the Uralic data: – Finnish is not listed under languages with 1M+ speakers; – "E Saami", as entered, should be "Inari Saami"; – "Lovozero" is more commonly known as "Kildin Saami"; – "Permyat" should be "Permyak"; – "Gornomari" should be "Hill Mari" (not "High Mari") [edit] Several Tur...

Related empirical question: does anyone happen to know of languages other than Danish that contrast all four of /ɛ œ ʌ ɔ/? For four high qualities you can look at e.g. literally anything Turkic for /i y ɯ u/ (also e.g. Scandinavian for /i y ʉ u/, or Toda for /i y ɨ u/). Finding four close-mid qualit...

For an Equus hemionus guess, I would suggest: 1) the most common source of /ʒ/ in languages is the lenition of earlier /dʒ/; 2) the most common source of /dz/ in languages is the fronting of earlier /dʒ/ (or /dʑ/); 3) the most common source of /z/ in languages is, however, the voicing of earlier /s/...

You might want to take a look at the proportion of pre-PIE roots with two *B series stops you end up hypothesizing here. Isn’t this exact issue a major part of the support for the glottalic theory? If there were some rule that disallowed 2 plain lenis (or ‘glottalized’) stops, this is probably what...

The obvious place to start is the only root structure where we can reliably (assuming, that is, that this hypothesis is even correct) identify original *b - in *wReC- and *mReC- roots. (…) The remaining roots are *mlewh₂- "sprechen", *myewh₁- "bewegen", wleykʷ- "befeuchten", *wred- "weich werden/ma...

As I recall reading, there has never been a sound change "ɒ > ɑ" in English to begin with — the LOT vowel instead went Middle English /ɔ/ > Early Modern English /ɑ/ > RP /ɒ/. (This would have been preceded by the CLOTH vowel going /ɑ/ > /ɑː/ > /ɔː/.) Anyway, you mention that this "is an example of b...

I'm reading a draft of an upcoming book on African historica linguistics (by Gert Dimmendal); he reports that the effect of tone on other vowel features is not very well-researched, but that a few cases are known: his example is the Teso-Turkana group of Nilotic, where vowels with complex tone were ...

I would presume that second-language learning informs people's understanding of their native languages' allophony at least somewhat.

When sound changes occur that lead to initial consonant mutation, do those changes necessarily (or strongly tend to) occur word-internally, as well? That probably goes for mutation that arises thru lenition, but might not for mutation that arises thru fortition: e.g. ɬ ~ l and r̥ ~ r in Welsh, wher...

How would you define "major" allophonic variation? Some cases of allophony in Finnish include: • prosody-related variation in length (e.g. short vowels become half-long at the end of a short trochaic stress group) • variation between dentals and alveolars (probably speaker-dependant, but e.g. I have...

Set in a natural environment, I'd expect that /v/ to turn into /b/ and from there into /p/ faster than you can say "presence of stop consonants is a linguistic universal" in Rotokas (possibly with ŋ > g > k hot on the heels). Ritual languages aren't strictly speaking natural though, and surely they ...

Languages with large inventories should have less allophony. But there's a problem. Languages with large inventories tend to be languages with complex phonotactics. And complicated phonotactics will also probably lead to plenty of allophony, because the phonemes can be places in a wider array of co...

Incidentally, the LIV² has several biases in their reconstruction, most notably that they include roots only found in single branches, but also their treatment of laryngeals (I seem to recall it stated somewhere that they only reconstruct *h₂ when aspiration affects are found in IIr, whereas there ...

Meanwhile, for people who think there's something worthwhile in the standard reconstruction of PIE (so, I would dare to presume, probably most people in this thread not named Jouna), I present a digitized list of all verb roots in LIV, and some analytic observations: https://protouralic.wordpress.co...

Sounds like a non-sibilant dental click to me, i.e. the click equivalent of [t̪θ]. It's not often recognized, but it's possible to distinguish clicks by both POA and MOA; the "standard" clicks [ʘ ǀ ǁ ǃ ǃǃ ǂ] are the equivalents of [p t̪s̪ tɬ t ʈ cç], but there are other options just as well (e.g. [p...

Yes, that indicates a much greater amount of variety early on for sure. But that's going to also make drawing any conclusions from these lineages' specifics hazardous. If the full spectrum of population variety in ~ 3000 BP was actually equivalent to something like 3000 equivalently divergent linea...

…Mmmhm, it's been a while since I checked this thread, but for future reference (in response to some posts upthread): I would prefer to not have private or semi-private email discussions I have been part of summarized in places like this. Publicly-defended quackery is one thing, interpersonal fricti...

Coincidentally, a new and seemingly pretty definitive paper in Science yesterday, about the amerindian population. A study of 92 samples from western south and central america (Mexico through to Chile), 8600BP to 500BP, based on mitochondria. Results: - all related - last contact with non-American ...

Is vowel breathiness > stop aspiration attested? It's one of those things that makes sense, but upon further looking I haven't gotten anywhere seeing if it's actually something that happens, especially with regards to voiceless stops aspirating. Vowel breathiness usually comes from aspiration in th...

I keep hearing from second-hand specialists (eg. people who are on good terms with super-professional linguists) that there's no one in the world that takes the Altaic, much less the Ural-Altaic, theory seriously, and the main reason for the dismissal seems to be that people who consider the (Ural-...