zompist bboard

KathTheDragon wrote:It's possible, yeah, but ad-hoc at this point.

I think the constraints work better with ejectives. Yet, I am not convinced about ejectives - these sounds could have been anything. It would be helpful to find out what they correspond to in Uralic.

Man adagarema tladtraphas mas a samdendam mal. I-DAT AOR-lose-3PL:P-1SG:A reckon-machine I-GEN and music.band-OBJ I-PRT 'I have lost my computer and my band.' Ibreta am tladtraphas a adagama am samdendam. AOR-break-3SG:P the:I reckon-machine and AOR-leave-3SG:P-1SG:A the:C-OBJ music.band-OBJ 'The c...

One possibility is that they were ejectives in an earlier stage, but shifted to implosives still before the break-up.

I think in this instances we take "older" to mean "first branch to split off from the rest of the family", as in "Anatolian is the oldest branch of Indo-European". Fine. I missed this possibility. Yet, in a family with just two branches - Indo-European and Uralic - one cannot say that one or the ot...

There is no way one contemporary language can be "older" than another. When linguists say that a language was "older" than another, they mean that it was spoken in a more distant past, as in "Proto-Afroasiatic is much older than Proto-Indo-European". When non-linguists speak of "older" languages, th...

Anyway, I'm personally hoping that Indo-Uralic by itself is not true, but rather something like Indo-Ural-Altaic, and at least Indo-European and Uralic are not genetically related except if you go really, really far back in time... long enough for all the Palaeosiberian, Eskimo-Aleut, etc. language...

I am glad that the majority of the SPD membership base voted in favour of the coalition. Sure, such a compromise is not easy to stomach, but if the SPD had blackballed the agreement, they would have made fools of themselves, suffered a grave defeat in new elections, and paved the way for a conservat...

Anyway, I'm personally hoping that Indo-Uralic by itself is not true, but rather something like Indo-Ural-Altaic, and at least Indo-European and Uralic are not genetically related except if you go really, really far back in time... long enough for all the Palaeosiberian, Eskimo-Aleut, etc. language...

KathTheDragon wrote:WeepingElf, you might find this paper interesting.

Yes, this surely is interesting! Thank you for the link!

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...

Most of the lexical resemblances betwen IE and Uralic look like loanwords from PIE into Proto-Uralic. The sound correspondences are such that the Uralic words have those sounds that are closest to the IE sounds, i.e. the expected sound substitutions. This is particularly striking with the vowels, wh...

Starostin's work is not considered valid by most historical linguists.

That's basically Starostin's method: combine the segments of the words from the compared languages into one long string, such that each language just has to delete some of them, and perhaps metathesize some of the remaining ones. That way, you can "prove" any relationship you want, but it has nothin...

An outright coalition of that kind seems unlikely to me, but I could imagine a CDU/CSU minority government that engages in a certain amount of rhetorical warfare with the AfD (and, to a lesser extent, the FDP) over other issues while at the same time happily using their votes to get majorities for ...

Who knows ... I hope and expect that the SPD membership base is reasonable enough to accept the deal. Just think of what happens if they don't: new elections, in which the SPD will go down in flames, and then perhaps a government coalition of CDU/CSU, FDP and AfD ... God beware!

- the Asian componant of na-dene isn't particularly closely related to the asian componant in Ket. The closest connection was to Koryak, then to Saqqaq, THEN to Ket. [the siberian admixture into Ket seems even more divergent from that into everything pacificky, so was probably later]. This may mean...

Breathy-voiced stops are rare . They occur in many languages of India - which all have either inherited or borrowed them from a single language , Sanskrit. Well, strictly speaking, I doubt the breathy voiced consonants in Pali derive from Sanskrit. (You're on safer ground if you claim Old Indic as ...

C'iz ǯirmą romąc'ə bugo lahę ġayęri nə? DIST.SF German Romance bogo language equals.IPFV-A:3SF-P:3SF INT [ˈtsʼiz ˈdʐiɾmã ˈɾomãtsʼə ˈbugo ˈlahɛ̃ ˈʁajɛ̃ɾi nə] Is that a German Romance bogolanguage? Sich. Est nom es "Roman Germanech". Es un projéct vézel. Yes. Its name is "Roman Germanech". It is an o...

Well, similar arguments could be levelled at the traditional reconstruction as well. Breathy-voiced stops are rare . They occur in many languages of India - which all have either inherited or borrowed them from a single language , Sanskrit. They occur in Wu, a Chinese dialect spoken in and around Sh...

jal wrote:

WeepingElf wrote:I am not Travis, but Russian linguists do the same in Caucasian languages.

Mi swel in no Trabis, oba mi sapway dem in tek Saralik fi dis.
I'm also no Travis, but I'm surprised they don't use Cyrillic for this.

Els usentz ést si schreiventz en anglés.
They use this when writing in English.

No so Travis, mas les linguists russes fachentz le meisen en lengs caucasechs.
I am not Travis, but Russian linguists do the same in Caucasian languages.

Just that was my train of thought; but as discussed above, the Germanic and Italic developments can be explained without assuming that the *Dh set was realized differently in NW IE than in Greco-Aryan. That dialectal division is of course not impossible, but the evidence is not all that forceful, an...

Here, Germanic points at voiced fricatives, and so does Italic, which seems to just have devoiced the fricatives in initial position. In medial position, they would have first remained voiced, merging with the voiced stops in Latin, and either devoicing or staying what they are but written with the...

There's this idea of mine I don't know of whether it is of any value, which I have nicknamed the "fricative theory": the breathy-voiced stops originally were voiced fricatives, so we get, with the idea I posted above, nice quadruplets of voiceless and voiced stops and fricatives at each of the place...

Just an enthusiastic amateur here too, WE! But then, these sorts of discussions are enlightening because they bring up problems you don't think of. Sure! And being amateurs. we can research what we want to and don't have to worry about our ideas spoiling our careers. This is the reason why I decide...