zompist bboard

What could I turn voiceless nasals into? Voiceless implosives? Possibly to be followed by these then turning into regular voiced ones. Consider also a chain shift: maybe plain nasals turn to something else (e.g. nasalized fricatives /β̃ ð̃/), while the voiceless nasals turn into new plain nasals. 2...

'Horn' is a rarely loaned core vocabulary item, so other things being equal, it's better to assume only one loaning event rather than two. Is it that rarely loaned? It's a trade good, after all. If you don't trust Swadesh on this, ask the people behind the Leipzig-Jakarta list . As far as I know, "...

What's the reason for assuming direct loaning, rather than loaning from a third family? 'Horn' is a rarely loaned core vocabulary item, so other things being equal, it's better to assume only one loaning event rather than two. I've always assumed that, at a deep enough time level, pre-PIE probably ...

Uralonet (UEW) is great for searching, but their reconstructions are problematic. I'm still wondering what they mean with O-breve and O-breve-umlaut. It's not O breve, it's an OU digraph, and they stand for "some back vowel of unknown quality" and "some front vowel of unknown quality". Compare belo...

That is also the kind of analysis I'm trying to do. First for the vowels and the laryngeal(s), which are simpler but definitely not trivial. Etherman's old thread (http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33695) also contained a lot of useful information for me. Basically: The 'vowel color' of ...

The similarity between PIE *ḱerh₂- 'horn' and PS *qarn- 'horn' seems to have been noticed, but has anyone considered it in depth? Since the PIE word is a possible derivation of *ḱer- 'to grow, increase' maybe we're looking at a PIE borrowing in PS. But then the 'grow, increase' root is also reconst...

Livonian: *h > j between a front vowel and any other vowel, e.g. lejā 'meat' ~ Finnish & Estonian liha.

There is semantic shift (…) Sure, but that doesn't actually help. Semantic shifts are one-by-one with no overarching systematic patterns. (There's some typology to it, but not enough to actually predict what has changed meaning to what when and where.) They only add assumptions to the system of com...

The Ossetian chapter in Compendium Linguarum Iranicarum has a brief outline. On ejectives in particular: 4.2.5.2.2.3 The glottalics (ejectives; p' etc.) have penetrated into Ossetic from the adjacent Caucasian languages. They are frequent in loanwords: I. k'uɨri , D. k'uære "week" < Georg. k'vira "i...

The PIE form is *wódr̥/*wédn̥ which is composed of a root *wed and a r/n stem suffix. PU has a very similar word for water: *wete-. Is it so crazy to think that there may be a relationship? Well, it's not crazy ; they're definitely fodder for a hypothesis that PIE and PU are related. It's one of th...

if we look at the reconstructed Uralic numbers, we find more forms that look eerily alike: PU: *(w)ük(t)i one (w reflected in Mordvinic) PU: *käktä two PU: *witte five PU: *kutte six Some of this "eerie similarity" between these might be not because they come from the diversification of a single ro...

How would I be able to make /ɹ̩/ and /az/ cognates? Boring but straightforward version: /ɹ̩/ < *ɹ̩z > /az/. Can anyone think of any other outcomes for lenited /s/, or any other initial pathways? Especially in a voiced environment? Nganasan has /j/ as the voiced alternant of /s/ (the other pairs are...

I still think an intervening vowel shift is maybe the most likely explanation. Both e > a / _h₂_ and e > o₂ / _h₃_ can be considered pre-PIE changes, since they can be only recovered by internal reconstruction. (There is some evidence that *o₂ was distinct from basic *o, but it's still reflected as ...

Obligatory: labioalveolars such as /n͡m/ in Yélî Dnye. Some polyphthongs I imagine it would be a bit hard to find parallels for: – /oæ/ in Southern Sami (contrasts with /oa/ and /oe/) – /ɶæ/ in Eastern Mansi (contrasts with /æː/, unclear if contrasts with short [ɶ]) – /uːo̯i̯/ in Livonian (contrasts...

/l/ and /r/ are notoriously unstable when it comes to sound changes. [citation needed] Unstable enough to change into something else here and there, sure; but also often quite stable if given the chance. At any rate, /ɫ/ to /ɣ/ doesn't seem that remarkable to me. /ɫ/ to /w/ is common as dirt (Ameri...

Karlgren and Yakhontov reconstruct Old Chinese with phonemic /bʰ/ and a series of voiced aspirates for other places of articulation, but with no phonemic /b/. /bʰ/ but not /b/ is almost assured for at least some variety of Chinese, even if not Old Chinese specifically; even in reconstructions that ...

The term you are looking for might be "active articulator". POA can be broken down in passive and active articulators, although the latter distinction is rarely employed and people can usually make do with naming just the passive articulator ("labial", "dental", "palatal" etc. instead of "bilabial",...

Arzena wrote:Modern Standard Arabic has its fair share of lexical conservatives, which gives interesting neologisms from Arabic's triconsonantal derivation patterns. Some from the top of my head:

dabbāba 'tank' from dabba 'to crawl'

Also known as a chess piece; apparently this used to mean 'siege engine'.

Finnish päivä "day" could be cognate to proto-Indo-European * péh₂ur if we assume that the -r was not part of the stem. I admit that's quite a leap of faith, though, and I was originally planning to connect the PIE word to Finnish tuli , claiming /tw/ > /p/ and /l/~/r/, until I realized that the /r...

Eugene Helimski, in " Early Indo-Uralic lingusitic relationships: real kinship and imagined contacts " claims 9 out of 18 preserved in all branches and out of 23 preserved in all but one, 6 numerals (not matching) and 6 with corresponding IE routes. Ah right, this paper. He's basing this on stats f...

What do the # marks mean? "Approximate reconstruction, details not clear, does not necessarily go back to single common Proto-X at all". If the word for fish was *kola or *kula or maybe küla I'd feel comfortable pairing it with PIE *kʷalos "whale, large fish", but it's not. *a could well have been ...

Of the 20 most conservative Uralic words, as measured by retention within Uralic, 10 have apparently related, well-established Indo-European correspondents. Do they? The best-retained Uralic words, with unambiguous reflexes in every branch, are the following 25: – pronouns: *ku- 'who' , *me- '1PP' ...

I'm working on an extremely isolating language, and I'm trying to find models outside of Chinese and its sphere of influence--there don't seem to be many. A few other big ones are Yoruba and Gbe. Some areas of Indonesia apparently have these: Donohue & Denham (2014), using the data in the World Atl...

I wish to resume here the discussion of the origin of the PIE stop grades we had on the Great PIE Thread and which led me to start this thread. (…) Now if the PIU/Mitian inventory was like Fortescue's Uralo-Siberian one, *t' could have emerged from the affricate *c (this would have to have gone som...

Whoops, sorry, I misphrased that. How is Syriac any closer to Germanic than Armenian is? The first two are at least both IE, the latter seems to be in the wrong direction entirely to look as a carrier of Centum-type loanwords.