zompist bboard

- 16,000BP is not out of the range of reconstruction, so a reconstructed proto-Amerindian may be a possibility. Afro-Asiatic, for instance, is around 10-18,000 years old; Nilo-Saharan seems to at least pre-date agriculture. Nilo-Saharan FWIW is also as dead as the dodo; even Notorious Modern-Day Lu...

jmcd wrote:But how else is Sanskrit tṣ explained?

That's simply from t + ṣ, right (and would be pronounced [t̪ʂ])?

There's independent evidence for *ṣṣ > kṣ from that also //ṣ + s// yields kṣ, e.g. dviṣ- 'to hate' : aorist dvikṣat-.

Vijay wrote:Really? The Northern Pukhto thing? I thought that was just a merger.

They merge in the northeast, but not everywhere. The usual transcription I've seen (no idea if there's an Arabic script solution too) is x̌ for the reflex of *š, x for the reflex of *x.

I learned turkoosi early on and pretty much accepted it as a relatively primary color (at least on the same level as orange and definitely more so than pink); and I've also already years ago moved towards considering cerulean a distinct color from blue; but I never seem to have settled on which of t...

Another potential change would be to mention the likes of Limburgish for an example of pure vowel lngth distinction outwith Finno-Ugric. It's also not even a pure length distinction in most of Hungarian (short /a e/ are [ɒ ɛ], long [iː yː uː] do not effectively contrast with short /i y u/ at all), ...

I knew Turkish was part of Oghuz along with Turkmen and Azeri (and Gagauz, Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Salar...) but didn't know about the dubiousness of "Proto-Oghuz." Thanks! But wow, were these really independent languages for that long? Turkic languages in general are so similar to each other that t...

No, that's exactly why I'm asking. This whole discussion about "proto-Turkish" started with Αυτοβοτα mentioning "proto-Turkish," then I said there doesn't seem to be any such thing as "proto-Turkish," then Xephyr asked what I meant, then I said I can't find anything called "proto-Turkish." If you w...

The development has been *ḱs > *ćš (RUKI + satemization) > *śṣ > *ṣṣ (general lenition/ assimilation) > *tṣ > kṣ (fortition of geminate sibilants). The only rule bleeding satemization in Indo-Iranian that I know of is *Ḱr > *Kr, found also in the other Satem branches and possibly already in PIE ("We...

And yes, I also assume /nn/ in dialectal Tamil is independent from Malayalam. But I'd still think it evolved from an earlier [n̪n̪], which is no longer attested in Tamil, or am I completely wrong about that? Taken in isolation, the order could have been just as well either *nd > *n̪d̪ > *n̪n̪ > nn,...

How does that work, honestly? How is the evidence for a language family sound if you can't identify lexical correspondences, or consistent sound correspondences? I feel like there must be something I'm missing here. Or are you saying we can, and the problem is something else? I'm confused lol. :P E...

I've definitely heard people suggesting that Afro-Asiatic is itself kind of shaky because we don't even know how many of the similarities between Semitic, Chadic, etc. languages are due to centuries of close contact rather than inheritance. From my understanding, the only questionable member of Afr...

Do you have this link? Yes, although I can't access it myself (yet). :D https://www.mediafire.com/?uh25dm3960mky5v Looks promising so far: Let us now make a fresh start by posing the following question: how do the Indo-European languages that formed the so-called "pre-Hellenic substratum" relate to...

There's this set of sound changes in Dravidian languages that I've been wondering about for a while now involving nasals. I'm not even sure what the exact progression of the change was, but I get the impression that it went something like this: *nr > ndr > nd (> nd̪?) > n̪d̪ > n̪n̪ > nn In particul...

Many, many words, ranging from expected spelling pronunciations (/ˈliːəˌpɑrd/, /Θeɪmz/) to L1 prosodic interference (descendant as /ˈdɛsənˌdænt/) to very roundabout analogical mixups with other languages (early as /jɑːrli/, by influence of earl as /jɑːrl/, by influence of Swedish jarl).

This isn's so much a comment on the phonology than the presentation, but: Basic syllable structure: (C1 (C2 (C3))) V (S) (C4) Optional C1 can be any consonant. Optional C2 is only permissible if C1 is a stop, nasal or fricative. If C1 is a stop or nasal, C2 may only be a liquid /ɹ l/. If C1 is a fri...

Serafín wrote:A couple alphabetlangs

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
/aː β t̺s̺ ð ə ɸ ɣ ʔ ɪ x k l m n w͡ɔ p q ʁ s̺ t ʊ ⱱ uː χ iː θ/

or, reordered:
/p t t̺s̺ k q ʔ/ p t c k q h
/ɸ θ s̺ x χ/ f z s j x
/β ð ɣ ʁ/ b d g r
/m n/ m n
/ⱱ l/ v l
/w͡ɔ/ o
/iː aː uː/ y a w
/ɪ ə ʊ/ i e u

- Around 2000BC, Anatolians, another non-PIE branch of AH, move into Anatolia. We don't know where from - they could be Yamna, they could be over the caucasus or from the east, or they could just come from Europe. Let's say Europe, that's neater: if Corded Ware is PIE proper, Anatolian could be spo...

IMO, the coincidences, especially with the morphology, pronouns and numerals, and the initial rhotic fact, warrant a deeper look The "initial rhotic fact" applies to a bit too many languages in Eurasia (at minimum also Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Mongolian, Proto-Tungusic) to count as ...

Avestan has regressive "perithesis" of /j/, but this probably works thru palatalization: Cj > Cʲj > jCj. The same mechanism might be difficult to extend to liquids.

†rd What does the † mean? "Attested but only in an extinct variety" (in this case, Old Persian). Which may seem sort of superfluous since we can call any prior stage of linguistic development technically "extinct", but it can be contrasted with "still attested in the same form from a different desc...

"Except before a vowel".

You're correct, Kath; fixed.

Proto-Indo-European to Sanskrit That can be done in much more detail. Here is a chronologically rearranged version, including some laryngeal theory addenda (a few interpretations are to taste), and several further developments in particular from Masato Kobayashi (2004), Historical Phonology of Old ...

Chiptunes of the day: Treasuria Anthology

Also, what's a good way to split /l/ into /l/ and /r/? IIRC a number of Bantu languages had *l > ɽ before the close-most vowels /i u/, sometimes followed by phonemicization due to ɪ ʊ > i u. Relatedly but in the other direction: Ossetian has *rj > l, Middle Persian has †rd > l. I wonder how this ha...

There's no way (again, iirc) to distinguish between the initiation of voicing because of a preceding glottal stop and the initiation of voicing because it's the beginning of an utterance, unless a glottal stop has other effects like turning the vowel creaky. So if you're trying to hear the differen...