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There are dialects of Armenian with breathy voice? No way! :o I don't know about Eastern Armenian dialects (though I seem to remember reading somewhere that in some of them, the voiced stops were breathy-voiced), but in Western Armenian, the Old Armenian voiced stops merged into the aspirated ones,...

Something more on the "Basque problem". It seems as if I had misunderstood something in the news about Neolithic origins of the Basques. This Wikipedia page says that the Atapuerca skeletons whose DNA was compared to modern Basques are from the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age ("These individuals ...

Mallory and Adams list a few dozen words with *h4 - not many, but clearly not marginal, and as you surely know, the whole plain velar series is the least common of the three. The punctus saliens in this discussion, I think, is whether PIE *o was rounded or not - and I am not aware of any academic In...

*h₄ is pretty ad-hoc as well, since it only finds support in Anatolian, but even that support can be explained away. I thought that way for a long time as well - I have been aware of this proposal for years, but thought the evidence would be too tenuous. Until I realized that it seems to help solvi...

2. The token frequencies seem to be wrong: one would expect *h1 to be the most common and *h2 the rarest. But *h2 is even more common than *h1! There's a blindingly simple solution to this: match up *h₂ with the front-velar series instead of the back-velar series. Of course, that leaves *h₁ danglin...

One way out of this conundrum would be to posit a fifth laryngeal, namely a labialized pharyngeal fricative, which colours *e to *o and is preserved in Hittite, while the labiovelar fricative is lost as I said above, but this seems quite ad hoc to me. There are probably better solutions, but I know ...

On the other hand, it may be that the Šrdš fared like the Franks in Gaul, or the Turkic Bulgars on the Balkan - they conquered the land, gave it their name, but lost their language. Well, as a minimum at least once - presumably, the didn't speak a Romance language before the Romans conquered them (...

Howl wrote:There is one issue with this. Initial h₃e is assumed to preserved as 'ha' in Hittite.
For example: 'hastai' bone from h₃estoi and 'haran' eagle from h₃eron.

Yes, there are some instances where a *h3 is preserved in Hittite. I don't know yet what to make of that.

Reading The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European ... by Mallory & Adams made me think again about the PIE laryngeals. My starting point was the popular idea that the three laryngeals were just the fricative members of the three velar series. There are, though, a few problems with it: 1. If the...

What speaks for the Cardial hypothesis is further that the ancient toponymy of Sardinia seems to show affinity to Iberian and Basque. And isn't Sardinia considered almost purely Cardial? Yet, the very name of the island is reminiscent of Šrdš , the name of one of the "Sea Peoples" in Egyptian chroni...

What I posted was an attempt at a synthesis of various secondary sources I found on the Web, and apparently, I got some things wrong. The primary sources (geneticits's research papers) are, as I said earlier, too difficult for me, and the secondary sources are often imprecise, obsolete and sometime...

It seems as if LBK originated in Anatolia and Cardial in the Levant. Citation? Because what I've gathered - as mentioned above - is that both came from Anatolia; we can deduce this because a) they are very similar, and b) they both have WHG genes right from the beginning, which were present in Anat...

It seems as if LBK originated in Anatolia and Cardial in the Levant. The languages may have been unrelated; there seem to have been lots of small units in the Near East before Semitic and Indo-European took over (we have Hattic, Hurrian-Urartian, Sumerian, Elamite, all unrelated to each other or to ...

To get back to the main subject - European Homo sapiens languages before Indo-European - I am trying to find out whether the Neolithicization of the British Isles was demic or not. Wikipedia and Eupedia seem to say "yes", but things do not seem to be all that clear, and these sources may be out of d...

I don't think translating names of mythological beings by mapping them onto beings of a different mythological tradition works well, at least not in general. Much less so with beings that are the invention of a specific author. Tolkien's Elves are based on a specifically Germanic mythological concep...

There isn't really any good way out of this for the SPD - if they enter a coalition, they may well lose half their voters, but if they don't, they may well lose the other half. Yes, they are somewhere between Scylla and Charybdis. Their basic problem, of course, is that they never really managed to...

Nevermind. I thought they did some agreement for a stable government shortly before they got banned. If that's not true, I'm very sorry for spreading such terrible misinformation. The Nazis had an agreement with the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP), which was a less extreme right-wing party. Not...

The SPD never formed a coalition with the Nazis!

My CD collection is just sorted alphabetically by artist name, and chronologically within the same artist. No heed of genre; I do not even distinguish between "classical" and "popular" when I sort my CDs. (This even though I have some fondness of genre classifications - but I know that the boundarie...

It is indeed quite likely that the speakers of PIE were the ones who domesticated the horse which gave them a military advantage over their neighbours, but domesticated horses do not make them Mongol-like nomads. There are plenty of cultures who have domesticated horses and are nothing like Mongols....

The notion of PIE speakers being Mongol-like nomadic steppe horsemen is a strawman the proponents of the Anatolian hypothesis and of Paleolithic Continuity like to whack. Nobody believes in this anymore.

Is there a specific reason articulation of combinations like [pɹ] as an affricate is judged to be impossible while /d͡ɹ̝/ is considered an affricate? In an affricate, both components are homorganic , i.e. produced by the same articulator. [pɹ] combines a labial with an alveolar sound, thus no affri...

Apparently, the Basques are genetic descendants of Neolithic farmers , which probably also means that their language belongs to a stock spread during the "Neolithic Revolution". Thus Basque would in my model neither be a Paleo-Mediterranean nor a Paleo-Atlantic language but a Neolithic Mediterranean...

It's not the morpheme boundary. Forms like Frauchen are strictly speaking not correct because the diminutive suffix -chen triggers umlaut (as in forms like Mäuschen or Schlösschen from Maus and Schloss , respectively). So the correct form would be Fräuchen , though I never heard that one, and Frauc...

Well, it's wrong. Maybe they based the transcription on the Yiddish pronunciation? As a native speaker of German, I can confirm that it is wrong. In Yiddish, it would be right, though, because Yiddish always has [x] and never [ç]. But of course, Eichmann is not a Yiddish name! I know the general ru...