Search found 360 matches

by Richard W
Wed Sep 13, 2017 2:16 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (beta)
Replies: 42
Views: 33501

Re: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (be

I’m not sure if you’re implying that the Semitic system is less stable than Austronesian, but I don’t believe it is at all No, I was just pointing out another triconsonantal system, one that happens to have conserved vowels. : just take a look at the mess Hebrew can make of loanwords in order to sh...
by Richard W
Fri Sep 08, 2017 5:17 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (beta)
Replies: 42
Views: 33501

Re: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (be

I don't get what you're getting at here. What part of PIE's morphology was as profoundly nonconcatenative as, say, Hebrew? PIE was hamstrung by effectively having just one slot for a vowel, samprasarna notwithstanding. It also had the limitation that, like modern Hebrew, it didn't tolerate tolerate...
by Richard W
Tue Sep 05, 2017 5:17 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: European languages before Indo-European
Replies: 812
Views: 193335

Re: European languages before Indo-European

8. Around 3500 BC, the second "Kurgan wave" carries Proto-Anatolian to the eastern parts of the Balkan Peninsula, from whence it later enters Anatolia. That's a bit messy for an Indo-Hittite split into Anatolian and Indo-European. 10. ... Basque holds out in southwestern France and the western Pyre...
by Richard W
Tue Sep 05, 2017 5:06 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (beta)
Replies: 42
Views: 33501

Re: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (be

If by "failed attempt" you mean "developed ablaut but didn't happen to undergo the developments that generalise it" then sure. But "failed attempt" is loaded af for that. I was thinking more of the pattern of CeRC verb roots and, to some extent, CeHC verb roots, which makes PIE seem to have a predo...
by Richard W
Fri Sep 01, 2017 2:32 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (beta)
Replies: 42
Views: 33501

Re: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (be

If by "failed attempt" you mean "developed ablaut but didn't happen to undergo the developments that generalise it" then sure. But "failed attempt" is loaded af for that. I was thinking more of the pattern of CeRC verb roots and, to some extent, CeHC verb roots, which makes PIE seem to have a predo...
by Richard W
Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:26 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448663

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Except ... what's with the -g in peg? If it was really *bak-, *baḱ- in PIE, shouldn't Grimm's Law have made it *pah- in Proto-Germanic, resulting in something along the lines of paugh in modern English? Verner's Law is the easy answer in my mind. The tonal accent was presumably originally on the ca...
by Richard W
Tue Aug 29, 2017 1:13 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79169

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

16) *ne 'not' The negative particle in Permic / Ugric seems to have too big of a risk of also being a loan. I don't claim that all these apparent cognates are indeed cognates - the truth in individual cases may be impossible to establish. I thought Thai วาฬ /wa:n/ 'whale, dolphin' (the /n/ is spelt...
by Richard W
Sun Aug 27, 2017 5:40 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79169

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

(This is not intended as a serious cognacy proposal, but rather as a warning against this sort of comparison. Such similarities, especially in such a limited array of words, are not very suggestive) Which is why decent word list comparisons attempt to limit the number of random matches. Straight Sw...
by Richard W
Sat Aug 26, 2017 7:18 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (beta)
Replies: 42
Views: 33501

Re: Tutorial: Making a Realistic Triconsonantal Language (be

This idea came to me when I was trying to sleep, so it probably isn't the greatest ever, but: how about showing an example of a triconsonantal conlang derived from (a necessarily tweaked version of) PIE, or something like Latin? The end result won't look much like the extant Indo-European languages...
by Richard W
Sat Aug 26, 2017 2:09 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79169

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Also, let's assemble a similar list on the IE side. How many of those will find good Uralic counterparts? Mallory & Adams give 15 words found in "all major IE groups" (— counting Baltic separately from Slavic and Iranian separately from Indic, but that doesn't seem to affect the big picture). Their...
by Richard W
Thu Aug 24, 2017 7:56 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79169

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

Richard W wrote:*mi(kä) ‘which’ (coɡnate with PIE *mo- - what's this?)
OK, tracked it down. Hittite masi 'how much?' and Tocharian mänt 'how?' and, possibly, Breton ma, may ‘that‘.
by Richard W
Thu Aug 24, 2017 10:06 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79169

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

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' ...
by Richard W
Tue Aug 22, 2017 3:15 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...
Replies: 217
Views: 79169

Re: Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Mitian, ...

(seriously, Indo-Uraliac is speculative enough!) There's damned good evidence for the reality of Indo-Uralic. I don't have the details to hand, and I may have misremembered the numbers, but the argument is: Of the 20 most conservative Uralic words, as measured by retention within Uralic, 10 have ap...
by Richard W
Tue Aug 22, 2017 11:40 am
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448663

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Early PIE didnt just have labiovelar stops, it also had rounded bilabials and rounded coronals. These arose through a process of dissociation where previously existing rounded vowels spread their roundedness onto surrounding consonants, as has happened in Micronesian, Aranta, and probably the Cauca...
by Richard W
Thu Jul 06, 2017 9:10 pm
Forum: None of the above
Topic: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election
Replies: 323
Views: 93483

Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

This is true: I think the only thing is that a citizen of a country that's a member of the EU (with the exception of the exceptionally-complicated UK situation and the different degrees of citizenship) is an EU citizen, and I would like to say the EU recommends for naturalization a period of reside...
by Richard W
Sun Jul 02, 2017 6:44 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448663

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Yes, in English, where "them" had become the dominant form of the demonstrative adjective almost everywhere by around 1900 - although it's since retreated in prestige dialects in Britain, and I gather also in the US. It sems strange that this is from the 3rd person pronoun rather than a survival of...
by Richard W
Thu Jun 01, 2017 11:18 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Indo-Pacific language family
Replies: 32
Views: 8237

Re: Indo-Pacific language family

Well, no, that's not the weird part about Dravidian languages! They just have a bunch of features that aren't all that common in Eurasia (or sometimes elsewhere), I guess, like a whole bunch of retroflexes and anywhere from eleven phonemic fricatives (Toda) to none at all (some varieties of Tamil)....
by Richard W
Thu Apr 20, 2017 2:32 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Sound Change Quickie Thread
Replies: 2827
Views: 614059

Re: Sound Change Quickie Thread

Is a regular and unconditional change of voiced to voiceless aspirated stops reported to have happened? Yes. The best known example is the Thai and Lao regional change. The change is that the voicing contrast becomes modal voice v. breathy voice, and breathiness on stops was reinterpreted as aspira...
by Richard W
Sat Apr 01, 2017 7:53 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Other planets' orbits? (A conastrology question)
Replies: 16
Views: 5687

Re: Other planets' orbits? (A conastrology question)

The wonder of a solar eclipse is that, the night before when the sky was dark, you were seeing for example, the summer stars (because at that point, you were facing away from the Sun and looking at the stars for example to the galactic west of the Sun. A few hours later, as the planet rotates and t...
by Richard W
Wed Mar 29, 2017 6:45 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: Questions about Japanese
Replies: 34
Views: 13011

Re: Questions about Japanese

Thank you for all the answers. However, in my onbin question, I wasn't asking about the actual processes. I wanted to know if there were any other natlangs which have a set of "sound changes" that only apply during verbal inflection (or maybe any kind of inflection--Japanese just has inflection in ...
by Richard W
Sun Mar 26, 2017 4:57 am
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Sound Change Quickie Thread
Replies: 2827
Views: 614059

Re: Sound Change Quickie Thread

{[w] [j]} → [h] / C_ No justification in general, but historically Latin to Spanish has gone half-way along tj > th. Affrication of /tw/ is known from Greek. I'll go one further, that looks plausible to me just on its face. I'm pretty sure I've at least seen *j → h before. *j → h is Greek. However,...
by Richard W
Sat Mar 25, 2017 7:33 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Sound Change Quickie Thread
Replies: 2827
Views: 614059

Re: Sound Change Quickie Thread

Click wrote:{[w] [j]} → [h] / C_
No justification in general, but historically Latin to Spanish has gone half-way along tj > th. Affrication of /tw/ is known from Greek.
Click wrote:Vj Vw → jV wV
It's awfully like Gandhari metathesis Vr > rV, so I think it might happen.
by Richard W
Sat Mar 25, 2017 7:14 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Fenja orthography: An abugida with different inherent vowels
Replies: 7
Views: 3544

Re: Fenja orthography: An abugida with different inherent vo

They arose as an adaptation of another language's syllabic characters, with each consonant having the inherent vowel of the syllabic character it was adapted from. Thus, in the early syllabary <TA> would have represented /ta/, whereas in its use as a consonant glyph in Fenja it represented /tˠ/ wit...
by Richard W
Fri Mar 10, 2017 7:46 pm
Forum: Conlangery & Conworlds
Topic: Fenja orthography: An abugida with different inherent vowels
Replies: 7
Views: 3544

Re: Fenja orthography: An abugida with different inherent vo

Any thoughts on possibly introducing characters with an inherent /u/ (or |U| in Undreve) for the consonants that don't have phonemic labialization? Well, I suppose you could do it with a system modelled on Persian cuneiform. In world, you could take the precedent of Tamil, and allow <PA.U> to becom...
by Richard W
Thu Mar 09, 2017 6:46 pm
Forum: Languages & Linguistics
Topic: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread
Replies: 2225
Views: 448663

Re: The Great Proto-Indo-European Thread

Where does Tocharian fit in the centum–satem division ? The notion that satem is a sound shift that spread over a group of adjacent dialects or languages seems to work quite well. The short answer to the question seems to be 'before it' - Tocharian seems to have split off from the other non-Anatoli...