zompist bboard

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...

What are the best papers/websites to get acquainted myself with the latest developments and understandings of Proto-Yukaghir and and Proto-Uralic reconstructions and of their last common predecesor?

According to this paper all the words in this wordlist are borrowings, but is it really likely that a lot of basic vocabulary such as 'not', 'eat', 'come', 'breast', 'go', 'die', 'say', 'skin', 'under', 'snow', 'moon', 'mouth', 'suck' etc. are all borrowings? The differentiation of vocabulary in two...

Could the Pregreek substrate be related to the P(B)Sl substrate named as Temematic? It also had a plosive shift.

Has anyone established a connection between *bʰergʰ- to safeguard, to protect; to preserve and *bʰerǵʰ- to rise; high, lofty; hill, mountain ? WIktionary gives one more meaning for the latter - [fortified] elevation - but this is in an etymology section of a germanic word and the fort/castle sense s...

What do people here think of the idea that the reflexive *swe (clitic *se-) and *so, the suppletive nom.sg of *to- "that", could go back to the original third person pronoun? I know that demonstratives quite frequently become thirdpersonal pronouns, but is the opposite even attasted? I can't imagin...

Are retroflex vowels as distinct from rhotacised vowels a thing? As in, the tongue is pulled back, but not curled up.

Is it only me, or does this synthethise only dolphin clicks and whistles?

Yes, Prussian is supposed to have kept the neuter gender, while Eastern Baltic (=Lithuanian and Latvian) turned all neuters into male nouns. So the problem is not the ending -(a)n in Prussian, but whether -o in Slavic is a regular outcome of PIE *-om . According to Kortlandt, PIE *-om changed early...

I honestly can't tell what the argument is about. How do you define language stock? Before the PIE hypothesis existed, Germanic, Romance, Slavi, Indic, etc. were all different stocks. After it, they became one. It'd be useful to define what 'language stock' means first and then judge how many there ...

Also, could anyone tell me whence came the Old Prussian nominative ending *-an or *-n? Old Prussian assaran (meaning lake) corresponds to Lithuanian ežeras (with a circumflex accent on the first syllable,) Polish jezioro, and Russian ozero. The word appears to have originated from Proto-Balto-Slavi...

Where do the voiced clusters in the Greek words hebdomad and ogdoad come from? Im not really expecting anyone to have the answer, since if it was known it'd probably be in the etymology on Wiktionary. Im just idly wondering. If I had to make a guess at it myself, I'd say its probably borrowing from...

When does writing reach West, Central and East Tuysáfa?

I've been thinking of starting my own (semi-)serious research on PIE and or PIU. The first step in any case would be compiling materials and I've been wondering if it's cool to redistribute what I've compiled. As in, if only one IE-ist has reconstructed a paradigm in a certain way and that reconstru...

I am currently working on a dictionary of possible Aquan loanwords in western IE languages. There is still a lot of work to do - I am currently about halfway through Matasović's Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic , and then comes Germanic - but some patterns begin to form which are broadly in ...

According to Wiktionary proto Germanic *bedō (“request, plea”) comes directly from PIE *gʷʰedʰ-eh₂. Since when is *gʷʰ → *b established for PGm? Shouldn't that rather be considered a loan from proto Celtic?

I'm talking about copying from PDF per se, without any modification it looks like this: * ptnéh 2 mi > ‘to spread out’, * skdnéh 2 mi > $ ‘to scatter’), so did such a vowel develop in an initial cluster of the type * h 1 CC- . So, * h 1 CC- yielded * h 1 iCC- > ( CC- . 39 And I have to painstakingly...

That is indeed interesting! It can't be quite that simple, though, due to the likely doublet *dwi- "two" and *h₁wi- "apart" (a preverb). I think the word for twenty is also pretty strong evidence of the alternation within the prefix for two itself. The question is then what was the conditioning fac...

Bulgarian uses five out of its six vowels as standalone words, and the sixth as interjection: /a/ - and, but /ɔ/ - at (archaic); oh! /u/ - in (for animate nouns) /ɛ/ - is (be.3.SG.PRS) /i/ - and /ɤ/ - huh?; well... but there's more: /f/ - in (or /v/, I'm sure it could be analysed as either) /s/ - wi...

Thanks! I'll try to sneak in extra examples (perhaps if I can work out a good way to do footnotes, I don't want to disrupt the flow) I have read Kloekhorst's article, although I sourced the notion of a variant of *wed- with *h₁ from this article . It is of course possible that the o/e ablauting nou...

I doubt *h₁ being a reflex of earlier **f, as all laryngeals have been linked with PU velars. As for the vowels, I subsribe to Kümmel's view that /e o/ were indeed [ɛ ɔ] in late PIE, but come from early PIE /a a:/ and further I think that late PIE /a/ simply comes from early PIE /a/ that never shift...

Do you guys know of any language that has adpositions (and I mean true, particle-like adpositions, not verb-like things), and that allows placing the adpositional phrase before a noun modified by it? That is, such a language would allow things such as, literally, word by word, "of hers a doll" (mea...

Oh man, I should really finish Pyvyy, given how little I have left, and in the recent months I've been getting ideas about redoing my pan-Tuysáfa language family. In the meantime I've been wondering if setting up some DBs would make reconstruction of PR easier.

Accepting Kluge's Law could allow us to rework the etymologies of words which are traced back to PIE morphemes containing /b/ solely because of the perceived Germanic cognates. Still, there are words like "apple" that cannot be explained by Kluge's law. Yes, and in general any Germanic word contain...

Gitxsan has a dorsal plosive inventory of /c kʷ q cʼ kʷʼ qʼ/ with /c cʼ/ being realised as [k kʼ] before /s l/. It's parent language, Proto-Tsimshian, has a dorsal plosive inventory of /k kʷ q qʷ kʼ kʷʼ qʼ qʷʼ/, and while no sound changes were listed, it's rather obvious where palatals came from. A...