zompist bboard

Also, even if someone makes a Proto-Indo-Uralic reconstruction, it won't mean that everyone will suddenly see PIU as a real thing. It will probably end up in a situation similar to Proto-Altaic. Yes, it is possible to make some reconstruction, but how much **akwater will it have? Definitely. Just f...

I'm not convinced. I can hear the difference just fine without context. I agree; vokzhen seems mistaken. There are the initial clusters [ʔj] and [ʔw] which exist in various Tai dialects, and contrast with [j] and [w]. Okinawan also has this contrast. The glottal stop isn't otherwise contrastive tho...

Hi guys! After a looong break from conlanging, I am trying to get back into the swing of things, and thought that I should do a bit of work on ARN so that it can at least be useful in the Proto-Ronquian reconstruction. I have added another ~30 words to my incomplete Swadesh list, as well as added th...

For some fairly extreme synchronic metathesis in an underlyingly CV language, check out Rotuman

I think this has been posted before but this article argues for a distinction of t: ~ t in Anatolian, and thus suggesting (something like) *t: ~ *t ~ *t' for Early PIE (PIE1), which is even easier to reconcile with the Proto-Uralic stop system. The Early PIE system would then have developed to *t ~ ...

Wait... τίθημι is a present, not a perfect; its perfect is τέθηκα . Oops again, so is dádhāti apparently. I just blindly grabbed from the wrong section - she doesn't actually cover Greek reduplicated perfects except in passing. And none of this explains very well why Greek would have fixed ι -redup...

Serafín wrote:"and currō 'I run'"

Oops, thanks

Just finished reading a rather long article on reduplication . The first half argues that the reduplicant starts off copying segments from the base towards using fixed segments in the reduplicant. The author then looks specifically at PIE and concludes that the present reduplication in Italo-Celtic,...

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...

Just found this interesting paper on the d ~ h₁ alternation, which it dubs the 'Kortlandt effect' (there's an English abstract at the end) which happens to touch on a few points we have just discussed. In passing it mentions the water root, which it reconstructs as both a singular *wódr, *wéd-n-s 'w...

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 nouns were not stressed acrostaticly, and my theory does still work if we modify the stress shift rule to accomodate it. I gotta say, *w...

Latin ūrīna clearly shows a root *uh₁r-, the zero-grade of what was apparently the old nominative of "water", *wóh₁r̥, where we should not expect to find any zero-grades at all if the root had an inherent Pre-PIE **ā. I haven't seen the root *wóh₁r̥ before, but it looks to be an variant of *wódr̥ w...

This article argues that the Anatolian laryngeal reflex was uvular due to the way it was borrowed into Egyptian and Semiotic - as a uvular fricative rather than a pharyngeal fricative in languages with both, or as a uvular stop rather than a velar stop in languages with both. By extension the autho...

What is the origin of the tocharian's secondary cases? They all appear to be from postpositions attached to the end of the early Proto-Tocharian oblique case which continues the PIE accusative. Someone -- weeping elf, I think -- posted a link to a various of various languages with three voicing/etc...

I think this issue is not just the population size. You find plenty of languages that are robust with only ~1000 speakers near other robust languages with only ~1000 speakers, all crammed into a small area, but in places like New Guinea, California, and Indochina, not in tundra conditions. Again, w...

First, a population of less than "a few tens of thousands" hunter gatherers could potentially speak several languages, even languages of different families. While isolated in glacier-bound Beringia for 5,000 years? Why not? Languages diversify internally all the time and 5000 years is a hell of a l...

Managed to get it done; sent to Atrulfal and Viktor.

Dios mío you guys are quick! I'll try bang it out tonight but otherwise it will have to wait till Monday or Tuesday since I'm busy this weekend.

Geez that's an impressive list Vijay! It's somewhat surprising that there's only one person familiar with Mandarin, and somewhat expected but still disappointing that I won't be practising my Māori :P The lineup still looks good, and there is a decent mix of languages (with a very heavy European bia...

Moi, j'aime la distinction entre 'fewer' et 'less', même si je ne l'utilise pas souvent. En tout cas ce n'est pas complètement arbitraire, car c'est égal à la distinction assez plus vivante entre 'much' et 'many'. I like the distinction between 'fewer' and 'less', even if I don't use it very often....

I'll tentatively put my name in the hat, although I'm fairly busy so I can't commit 100%.

From: French, Spanish, Latin, Italian, Esperanto, Haitian, Māori (long shot)

To: French (my strongest), Spanish, Māori

Vijay wrote:Heheh, couldn't be Mongol because he already said it wasn't Ramu

Ah true! Well I expect a Mongol sample in the near future then.

Mongol? (Not because I think it is, but because it's a funny name)

This is a response to the recent discussion of European geneology in the European Languages before IE thread. I thought it would be more appropriate here. It seems that the Yamna population which were most likely the speakers of PIE were formed from mixing of Northern Eurasian hunter gatherer popula...

I don't have any great big reason to think this. My thinking is mostly in two parts: firstly the question of how the voiceless fricatives get there in the first place. AFAIK all theories of the phonology of PIE place the aspiratae as voiced stops, so a simple lenition to voiced fricatives seems more...