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More or less. What led me to the idea was that the "voiced aspirates" as voiced aspirates seem highly improbable given the lack of voiceless aspirates, and that the similarities between Grimm's law and the second Germanic sound shift suggest that they might well have been fricatives. Meanwhile, the...

Anybody want to poke holes in this? Correct me if I'm misunderstanding what you're proposing. But the core idea seems to be that PIE had a nice symmetrical system of four series based on two contrasts: plosive–fricative and voiceless–voiced. In particular, the proposal seems to be that the voiced a...

It is quite famously part of the style of the The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultur ... -diaeresis

How do we know that PIE proper (that is, excluding Hittite and Tocharian) had eight cases and that some of the oblique cases were not innovated independently? Some of the endings in the various branches do not resemble each other that much, the most notable example being the case for bʰ vs. m in da...

To give another non-Australian example, the Adzera language (Austronesian, Papua New Guinea) has /a i u/ without length contrast, tone or nasalization. It does have diphthongs /ai/ and /au/, though: http://www-01.sil.org/pacific/png/pubs/0000026/adzera_opd.pdf Also, maybe some Berber languages? Ther...

It's just I'm seeing some people reporting that, for instance, Swedish uses the same style as English sometimes, but the commas are in the wrong place, and like, I'm gonna have to see photographic proof that they would really be typeset outside the quotation mark in a real book, or if the poster ab...

There is a fairly authoritative style guide for writing Swedish: "Svenska skrivregler" by Språkrådet (The Language Council of Sweden), now part of Institutet för språk och folkminnen (The Institute for Language and Folklore). The recommendations in this guide are mostly followed in practice, at leas...

What about *TK → *TsK → *KTs? Is this shift widely accepted as having occured in PIE? I think the last step is now widely accepted to not have occured already in PIE, since both Anatolian and Tocharian preserve the (presumably original) dental–velar order. As for *TK → *TsK, I don't think it's wide...

Interesting - everybody else seems to disagree! Could you perhaps give some reasoning for this certainty, rather than having it just be your word against theirs? Matasovic, for instance, has the change as *TT>*ss directly, locates it as 'dialectal' PIE, and specifically notes the same change also o...

it could just be foreign-sounding nonsense (is there a term for that sort of conlang-with-only-a-phonology?). Yes. Right, but what I was thinking of is really a special kind of gibberish, namely something that's made to give the impression of being a foreign language (for books, movies, video games...

It's not Greek, says native speakers. There are some discussions in the Youtube comments and on Reddit but apparently the language is still a mystery. Could it be... a conlang, perchance? :) Yes, the idea has definitely crossed my mind. Or maybe not even a true conlang, it could just be foreign-sou...

Zaarin wrote:Somewhat related, Klallam apparently comes from a cluster of /xʷstɬ̕/.

That is a nice cluster! What does /tɬ̕/ (or is it just /ɬ̕/?) represent here? Is it glottalized?

/tl/ > /kl/ is common in colloquial Swedish, at least when they are not obviously separated by a morpheme boundry. The most famous example is the word egentligen . Prescriptivists love to write to newspapers complaining about the /kl/-pronunciation. Another common example is kittla (’to tickle’) or ...

It's not Greek, says native speakers. There are some discussions in the Youtube comments and on Reddit but apparently the language is still a mystery. From what I've been able to find, these languages can be ruled out: English Greek Turkish Italian Spanish Latin Chinese Japanese Hebrew Arabic German...

Still, my question remains then where the geminate l coms from in above words. And I already gave you the answer, it's an assimilation of the following consonant. In Old Norse (and Icelandic to a lesser extent I think), masculine nouns and adjectives with a stem ending in s, r, l and n often gemina...

Geminate l fortifying to /tl/? How does that happen then? It seems like a very counter-intuitive sound change to me. What do you mean by "how" in this case? The sound change /lː/ > /tl̥ ~ tɬ/ doesn't seem strange at all to me. It may have passed through a stage of /l̥ː ~ ɬː/ but I'm not sure. Forti...

I'm not sure how weird this is, so I'll post it here for confirmation. In Menominee , /i̯a/ and /u̯a/ are constrative with /ja/ and /wa/. Are you sure that those are rising diphthongs and not falling , i.e. are you sure that they're /i̯a u̯a/ and not /ia̯ ua̯/? The Wikipedia article doesn't actuall...

Common among conlangers, I think, is T6R : T6R i y u e o a I don't know of any languages where this appears in nature Aikanã , ignoring the nasality distinction. Also, Medieval Greek until the 10th century. No nasal vowels, length distinction or diphthongs, just 6 monophthongs: /i y u e o a/. There...

I tend to agree with Kath; since the laryngeals behave almost nothing at all like *w and *y (except in Greek), representing them as e̯ a̯ o̯ strikes me as a lot more dishonest than depicting them as h-sub-whatever. How is it less honest? In nearly all the IE languages, eh₁ > ē, eh₂ > ā, eh₃ > ō. Ha...

The point is, of course, that such an assumption is, well, an assumption. The h-index notation has the advantage that it doesn't suggest a particular set of phonetic values which may turn out to be wrong. Yes, that's the usual defense, and for me personally it has never seemed a good one. Lots of t...

The original post is somewhat confusing in that it talks about voicing, but I'm going to assume that a pause here means not just lack of voicing but complete lack of airflow (required for "a lack of sound"). I'm by no means an expert but I think their may be a physiological barrier to using "true pa...

That's true... *eǵoH and *eǵHom would in theory have become *ekō and *eką in Proto-Germanic, but the shift from PIE *e to PG *i implies that the entire word was treated as unstressed in pre-Proto-Germanic, so the loss of the second syllable could be an irregular change related to that. Many PG pron...

Are there any cross-linguistic parallels to its ablaut system, for instance? I think Proto-Kartvelian (Proto-South-Caucasian) is reconstructed with a system of ablaut quite similar to PIE. I'm far from an expert on Kartvelian linguistics and I haven't been able to find that much information on Prot...

What, no one says taxin in Sweden? No, I don't think so. I've never encountered it in Sweden (I think) although SAOB actually lists one example of plural taxin from a 1965 Dagens Nyheter. Generally, common nouns with plurals in –n seem to be a found mostly in Finland (and apparently it was consider...

In some northern Swedish dialects the English numeral two is also pronounce two, written most often as to . Compare Swedish två . Funny, in standard Swedish there's a kid's rhyme or used to be one that has preserved a memory of this where två is pronounced as tu . It goes: ett, tu , tre (one, two, ...