A question about proto-nostratic's Wikipedia page

[YourFace]

What the hell does "∇" represent? It only shows up in the vocabulary section (and nowhere else, not even the example text), so I have no idea what it represents. Does anyone here know?

[WeepingElf]

It seems to be a cover symbol for an uncertain segment of some sort, but I don't know the details. Russian school Nostratic is full of uncertain segments and many-to-many correspondences, which strongly suggests that the whole thing is bogus.

[YourFace]

It seems to be a cover symbol for an uncertain segment of some sort, but I don't know the details. Russian school Nostratic is full of uncertain segments and many-to-many correspondences, which strongly suggests that the whole thing is bogus.

Thanks.

[Pabappa]

Strange, Ive never seen that before either, I think ∇ is seen as a more socially acceptable variant of V, which stands for "unknown vowel".

An IP user change4d it in 2009:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =295148411

[CatDoom]

I dug up a Proto-Nostratic dictionary a while back which was probably one of the main sources for the Wikipedia page, and it used ∇ rather than V. The edit was probably to bring the orthography in line with what's used in the literature. Note that the Wikipedia page mentions that the listed etymologies are considered "strong"; In the dictionary I found, many if not most of the listed morphemes contained one or more uncertain segments, and some were as vague as "some liquid followed by some vowel."