zompist bboard

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

I dunno, you could construct some sort of theory about how the Norse at L'Anse aux Meadows and other North American settlements weren't the first Norse folks to show up in the Americas?

I didn't say it'd be a good theory, mind, but I'm sure somebody's come up with it before.

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I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

Are not the remains at L'Anse aux Meadows proof that the Norse originated in North America? Some may dispute this due to the relatively recent age of the houses, but that's laughable! As if those were the oldest ones! The older houses just got destroyed by the Beothuk. Surely their poor relationship with the Beothuk is why the Norse left North America to settle Scandinavia in the first place. I mean think about it...Norse, North America. Norse means north.

Watch this.
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yee

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

has been spammed to the Great Proto-Indo-European Thread recently.

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Allan Bomhard is, to my experience, a pretty nice fellow, and quite grounded despite his prominence in Nostratic studies, though he is rather deeply entrenched in his version of Nostratic, and trying to discuss my own ideas with him wasn't very productive - he always just pointed at this or that chapter of his monograph. Also, he eventually asked to be removed from the mini-discussion group (consisting of just him, Juho Pystynen (Tropylium) and me) I had set up after he had left Nostratic-L, because he felt that Juho's ideas were of poor quality and his knowledge of the relevant literature insufficient.

Bomhard's reason to withdraw from Nostratic-L was, I think, that Arnaud mercilessly picked everything apart and was just plain annoying. Arnaud's ideas are not really as crazy as Octaviano's (at least, he accepts the conventional reconstruction of PIE), but he firmly believes in Hurrian being IE (what about Urartian? he never mentions that), and tends to offend those who contradict him. Recently, there was a fruitless debate on Proto-Uralic vowels between Arnaud and Juho, with some occasional comments from others, but then Arnaud announced taking a break from the discussion, and Nostratic-L fell silent.

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Apparently Irish beatha and Latin vita can be read an pronounced the same. XD

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It was about time I changed this.

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

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The conlanger formerly known as “the conlanger formerly known as Pole, the”.

If we don't study the mistakes of the future we're doomed to repeat them for the first time.

Years ago, I remember being invited to a party at a neighbor's house with my parents. He's Tamil and said something along the lines of "well, all Indian languages come from Sanskrit, right?" which is perhaps ironic given certain political movements in Tamil Nadu in the 70s trying to distance Tamil from Indo-Aryan languages (such as Sanskrit) as much as possible. He and most of the other adult male guests were sitting around the dinner table with my dad and me, and at some point, his daughter happened to stop by, too. I think she's an anthropology major or something, so she said something about how when early hominids migrated from Africa to Southeast Asia, they crossed India on the way. One of the guests talked about a business trip he took to Thailand where he saw statues of Hindu mythological figures and references to the Ramayana. I know this isn't exactly linguistic quackery, but that brought them to the following conclusion: The Neanderthals (yes, the Neanderthals) migrated out of Africa, stopped off in India just to write the Ramayana, and then brought it with them to Southeast Asia.

Speaking of India...

:

"The word 'Indo-European', in my opinion, is mis-nomer. Does 'Indo' to the IE mean that all the IE languages have their origin in Sanskrit? Or, are the IE languages of either 'Indic' or 'European' origin, or of both? Origin of any language can/should be only in one language. Polygenesis of any language is not right."

"Based on irrefutable historical evidences (my emphasis), this book will establish any doubt that there has not yet been any scientific research to support the thesis that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin have same parentage. The Indic and European languages - culturally and historically different and geographically too distanced - can not have linguistically a common parentage."

"Aryan invasion did not happen. It has been mischievously engineered by the British."

"Dravidians are Aryans."

"Extra wide age differences of more than 1,000 years between Sanskrit and the two European languages - Latin and Greek - suggests that it would be too difficult for their mother PIE to secretly disappear and hide without the knowledge of the speahers [sic] of her daughters, particularly her eldest daughter Sanskrit. The literature of Sanskrit - which has been orally transmitted for ten thousand years - would have narrated the sad story of her separation from her mother (PIE) (my emphasis) and two European sisters, Latin and Greek...If the PIE really existed, Sanskrit scriptures would have known at least her name and its some text, as is about the Avestan...this clearly suggests that it is a fabricated story."

+ stuff about Sanskrit "raj" and Latin "rex" (can't reproduce it here)

...and so on. How many quacks/milli-nylands?

Hahahaha wow, all of that sounds all too familiar except the complaint about the saga of PIE.

This made me start going through some of the...stuff written in essays in those books from the National Integration Language Series called "Learn [language name] in 30 Days." Sometimes they start speculating about how exactly one language is related to another: Is language X language Y's mother, daughter, or stubborn but lovely daughter-in-law?

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First known on here as Karero

Very dodgy, and the accompanying pictures are sometimes quite inaccurate (particularly the Amharic and Navajo ones!). Probably harmless folk linguistics, though.

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First known on here as Karero

If I made a video like that, probably all ten languages would be Otomanguean.

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[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

It's funny, you get linguistic quackery in like every direction in an Indian context. Sanskrit is the mother of all languages! But wait a minute, Tamil is older! Nuh-uh, Telugu is just as old because it has a literary history that goes at least as far back as Tamil! Malayalam has literature going back at least 1500 years and is thus a Classical Language of India! (<- Weirdly, this particular claim is actually recognized by the Indian government). Tamil's just bad Malayalam! Malayalam's just the Tamil they speak over the mountains!

Also, I love "The literature of Sanskrit - which has been orally transmitted for ten thousand years..." How would you possibly determine that figure for an oral tradition?

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[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

Formerly known as Primordial Soup

Supporter of use of [ȶ ȡ ȵ ȴ] in transcription

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a 青.

By reading the Wikipedia article on the Rigveda and adding in a 0