Zompist Bboard Again

The Machtergreifung happened almost as soon as Hitler assumed power, and the signs of what he really stood for were obvious, such as Jews being ejected from all public positions (including academic positions) and so on. Yet Trump had four years to do that, and while he has been responsible for some...

... which is why the distinction between it and fascism has narrowed. Yet at the same time we do not really see the totalitarian aspects of fascism manifesting in GOP-dominated areas of the US, and there is more to fascism than just racism and plain authoritarianism alone. ... You are really splitt...

This is a stupid discussion. The thing about German nazism is that we only know how bad it was in hindsight. And only because the allies won the war. Between the Native American Genocide, Slavery and Jim Crow, US history was just as despicable. The current GQP is not only racist, but clearly also au...

bind ~ bindle ~ bend ~ band ~ bond ~ bound ~ bundle (PIE *bʰendʰ 'to bind, to tie') fly ~ flew ~ flee ~ fled ~ flow ~ flood ~ fowl (PIE *plew 'to fly, to flow, to run') grow ~ grew ~ grey ~ green ~ grass ~ graze (PIE *greh₁ 'to grow, become green') live ~ life ~ leave ~ left ~ lave (PIE *leip 'to re...

which is actually pretty plausible, if you assume a Semitic Urheimat in the Levant. And if, as says my friend who's a speaker of Tigrinya and who I trust to have a better grasp of how Afrosemitic forces a reconsideration of all the "facts" about Semitic than anyone else I know, we assume ...

(I have also noticed that Uralicists tend to be more accepting of Indo-Uralic than Indo-Europeanists; this perhaps has to do with the fact that most Uralicists know some IE languages and have noticed the similarities, while most Indo-Europeanists know no Uralic languages and aren't aware just how s...

That said, I think that Holzer's etymologies are bogus and "Temematic" never existed. I'm reading Matasovic paper on Balto-Slavic substratum words (the one refuting Holzer's Temematic). The usual strategy is presenting alternative etymologies using loose semantics. But that does not work ...

I'm in/near the biggest COVID-19 outbreak area in the Netherlands. That was caused by partying in crowded bars for the traditional carnival celebration with some infected people who just got back from a holiday in Italy. The government here has finally implemented some appropriate measures, but it w...

If the protolanguage phoneme inventory is larger than any of the daughters', there is IMHO probably something wrong with it Correct, that's what I also think is the clearest problem with Moscow School-type reconstructions. There are 131 different main consonant correspondences asserted, and then 57...

About a dozen of Bomhard's proto-consonants are only based on the evidence of one branch; a few of these are nominally continued in a larger number, but in practice the overlap between their evidence is too small to make any difference. – alveolar vs. postalveolar sibilants *cʰ, *cʼ, *dz, *s | *čʰ,...

I have done some research and there is not much within PIE to support this idea. The exceptions to Brugmann's law in e/o ablauting stems can be explained by generalization of the e-grade forms. There is also Cowgill's law in Greek with a handful of examples and many more counterexamples. Miguel Carr...

Perhaps there were different vowels *o₁ (~ø), *o₂ (~e) and maybe even o₃ (~é) that merged into PIE *o but with different weak grades. Something like that might also be able to explain the exceptions to Brugmann's law with PIE *o₁= Indo-Iranian *ā but PIE *o₂= Indo-Iranian *a.

The problem with ablaut in PIE is that even in the oldest attested languages there was a lot of leveling and innovation. So we end up with lots of different patterns and we can't really tell which ones are archaic and which not. So everybody just reconstructs the ablaut patterns they want to reconst...

Thanks for the presentation! It does miss a lot of context for someone like me who is not initiated into Basque linguistics. But looking at the 7. “Semantic lumping”: Category 1, Possible *baso 'wild, uncultivated' *bʰos-o- 'naked' The adjective *bʰosos is only attested in Germanic ('bare'), Balto-S...

I have been entertaining, for some time, the idea that there was a split of a single grade of stops, corresponding to the single stop grade of Proto-Uralic, into the two grades that we now know as "voiceless" and "voiced-aspirated" due to some sort of prosodic feature that bound...

I don't think anybody believes *h₁egʷʰ- is related to the above, though. Laryngeals don't mutate into each other, and there's no reconstructible *T~*Dʰ alternation either. On the other hand, I came across this paper quite a while back, which presents an entirely other line of analysis, taking "...

In Latin, all the correlative pronouns for motion-towards look like ablatives. Does anyone know how that came about? Are these, somehow, maybe remnants of the Indo-European instrumental? I'm talking about quō 'where to?', aliquō/quōquam/quōpiam 'to some place', eō 'to there', eōdem 'to the same pla...

By the way, three days ago I presented a co-authored preliminary (negative) review of Blevin's hypothesis in this workshop: http://www.fontes50.es/en/workshop-9-the-study-of-the-history-of-basque-can-be-an-example-to-the-study-of-other-isolated-languages-and-we-hadnt-realised-it The URL has a summa...

I read the post but I am sticking with my own idea because I don't think p>bh is likely. Well, we can't take the Late PIE phonetic values at face value for this. Obviously, we are dealing with an old pattern that harks back to a time when the three stop grades had different phonetic values. I also ...

Besides Grassman's law, is there any other linguistic reason to suppose Graeco-Aryan? (Yes, I know that it's a terrible argument) The augment and basically the whole verbal system. Also aspirated reflexes of the Dʰ stop series (which is what triggered Grassman's law). But in Greek the deaspirated *...