Zompist Bboard Again

Well, according to Philostorgios, Wulfila translated the entire Bible except for the Books of Kings, since they contained accounts of war and he did not want to inspire the warlike Goths. So there may not have been a need for a word for ‘ape’ to translate that passage after all. What about all the ...

FWIW the Bible has references to apes: For the king had the ships of Tarshish that went with the servants of Hiram. Once every three years, the ships of Tarshish would arrive bearing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks. This means that Gothic would have needed a word for 'ape' no later than the...

What did Germanic languages use before they incorporated that one? Apparently English had hlēapan , modern ‘leap’. Gothic had plinsjan , which is a loan from Proto-Slavic. Looks like the Germanic people weren't good at dancing, liked it better when other peoples did it, and loaned their words for i...

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Sun Jan 04, 2026 2:41 pmSo the correct title would be De Orthographiis Phonemicis.

Arguably, it should be Phonematicis.

Why are the Germanic agentive suffix -er and its Slavic counterpart -ar taken to be borrowings from Latin -arius and not considered that they could be common inheritance from PIE? (e.g. *-ar-) I'm not sure, but a form like *-ar- doesn't look like a plausible PIE suffix with that /a/ in it. Any inst...

I can't get over Arapaho not having any open* vowels. Wikipedia disclaims over 98% of languages have an /a/-type vowel, but even that seems like lowballing it. Is this the analysis, what's going on there? That has always baffled me as well. I wonder if /O/ in Arapahoe actually sounds closer to [A] ...

Does Standard Swedish kyrka reflect direct influence from Byzantine Greek, since ON had kirkja (note the unrounded vowel), itself a loan from OE cirice (Late PWGmc * kirikā ), but Byzantine Greek had κυριακόν ( δόμα )? This is not a specifically Swedish development, there is an old variation in Nor...

Swedish has something like this, at least in the formal written language. The normal word for and is och , but the word samt is also available as a sort of ”higher level” conjunction. It’s not really that och is only used for ”units” (or natural as opposed to accidental combinations) though—it has m...

In 1709, Jonathan Swift published A Tritical Essay Upon the Faculties of the Mind where tritical comes from trite and critical.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2914182

The first thing that comes to mind is that the Old English infinitive ended in /ɑn/ rather than the /æn/ expected from Anglo-Frisian brightening through the influence of this vowel. Do you happen to known of any sources for this idea besides Wikipedia? Unfortunately Wikipedia does not cite any sour...

About Ossetian cases Are Ossetian genitive and dative descended from PIE cases or a separate creation? The dative is certainly a separate creation, there is no PIE dative in *-n . The genitive doesn't look PIE, either. Looking at the table in Wikipedia , I have the impression that all Ossetian case...

I always understood coarticulations as phones with multiple simultaneous articulations at different POA, such as the [kp] and [gb] found in many Niger-Congo languages. I think the term coarticulation is used in multiple, but related, ways. It can refer to the doubly articulated consonants you menti...

The German Civil Code, as a classic example of German over-meticulousness and extreme obsessive-compulsiveness, has more than 2000 sections dealing with all kinds of matters. And because it is so extremely meticulous, among its more than 2000 sections, there are four sections (961, 962, 963, 964) t...

I made a conlang Yorwicks, a descendant of Old Norse that survives to the present day in the Vale of Pickering (maybe some day I'll finish and publish it here). One thing I ultimately noticed is that if you use the right sound changes and grammatical developments you can basically make Yorwicks ind...

Also, see this Language log post, which is from 2012, so not in response to the 2014 monograph per se, but Faarlund’s claims had received some media attention before that. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4351 This extract strikes me as interesting: Parallel but independent innovations in c...

There was some discussion at the time. Here’s a response by Kristin Bech and George Walkden: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nordic-journal-of-linguistics/article/english-is-still-a-west-germanic-language/FFF1593D4EC6A2E7D9671595509F0815 Also, here’s some back-and-forth between Faarlund and ...

This may sound silly, but I am still somewhat confused about how the perfective aspect works. If the perfective marks verbs as completed and considered in their entirety, does that mean it generally implies past occurrence even in languages without grammatical tense marking? What about future-tense...

I myself have noticed that /kw/ and /gw/ for me are [kʷw̥~kʷw] and [kʷw~ɡʷw] respectively for me, i.e. they have a clear semivowel component but the plosive component is also labialized, but this is such a phonetic detail I rarely bother to mark it in transcriptions. That makes sense. A fun exercis...

Speaking of typology, my understanding is that a system with voiced fricatives contrasting with voiced stops but not with voiceless fricatives at the same point of articulation is very rare, although maybe not unattested. This is from WALS: Approximately another third (33.4%) of the languages survey...

You might as well try to say /uu/ and /wu/ are the same. Well, of course they aren’t! However, in narrow transcription, [uu] and [wu] are the same, for precisely the same reason that [ii] and [ji] are the same. I think it's true that there is no well-defined (and generally agreed-upon) language-ind...