Zompist Bboard Again

Is it Sinitic?

Question: is the historical phonology on the Proto-Eastern page still up to date? (I'm wondering about the velarization changes...e.g. the PE philology page has *tuli 'breeze' -> ʔuli, but the Obenzayet page shows the (somewhat more expected?) tˠuli. Perhaps this isn't really so much a question abou...

Tangut I started off with the initials trying to do Pinyin, but then ran into the voiced fricatives. I hate apostrophes, so <ng> is /ᵑg/ and <ñ> is /ŋ/, the latter usage attested in Crimean Tatar and Nauruan. <x xh> for /z ʒ/ is semi-influenced by Albanian. The vowels are influenced by the standard...

Rhyme tables aren't the same as rhyme evidence. The earliest Chinese poetry, e.g. in the Shijing (earliest poems from about 1000 BC), had end-rhyme like poetry in modern European languages. The first rhyme dictionary was compiled in the Han period, and survived until at least the mid-Song, but is no...

Old Chinese had an inventory of /a e o i ɨ u/ with some sort of distinction that may have been pharyngealization. Baxter and Sagart reconstruct it for the consonants, except that then you get e.g. a distinction between *q and *qˤ, which seems unlikely. Based on areal features it seems at least plaus...

I'm going to take a crack at this just to try. (Thanks to Risla for suggesting it on Discord as I hadn't previously seen it.) Function words tend to be a single syllable, and we know dots are word boundaries, so let us look at single-syllable glyphs. The ten most common words in English text, in ord...

A cognate to miss- also exists in Massachusetts , though that might not be picked up on. (There's a suburb of Boston called Wuchusett , but it's probably not big enough to qualify in the data). Manhattan looks like it has the -tən morpheme. Probably the Man- would be taken as cognate to the mi- of M...

The only thing that has to happen right before Proto-Germanic is for -s|tV to act phonetically, even if not grammatically, like a single word, in which case you have a phonetic presigmatized stop and Grimm's Law is blocked for a following tenuis. (Compare English stand , not **sthand .) Doesn't expl...

I'm particularly intrigued by a Romance language that looks like English. You'd presumably have serious reduction of the verbal system...[eɪ eɪm, tʰaʊ eɪmz, ɪl eɪm, nu:s eɪməm, wu:s eɪməs, ɪlz eɪmən]? The verbal system is going to collapse from the stress shift, although then again it only half-coll...

There's also the James C. Scott thesis, from Against the Grain (good book review, much quicker to read than the actual book, here ). Scott believes grain-farming civilizations followed, rather than preceded, the concentration of enough state power to tax them: grain is easy to measure and keeps well...

Chongming Wu Libgen has a scan of the standard dialect dictionary of this rather unusual little dialect of Wu (the group that includes Shanghainese). Its phonology is eccentric, to say the least. Initials Plain stops/affricates : /p t ts tɕ k ʔ/ Aspirates : /pʰ tʰ tsʰ tɕʰ kʰ/ Voiced stops/affricate...

There are surely hundreds of these in Sinitic when you take into account colloquial and literary readings of characters across various varieties.

Sure, if you regard "willful ignorance of laryngeals" as interesting. I can't think of any reason to use Pokorny over the LIV.

Modafinil: wow.

Georgian reflects Proto-Kartvelian *q(ʰ) as /x/, while maintaining the ejective /q'/.

I don't know whether we reconstruct aspiration back to PK, though--what are the phonetics in Laz/Svan/Mingrelian?

Note that the American fur trade was driven in large part by falling stocks of furry critters in Scandinavia, Russia and the Baltic that had previously supplied Europe's coats and hats. That hadn't happened yet when Leif Erikson arrived in Newfoundland.

Aren't there some dialects of Jutland Danish that no longer have the common-neuter distinction?

/ć đ ś ź/ are not really phonemic, but represent a Mandarin-style merger of the alveolars (*c *ʒ *s *z) and velars (*k *g *ḫ; velar nasals are unaffected) before front vowels or yod (*y). Is the velar nasal being uniquely unaffected by palatalization attested? Sigh...the Index Diachronica is almost...

Hallow13 and I spent most of yesterday evening fleshing out a revisèd and newly endorsèd sketch for Proto-Kangshuic. Phonologically, Proto-Kangshuic is characterized by a distinction between "type A" and "type B" syllables, the former being unglottalized and the latter glottalize...

I haven't been terribly active on here recently and there's a good reason for that, so here's a bit of a life update. My final year of undergraduate is coming up and now I'm near the end I've realised that serious theoretical linguistics really isn't for me. So I've decided to apply for an MA in La...