Zompist Bboard Again

There's no reason the affricates and fricatives have to undergo the same changes--in many languages' histories, they haven't. If you have newly orphaned /tɕ dʑ/, you could deaffricate them to get new fricatives, or you could e.g. depalatalize them to give /ts dz/. Weirder paths, for example to later...

I think to some extent you're making the classic mistake of assuming that high salaries are somehow the natural state of things and that mass penury is some sort of deviation from the norm. But as Braudel and others have shown, this is incorrect. If you're in a pre-industrial economy (like Banglades...

I would recommend reading Walter Scheidel's Escape from Rome . He makes a pretty convincing case that Rome was a one-off empire whose disintegration was essentially irreversible but sowed the seeds for the modern world. Of course, you're entitled to handwave that, but it's worth reading him just to ...

The USSR was a debt-laden petrostate by 1970, and was arguably felled by the double whammy of falling oil prices from 1980 onwards coupled with Volcker-era interest rates on its Western debt. Neither of these apply to China, which is a net creditor nation whose biggest resource is its manufacturing ...

I think your blog post is good, although I don't see the connection with China. I mean, a non-CCP-led China could go any number of ways. There's a lot of path dependency relating to the specific way you get rid of the CCP. Nothing automatically brings on liberal democracy, or fascism, or socialism,...

*j > lʲ in Slavic is the rule after labials, which is why you get paradigms like люблю, любишь, любит.

On the one hand, I'm very sympathetic to Hong Kong's protest against the Communist Party's totalitarianism. On the other hand, if the Communist Party of China falls, I'm 100% positive that women will regress to their Authentic Traditional Cultural Status within decades: https://www.youtube.com/watc...

For what it's worth, Oto-Manguean is apparently nightmarish to reconstruct You have any sources you can share here? Rensch also reconstructs four tones for Proto-Oto-Manguean.[26] A later revised reconstruction by Terrence Kaufman[27] adds the proto-phonemes */ts/, */θ/, */x/, */xʷ/, */l/, */r/, */...

For what it's worth, Oto-Manguean is apparently nightmarish to reconstruct and the sketch of the proto-language that's been promulgated is very much an initial stab at the problem, so I wouldn't necessarily take that change as gospel. But then, Hopi had *w > l in the neighborhood of *a *o...

How realistic and/or believable would it be for a language to have no /l/, and yet a lateral fricative? Tlingit, Nootka, Chukchi There are also languages with ɮ but no l, like Mongolian; this is also claimed for Dawawa and (in Colarusso's NWC Reader) Adyghe and Kabardian I can report from a seven-m...

Then there would be no nasals left in the language. That would be pretty bizarre for a language with nasalized vowels. VNC > ṼC leaves nasals - it just creates a distribution restriction! Initial, intervocalic, and postconsonantal nasals aren't affected. (Word-final nasals technically aren't affect...

Far as I can tell, verbs' inflectional work can be distributed any number of ways across auxiliary and core verb--the Finnish negative verb, for example, only marks person and number (and the imperative).

Of course, diachrony imposes its own cross-linguistic trends, if not hard-and-fast rules.

Several attestations of intervocalic -l- in Tubatulabal and the Cupan languages derive from PNUA *-t-, with Tubatulabal and Cupan -l- regularly corresponding to -t- in SUA cognates. In addition, a shift of /w/ to /l/ occurred in some Hopi words in the environment of the low vowels /a/ and /ö/ (Voeg...

A dumb question, since I'm sure there's a sketch back in the old Zeeb's archives: can we get a quick phonological sketch so I know what I'm supposed to be reading when I see the language?

I'm not arguing against all regulation or even a majority of regulation. I do think certain sectors of the economy, particularly housing (but also transport and education, and perhaps healthcare in some instances) are mostly on the downward slope of some local maximum of regulatory efficiency, and t...

Even if you don't care about GDP per se, consider the family that pays $3000 a month (36K yearly) in rent in the Bay Area that would be paying, oh, a third of that in the absence of Euclid v. Ambler . That's $24K a year right into their pocket--and more than that, given the lower cost of goods and s...

96 people died in the construction of the Hoover Dam. The death toll during construction of the Big Dig was one. Sure. But like I said, there's a very easy way to bring the death toll of construction to zero: just don't build anything. Or, put another way, there's an obvious and well-intentioned re...

I think there's also a sense in which regulation is implicated in a particularly modern disease, which is the decline of state capacity and the ability of anybody (not just the state, but particularly the state) to build. Here's a selection of projects from the early and mid-20th century: * The Empi...

Modern Greek also does this: αυτός [a'ftos]. I don't know of any examples for syllable-final yod, but there must be some.

[j̃] is also the usual Brazilian and African realization of European Portuguese /ɲ/. Are there other examples of this, perhaps in Spanish, Italian or some variety of Slavic?