Zompist Bboard Again

I have a Finnish-Japanese dictionary. When I bought two Burmese grammar books at a second-hand bookshop, the owner told me that he had just sold his Russian-Burmese dictionary the day before. Don't know if these combinations are that strange though. A Russian-Burmese dictionary isn't strange, but F...

The biggest problem is IMO not in this three-length system's later decay, or even in its synchronic phonology, it's in getting to it in the first place. I do not know of any precedents of a language where old long vowels, or worse yet just one single old long vowel, end(s) up as "half-long&quo...

About the last point: I'm skeptical. Face and head are very basic terms and not likely to be borrowed at all. Is this something you can back up, or something you believe? In that sentence you wrote, "face" is already a loan ultimately from Latin, which has loaned the word into many Europe...