Zompist Bboard Again

Languages of the Northwest Coast, but Salish languages in particular. Heavily verb-centric morphosyntax, large phonological inventories, complex morphophonology, and really interesting word-formation with lexical suffixes. Plus, the family is fairly well described compared to most other Indigenous N...

But seriously, I offer that example only as a cautionary tale that these kinds of chance resemblances are very likely, even when the phonetics and semantics match extremely well. Be cautious with cautionary tales. While the wider ramifications of Dene-Caucasian may be wrong, Dene-Caucasian may be u...

Now we're talking!
But seriously, I offer that example only as a cautionary tale that these kinds of chance resemblances are very likely, even when the phonetics and semantics match extremely well.

There is more to be said about the hypothetical PWC *ʁ́Iʷǝƛ̣ʷV 'iron'. Since several authors relate the Hatti language to WC (see, e.g., Ivanov 1985), it seems very tempting to relate *ʁ́Iʷǝƛ̣ʷV to the attested Hatti name for 'iron', χap/walki (with χVw- rendering *ʁ́Iʷ- and -lk- rendering the late...

It'd distance you from the disbelief that automatically greets 'proto-NC', and perhaps even get you some of the sympathy shown towards proto-Pontic. I don't support Colarusso's Pontic, although PIE has some WC loanwords, namely the numeral '2'. There's also a Wanderwort found in Hattic χa-palki , H...

I would note that the Glottalic Theory has ejectives developing into voiced stops in most of IE, so having reconstructed ejectives where one might expect plain voiced stops might not be as weird as it seems. Interestingly this is attested in the Northeast Caucasian family. But this still leaves the...

I just can't imagine a scenario where a language would borrow an alveolar ejective affricate as a palatal glide, or vice versa. I presume it's the ejectivity you're unhappy about. There are quite a few words where Thai has borrowed English /dʒ-/ as /j-/ ( German , jam and jean(s) off the top of my ...

I just can't imagine a scenario where a language would borrow an alveolar ejective affricate as a palatal glide, or vice versa.

Having "the best brain" isn't necessary if you have a useful theory and methodology.

I actually agree that the tree model is an oversimplification (for all language families, not just IE), but I'm not sure I understand the leap from that to "all modern IE languages don't descend from a single ancestral protolanguage".

My understanding is that the Ukrainian/Russian steppe was originally home to Iranian languages, which were then replaced by Turkic languages, then by Slavic. This is an oversimplification, since Gothic, Hungarian, and Mongolian speakers also lived in this area at various points, but the general answ...

As regarding the glottalic theory, I found some interesting correspondences between Starostin's Proto-Caucasian and IE. In addition to *Hnǝ̄-ttsˀwē/*ttsˀwǝ̄-nHē 'reed, cane' ~ IE *nedo- 'reed, rush' and *don- 'reed', there's *ttsˀænɁV 'new' ~ IE *ǵenh 1 - 'to gave birth; to be born'. So "Proto...

I'm not very knowledgeable on IE but I found this paper fascinating. I think he overdoes it a little bit at the end comparing Germanic *wisund 'bison' with OPruss. wissambs’ , Lith. stumbras , Latv. sumbrs, sūbrs and OCS zǫbrь . The possible link between the pre-Germanic and pre-Greek substrates sug...

There's no reason why we shouldn't expect proto-languages to contain loanwords, and I'm not sure why that would invalidate the existence of a single PIE that all IE languages descend from...