Zompist Bboard Again

It seems suspicious that in English, word-initial /ð/ is limited to function words, leaving /θ/ for everything else. I was going to mention English as a shockingly similar parallel, but my googling surprisingly didn't turn up anything on the historical process involved. It does seem that the Englis...

Posting this here because it seems to me that grammatically/morphologically conditioned sound changes can be considered a subset of lexically diffused sound changes, i.e., ones that never spread beyond a particular morphological context. Now, explanations of this type seem to have fallen out of favo...

I'm not 100% sure but I don't think there are any languages that have lost the three-way constrast. Ejectives seem to be quite stable in other Pacific Northwest Coast language families, such as Wakashan and Salishan. For instance, Proto-Wakashan is reconstructed with a voiced-voiceless-ejective dist...

I guess I just meant that I'm not sure how reliable the dating of protolanguages/linguistic diversification is, unless we're talking about protolanguages that have strong evidence of being spoken by a particular archaeological culture (like maybe Yamnaya and PIE). But you could really make the same ...

I find this is a problem when it comes to arguments about the settlement of the Americas as well, where it seems extremely difficult (or maybe impossible) to correlate the lack of genetic diversity with the overwhelming linguistic diversity. Why? Even in the lowest genetic diversity scenario, most ...

I find this is a problem when it comes to arguments about the settlement of the Americas as well, where it seems extremely difficult (or maybe impossible) to correlate the lack of genetic diversity with the overwhelming linguistic diversity.

But then again, how likely is it for glottalised consonants (I’m thinking ejectives here) to become voiceless? They’re on opposite sides of the continuum, after all. Just speculation, but I don't think it's that unlikely from an acoustic point of view. In some languages ejectives are weak and can b...

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 11:22 pm

Zju wrote: ↑Thu Sep 09, 2021 1:20 pm Indeed, all of **Hɑmæ/lV/nV look like arbitrarily constructed words to get the initially desired result. And of course, we can drop and add consonants as much as we want to get from **Hɑmæ to uda.

Isn't it that way reconstructions are made?

No

It's a... vaguely plausible semantic development, which is partly-attested in Japanese — the element 焼く、焼き ( yaku, yaki ) which means "burn, cook, heat up", note 日焼き hiyaki , which can mean "sunburn" and "suntan", and also "discolouring owing to exposure to the su...

Do you assume PIE loaned the N-D word for "warm" and then derived meh2lo- "apple" from it? That's right. What puzzles me is apparently the "laryngeal" underwent metathesis twice , one in EC and other in IE. Maybe because the words are lookalikes and actually don't have...

As with modern IE languages, PIE had a very productive derivational morphology, and its traces are all over its modern-day descendants. So you're basically saying PIE behaves like a conlang, are you? Really confused by what you mean by this, since derivation is a process in all natural languages as...

I know Burushaski báalt "apple, apple tree" is sometimes connected to the IE forms, but this gets us even further away from Western-IE so its probably just a coincidence.

Oh yeah I see now that theres a palatalized alveolar in the word for "slippery". It seems significant that Proto-Mixtecan plain alveolars go to Proto-Amuzgo velarized ones. Do you have any theory about the origin of the palatalized series?

I know nothing about Mixtecan but you've made me want to learn more so I'd say thats a good sign. I'm always interested in learning more about the historical linguistics of indigenous languages of the Americas but I'm much more familiar with the Northwest Coast, so some of my questions here might be...

Well, he didn't quote any forms there, that's what I'm interested in. PNWC (Abkhaz-Adyge) *tˀqˀ w ə '2' -> PIE *dwe-h 3 (u) '2' ( *-h 3 (u) is a dual marker suffix). PNEC (Nakh-Daghestanian) *fimkˀwV 'fist' -> PIE *penk w e '5'. The NEC connection is interesting, but what is the argument that PIE b...

Simply. There's no way the +2000 lexical items reconstructed for "PIE" actually came at once from a single protolanguage. :) I don't follow your logic here. Natural languages have tens of thousands of words. The point with most proto-languages is rather the opposite - we are only able to ...

Apparently *s > n is attested in Arapaho, but I don't know any theories about what the intermediate steps, if any, were. Plains Algonquian languages in general have a ton of really bizarre sound changes. https://www.academia.edu/2107195/The_sound_change_s_n_in_Arapaho Guess I should have just googl...

Apparently *s > n is attested in Arapaho, but I don't know any theories about what the intermediate steps, if any, were. Plains Algonquian languages in general have a ton of really bizarre sound changes.

(and probably Nivkh to the extent that that's possible) Relatedly, does anyone know the state of Dené–Yeniseian? From what I’ve heard it sounds like one of the better-accepted ‘macrofamilies’, but I don’t know how comprehensive the reconstruction is yet. Also we should consider Austro–Tai, though i...

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...