Zompist Bboard Again

In the model of PIU, which I shared here, at least 26 Swadesh roots are shared (there is one that's not on the sheet since I'm at school right now, and I reconstructed that one at school. I can't access the masterdoc at school, so I had to make a copy.) IMHO, Swadesh lists are rather useless in lon...

Hi, folks! I've found recently this website purporting a relationship between AfroAsiatic and IE by Robert Cerantonio. I wrote him some comments (which are "awating moderation", i.e. on a shadow ban) pointing out inconsistences such as AA has a verbal agglutinative morphology while IE has...

You can always look at relating PIE and Afroasiatic (AA) as a prelude to relating Mitian to AA. As someone who is professionally used to work with noisy data (specifically from radar), it saddens me that comparativists can't work with noisy (a.k.a. dodgy) data. Does the AA 1st person pronoun *ˀan-V...

Hi, folks! I've found recently this website purporting a relationship between AfroAsiatic and IE by Robert Cerantonio. I wrote him some comments (which are "awating moderation", i.e. on a shadow ban) pointing out inconsistences such as AA has a verbal agglutinative morphology while IE has ...

Not buying it, especially if Hittite ḫarra- "crush, grind" shows the derivation of "crush soil" > "plough" to be purely internal to Indo-European. Semantically it doesn't fit. Mallory-Adams assign instead to IE *h₂erhₓ- 'to destroy' (Lithuanian ìrti ‘to dissolve, to go...

*h₂erh₃- is likely a Semitic loanword related to agriculture (Neolithic farmers) Not buying it, especially if Hittite ḫarra- "crush, grind" shows the derivation of "crush soil" > "plough" to be purely internal to Indo-European. Semantically it doesn't fit. Mallory-Adam...

Another fruit name is *golostr- , a derivation of IE *ǵʰelh₃- 'green, yellow' (Greek khlōrós ) parallel to Celtic *glast- 'green-blue' and which spread to Ticinese ğüštrún, šištrún 'bilberry ( Vaccinium myrtillus) ' and Sardinian colostri, colóstri(g)u, cóstiu, golosti, bolostru, lóstiu, olosti and...

Thanks to Gemini AI […] I've found another possible match Bahahahahaha! Yeah, you and AI are a match made in heaven, you both like spewing meaningless gibberish. Please, don't compare me to an AI. *ńila is properly Finno-Permic rather than Uralic, since it's not attested in Hungarian, which makes i...

Until you can substantiate loss/gain of initial nasality across multiple lexemes and likewise a gain/loss of voicing of word-internal stops between PIE and PU you are on very shaky ground. We'll see. Thanks to Gemini AI (I must say AIs are quite sloppy at historical liguistics, but sometimes can be...

Do you have established comparanda between IE and Uralic that substantiate loss of initial nasals found in Uralic in comparable IE words, and Uralic *k > IE *g ? This is #1. I'll tell you when I find more. Edit: Or conversely, as it is probably more likely that if there is any connection between IE...

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Jun 04, 2026 3:58 pmWhat is your source linking the Uralic and the IE here (and don't say Starostin, because Starostin is known for shoddy long-distance etymologies)?

It's myself.

(IMHO, PIE likely is a Para-Uralic language modified by a Para-NW-Caucasian substratum.) The only problem with that is that practically all PIE-PU 'cognates' turn out to be loans, and generally from subbranches of IE (such as PII or PGmc) rather than PIE proper. Uralic *nakrV 'cedar nut' ~ IE *agr-...

Luwian has two series of stop phonemes, a 'fortis' series and a 'lenis' series that are thought to have been geminate and non-geminate respectively. But things like phonemic aspiration can change in the process of borrowing -- e.g. English lacks aspirated stop phonemes but has phonetic aspirated st...

Of course, since Catalan gerd has only been attested relatively recently, it could be a shift in meaning from, say, dialectal Basque girda for 'sour cherry' to Catalan gerd 'red raspberry' even if the Basque itself is originally from a Germanic source. That's highly unlikely, because they're also t...

If thálassa is IE then I would look to, say, Luwian, even though there is always the chance that even Luwian got it from a substrate. Why Luwian? Thracian would be a more likely candidate, athough it's a poorly attested language. Spanish guinda has nothing to do with Catalan gerd and the like. If b...

PIE is a theoretical language construct which needs to be analyzed and dissected in order to identify its underlying structure. A position you use to cheerfully throw just about anything reconstructed w.r.t. PIE into the garbage on a whim. Sorry, but I don't do anything of the kind (see for example...

Nostraticists are a fringe minority, and just because they exist does not mean that PIE is invalid by any means. PIE is a theoretical language construct which needs to be analyzed and dissected in order to identify its underlying structure. Um I used your dictionary of choice and found this ... Thi...

Regardless of the imperfect reliability of Wiktionary, in many cases it is much more reliable than wildly throwing about things like 'Eurasiatic' and 'Paleo-European'. As I said before, there're nothing more than useful labels for classifying words, not Frankestein-like entities based on the std PI...

Regardless of the imperfect reliability of Wiktionary, in many cases it is much more reliable than wildly throwing about things like 'Eurasiatic' and 'Paleo-European'. As I said before, there're nothing more than useful labels for classifying words, not Frankestein-like entities based on the std PI...

Turkic loanwords into Ancient Greek are perfectly plausible given the Turkic presence around the Black Sea (and the fact that the Turkic word transparently means 'pear' and has been loaned into other languages around the Black Sea with this meaning such as Chechen, Ossetian, and Ingush), and Gran D...