Zompist Bboard Again

The answer to your question is quite simple: Northern Scandinavia, whose soils never saw a plow for climatic reasons. AFAIK, the Saami languages are full of loanwords from hunter-gatherer languages. Ah, right. I seem to remember that they retained their ancestral language probably into the common a...

I haven't read through all of the messages in this thread so forgive me if this has been discussed before. It's sort of linguistics, sort of genetics. We know of diverse Paleo-European languages in Southern Europe, but if I had to guess they are probably mostly languages of the Early European Farmer...

Are you sure it isn't different from the spoken English you speak? There are substantial differences between written Standard English and spoken English in practically all English dialects. Nothing I'm particularly consciously aware of -- at the very least, I don't remember having to make any subst...

I'd guess this situation will continue, unless something develops that causes widespread mixing at the global level. As a native English speaker, I'm glad it's not 2500 AD so I don't (yet) have to learn "written English" in school which is different than the spoken English I know and love!

I was wondering recently how the existence of the Internet might influence language change, particularly diversification. Historically, if a language like English were to "suddenly" (over a couple of centuries) expand its speaker base by an order of magnitude or so, one would expect it to ...

I don't think it's Nuxalk because Nuxalk only has /a i o/, unless the vowels are being transcribed more as their surface realizations. Also, at least in the stereotype, Nuxalk is full of obstruent-only runs of consonants and I see none here.

Is it an Algonquian language? It looks a little bit like Mikmaq actually but I'm not sure.

This looks suspiciously like an Aboriginal Australian language (although my knowledge of languages in general is not nearly enough to figure out which one or even which group.)

How would our knowledge of Proto-Germanic be different if we didn't have Gothic? I assume we might be able to reconstruct the original nominative singular ending through runic evidence, but what else might be missing or different?

*bak- "club, peg, stick" is a classic; it seems nobody can ever fully dismiss it despite it stinking like week-old fish because there's no other conclusive explanation for the things it ties together. The semantics are terrible: Germanic *pagilaz (English pail ) is just about defensible a...

There is no reason that *h₃ could not have become voiced in the daughter that spawned Indo-Aryan. For instance, I have heard it posited that ME /x/ may have become voiced in the daughter that spawned StdE in positions where it did not merge with /f/ prior to disappearing altogether. (Of course, tha...

Back when I had just discovered this forum and was reading through the discussion on PIE (and it might have been here or on the old forum), I seem to recall someone hypothesizing that *h 3 was a rhotic rather like the one in English. Does anyone have any unconventional ideas on the pronunciation of ...

I think that the lack of a native etymology for the word for "seven" isn't really that much evidence. Proto-Indo-European is a language with just as much of a complex and layered history as English, and the lack of many (or any?) apparent etymologies for English numerals does not mean the...

Though I'm not sure I follow your line of thought. Surely it's possible that just a single numeral is a loanword? And no native etymology being proposed by such an extensive source and review of the earlier literature surely gives some weight to the notion that *septm is a loanword. I think that th...

What dialect of NAE realizes the rhotic as uvular?

I think "areal kingdoms" in the vein of floristic kingdoms would include: Australia Mainland SEA, including South China Insular SEA Eastern Siberia and Nearctic Western Siberia, Europe, South and Southwest Asia, North Africa Subsaharan Africa Eastern South America Western South America Ea...

It's well understood that tonogenesis in Southeast Asia was probably an areal change. But do we know if it originated in one language family in particular, or did it happen to all involved languages around the same time, before which none of the languages in the region were tonal?

Does a similar sort of argument work for the Proto-Germanic a-stem masculine accusative singular?

I suspect that, even if, through some kind of magic trick or something, we would get a table with accurate numbers of currently spoken languages for each year of the past 30,000 years, it would still be difficult to sum them all up through time, since for that, you'd need some kind of standard for ...

Maybe the peak of language density is somewhere between the neolithic revolution and the bronze age? Just a possibility. This is actually a really interesting question about language density that I hadn't thought of! That sounds roughly reasonable. Although perhaps it occurred in places on the brin...