Zompist Bboard Again

I'm not quite sure how the molecule thing is relevant, because some animals can and do sense infrared without using photosensitive molecules. They have a (much less sensitive) strategy where infrared receptors are activated by the heat of a large number of infrared photons hitting them.

Maybe someone here can point me to the right place. I seem to remember reading on this board an experiment along the lines of people taking a conlang and evolving it forward in time to produce multiple descendant languages, and then other people trying to use these descendant languages to reconstruc...

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Thu Jan 15, 2026 4:50 am
Yes - this is indeed quite obvious.

What I'm trying to get at is that, if 1PL is derived from 1SG, then we cannot argue that Indo-European and Uralic share a 1PL marker -- at best, that Uralic 1PL corresponds to IE 1st person, which is slightly weaker.

Zju wrote: ↑Wed Jan 14, 2026 4:08 pm
PIE has *m in some 1PL verbal suffixes

While we're speculating on proto-languages I have seen it suggested that 1PL suffixes like *-mos are from earlier -m (1st person) + -s (plural).

Oddly enough I use ‘Mississippi’ too, though it may be influenced by my childhood in Canada. An alternative I’m aware of is ‘[number] one thousand’. Even in the USA there are other alternatives. For example, at my (American) grade school, students would count using "one [name of school], two [...

Originally, present participles and adjectives didn't have /N/ but /n/, and nouns had /N/. Merging of the two began early (etymonline says 13th century, Wikpedia mentions Middle English), but I'm not sure whether merging was ever complete in all dialects. It might be what you heard was a dialect th...

Does anyone have any resources on modern English dialects which merge the coda -ing into -in in only some contexts? I was at a phone repair store and heard the employee use -in for words which were verbs and -ing for words which were nominals. I can't remember the sentences he said but "This ph...

I meant for all IE, but it's news to me that it's accepted for Germanic - what's your source for that? I was talking about Cowgill's Law. (Reading the Wikipedia page for it again, it is apparently "controversial but increasingly accepted" so take that as you will.) Then again, reading the...

It has been proposed that the feminine suffix -ix, -icis goes back to -ih 2 - , with so-called laryngeal hardening. That's not a generally accepted proposal (laryngeal hardening isn't a generally accepted phenomenon), but it's not outside the range of ideas taken serious by IE scholars. I thought i...

The Scandinavian transitions listed above don't help much, as the communities will have been Uralic-speaking by the times of the transitions, and probably long before them. Yeah, those dates are definitely too late, but I do recall reading somewhere (although without justification) that the very no...

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 Farme...

For me as an AmE speaker, "route" is always with GOOSE as a verb and is in free variation GOOSE/MOUTH as a noun. I have less free variation for route as a verb than as a noun; with route as a noun GOOSE is an acceptable variation for me (even though I would normally use MOUTH except in na...

For me as an AmE speaker, "route" is always with GOOSE as a verb and is in free variation GOOSE/MOUTH as a noun.

How do people here pronounce "ask" and "asked"? I have /{sk/ and /{st/, respectively. The /k/ is totally elided in the latter. I usually have /sk/ and /skt/. I will note that in speakers I know who elide the /k/, the vowel in "asked" is often slightly lengthened, which...

Generally speaking, when people who use English address each other by their surnames, they also use some kind of formal address ("Mr", "Ms"), or honorific ("Doctor", "Captain", ""Reverend"). Using only the surname seems to be rare. But my impre...

Today at the hardware store the man at the counter suggested that I buy a [dɾɐːw]. I expressed confusion, so he clarified that what he thought I should buy was a [dɾɐːw]. Eventually I just asked him to spell it out, and it clicked — the word he was saying was drill ! Sounds like a Kiwi to me, altho...

"few" can't have /iw/ unless you posit that word-initial NEW is actually /jiw/, because e.g. a useful thing (not *an useful thing ). I would posit in this analysis that the word "useful" starts with /ju-/ instead of /iw-/. This particular aspect of the analysis may be very speci...

I have some ideas about analyzing English high vowels. (I don't remember the formal terms for these, so apologies in advance): some dialects (including my own) have the hire-higher and flour-flower mergers. I wonder if this could be analyzed as underlying /aj/ and /ar/, where both /j/ and /r/ patter...

On that note, does anyone else merge will (when used as a verb) and wool in everyday speech as /wʊl/? Note that I realize them when merged as [wʊː(ː)]. For me, in some unstressed positions will does reduce to /wl̩/, but this is probably underlyingly similar to yours as in my dialect the STRUT, FOOT...

I would add that /ol/ and /ʌl/ in other dialects are realized as /l̩/ in my dialect, although due to influence from East Coast speakers as of late it seems as though /ʌl/ is reverting back in some cases.