Zompist Bboard Again

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 6:03 am Actually, yes you can. The most famous case is Kupwar but there are many others.

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.)

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Tue Sep 01, 2026 4:40 am

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Tue Sep 01, 2026 3:08 am 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 a flexive one (although if Rodríguez Adrados was correct, it would have evolved from an agglutinative one), as well as the AA 1st personal pronoum ˀan-Vk- (Semitic *ˀanāku) would correspond to IE *h₁eg-om 'I', but he qualifies as a crackpot.

I know that blog, and while I wouldn't write him off as a crackpot, I am not convinced, and I don't think IE and AA are meaningfully related, even if IE and at least Semitic seem to share some Neolithic Wanderwörter.

Aside from these and other cultural loanwords, I think there could be some genuine cognates, such as that pronoun and AA *aqʷ- 'water' ~ IE *h₁ēgʷh- ‘to drink’ > Hittite ekumi ‘I drink’, Latin ēbrius ‘drunk’.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 4:27 am

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Tue Sep 01, 2026 4:28 pm Does the AA 1st person pronoun *ˀan-Vk- (Semitic *ˀanāku) have a Mitian counterpart?

It doesn't.

Good.

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 8:11 amIn 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 long-range comparison, mainly because of semantic drift.

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 6:01 am You don't just sprachbund all of your damn grammar

bradrn wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 6:03 am Actually, yes you can. The most famous case is Kupwar but there are many others.

You two are talking at cross-purposes. I think Brilliant-Resource14 meant, 'One doesn't borrow all of ones inflections'. I suspect that this might be false when there isn't very much inflection to begin with. By word count, foreign words can significantly import their plurals, e.g. in English (mostly from Latin, some from Greek, and bits from elsewhere); in actual Welsh, so I gather, from English; Farsi from Arabic; and we have already mentioned adjectival gender distinctions in Coptic (from Greek), a case where there seems to be no native competition; and we even have an alleged gender distinction in English between blond and blonde. Sometimes nouns import not only plurals but also case forms - Latin (especially poetry) shows some of this with respect to Greek, and German with Latin. English has imported a quasi-participle in the shape of -able.

One of the morphs for the Basque 'participle' (-tu) is borrowed from the Latin past participle ending.

There are also a few hybrid languages, where nouns and their inflections come from one language and verbs and there inflections from another. I can see later relexification from one parent reducing the other component to the borrowing of a set of affixes.

Talskubilos wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 1:29 pm IMHO, Swadesh lists are rather useless in long-range comparison, mainly because of semantic drift.

The meanings were originally selected for being universally present rather than having stable, long-lived words, so in a way it is surprising that they function as well as they do. Some are also statistically inconvenient because of correlations. For example, English this is etymologically a compound of that. Whenever I assemble a list for English, I am bothered that there are several word for which the English gloss is not the word I would choose - dull and belly are two examples which immediately come to mind.

What better lists can you suggest for the purpose?

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 2:48 pm What better lists can you suggest for the purpose?

Leipzig-Jakarta is another list, although I'm unsure if it's better than Swadesh.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Sep 01, 2026 4:50 pm And a big problem here is that a sister relationship between AA and Mitian or PIE makes little sense considering the sheer time depth of AA. Mitian or PIE would have to be a daughter of AA.

Or niece! Kin can be hard to recognise.

Richard W wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 2:32 pm I think Brilliant-Resource14 meant, 'One doesn't borrow all of ones inflections'.

I was meaning "you don't just borrow the nominative singular, accusative singular, ablative singular, dual, and* nominative plural inflections across the ENTIRE language"
*originally said "or"

EDIT: also the verbal paradigms are related

me: wait these can't be related, there are phonological issues
Wiktionary: The initial voiced aspirate is left unexplained.
me: ok thanks that doesn't help

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 9:21 am me: wait these can't be related, there are phonological issues
Wiktionary: The initial voiced aspirate is left unexplained.
me: ok thanks that doesn't help

What are you referring to? Without context, there is no way understanding.

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 1:37 pm

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 9:21 am me: wait these can't be related, there are phonological issues
Wiktionary: The initial voiced aspirate is left unexplained.
me: ok thanks that doesn't help

What are you referring to? Without context, there is no way understanding.

Just venting frustrations about trying to do research on something?

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 1:51 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 1:37 pm

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 9:21 am me: wait these can't be related, there are phonological issues
Wiktionary: The initial voiced aspirate is left unexplained.
me: ok thanks that doesn't help

What are you referring to? Without context, there is no way understanding.

Just venting frustrations about trying to do research on something?

Apparently. It would be nice to know which word this vent is about, but on the other hand, it doesn't really matter to me that much which word is being discussed here. (Probably one that was mentioned in this thread, though.)

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 3:36 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 1:51 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 1:37 pm

What are you referring to? Without context, there is no way understanding.

Just venting frustrations about trying to do research on something?

Apparently. It would be nice to know which word this vent is about, but on the other hand, it doesn't really matter to me that much which word is being discussed here. (Probably one that was mentioned in this thread, though.)

it was just a general frustration based on the word for Heart in PII vs. the other branches

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 4:00 pm

WeepingElf wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 3:36 pm

Raphael wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 1:51 pm

Just venting frustrations about trying to do research on something?

Apparently. It would be nice to know which word this vent is about, but on the other hand, it doesn't really matter to me that much which word is being discussed here. (Probably one that was mentioned in this thread, though.)

it was just a general frustration based on the word for Heart in PII vs. the other branches

Thank you for the clarification.

Brilliant-Resource14 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 04, 2026 9:21 am me: wait these can't be related, there are phonological issues
Wiktionary: The initial voiced aspirate is left unexplained.
me: ok thanks that doesn't help

It seems to be one of the brute facts of language evolution - random shifts in the phonation of velars. The mechanics of velar stops make the voicing distinction much subtler in velars (possibly why /g/ can be stably missing from phoneme inventories). There seem to be particularly large sets of such random changes in Romance and Proto-Oceanic (if I remember the Austronesian stage right). Why voiced aspirate? There seems to be something other than mere voicing in the Brugmannian voiced consonants of PIE, possibly by then only phonological.

Thus while PII ȷ́ʰā́rd is not the regular reflex of PIE *ḱerd-, 'heart', it is highly probable that it is the descendant rather than a phonetically similar borrowing. It's not impossible that the word has been influenced by another, but I haven't seen a good suggestion as to what word.

Random variations in idiolects are far from unknown. For unknown reasons, I pronounce tooth as /tʊθ‌/ rather than /tuːθ/; this fits in with the seemingly random shortening of <oo> before dentals. The shortening may have been encouraged by the common compounds toothbrush and toothpaste, but they don't explain why the shortening seems peculiar to me.

Wiktionary, circa 2875 CE: "The intrusive velar stop in the modern reflex 'expresso' is unexplained."

Richard W wrote: ↑Sat Sep 05, 2026 12:31 pm There seem to be particularly large sets of such random changes in Romance and Proto-Oceanic (if I remember the Austronesian stage right).

In the case of Romance, the key examples that stick out to me are Spanish/Portuguese gato, Catalan gat, and Italian gatto, which make little intuitive sense (since initial voicing of fortis stops is not a general feature of Romance languages, voicing of fortis stops generally did not occur in Standard Italian, and it is not inherited from Vulgar Latin as French has chat).

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Sep 07, 2026 1:58 pm

Richard W wrote: ↑Sat Sep 05, 2026 12:31 pm There seem to be particularly large sets of such random changes in Romance and Proto-Oceanic (if I remember the Austronesian stage right).

In the case of Romance, the key examples that stick out to me are Spanish/Portuguese gato, Catalan gat, and Italian gatto, which make little intuitive sense (since initial voicing of fortis stops is not a general feature of Romance languages, voicing of fortis stops generally did not occur in Standard Italian, and it is not inherited from Vulgar Latin as French has chat).

There are a few other examples that I can remember:

• English gulf ultimately from Greek kolp(h)os is another example; Romance languages uniformly show /g/.
• The contrasting English pair cage and gaol; in Romance, the base form has a voiceless consonant and the diminutive (sic) a voiced initial.

Digging around, I found some examples new to me:

C(H)ARAXĀRE ‘carve, scratch’ > ⟨gercer, jarser⟩ ‘scarify, torment, chap’;
(Gaul.) *CAMBO ‘curved’ + ITO- > jante ‘curved pieces of wood, usually six, forming a wheel’s rim’

Clayton G. S. Marr, in A missed regular sound change between Latin and French: velar onset voicing, 2024, documents a regular conditional change of initial /kl/ and /kr/ to /gl/ and /gr/, whence such English forms as grill and grease.

This paper also gives further example of /ka/ > /ga/ in various French dialects, a process usually bled by the palatalisation.

The "cat" word is a known wanderwort, so the rendering of the stop as voiced or unvoiced may reflect something in the (unknown) source language. But the other examples hint at least at a sporadic sound change in Romance. Are there any known Romance varieties that have consistent voicing of initial stops?

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 4:43 am The "cat" word is a known wanderwort, so the rendering of the stop as voiced or unvoiced may reflect something in the (unknown) source language.

In Germanic this word is reflected with a consistant voiceless stop, of course.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Tue Sep 08, 2026 4:43 am But the other examples hint at least at a sporadic sound change in Romance. Are there any known Romance varieties that have consistent voicing of initial stops?

Not as far as I'm aware.