Monthly Archives: October 2014

The rooting of historical linguistics

Posted on Sat 2014-10-18 by sansdomino — Leave a comment

Most of the harder problems in the methodology of historical linguistics seem to come from it being a fairly “high-order” discipline, and a relatively isolated one at that. To an extent, this true of all humanities. With the levels of…

Some sunny words

Posted on Mon 2014-10-13 by sansdomino — 5 Comments

A recent blog post from Christopher Culver brings to my attention an apparent family of Turkic word roots showing irregular variation in form: *künäš ~ *qujaš ‘sun, day, heat’. Aside from the alternation *n ~ *j (for which *ń seems…

Similar Place Avoidance in language history

Posted on Sat 2014-10-11 by sansdomino — 8 Comments

An interesting paper I’ve found a couple days ago: Pozdniakov, Konstantin & Segerer, Guillaume (2007). Similar Place Avoidance: A Statistical Universal. In: Linguistic Typology 11:2. The main thesis is relatively simple: most languages of the world disfavor word roots where…