Monthly Archives: November 2019

Native initial clusters in Udmurt

Typological definitions of Uralic [1] just about always note the lack of native word-initial consonant clusters. While the literary standards have their share of IE-derived clusters by now, in rural dialects and the Siberian languages clusterlessness is common enough to

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Posted in Reconstruction

Etymology squib: *äńćä ‘(rasp)berry’

A repeating complaint I run into with the more impressionistic reconstructions found in the UEW is the frequent use of *ŋ as a kind of a deus ex machina phoneme, reconstructed for all sorts of confusing correspondences of nasal consonants.

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Posted in Etymology