Cushitic studies have yet to recover much from the troubles caused by the Somalian civil war, still low-intensity ongoing in the south of the country. This is alas also the more ethnolinguistically diverse part of Somalia (perhaps not only by…
The newest Journal of Language Relationship is recently out: a volume with notably much work on Uralic actually, with Belykh and Savelyev dealing with loanword layers in Permic, and an article from Zaitsev on Proto-Samoyedic vowel sequences, hot on the…
One of the several interesting yet understudied East African languages is Kʼwadza (abbreviated here as Q.), one of the recently extinct South Cushitic ones, the southernmost of the bunch. Unlike a few of its congeners, it seems to have been…
A common meme about glottalic consonants, popularized by its application to the glottalic theory of Proto-Indo-European, claims that if a particular place of articulation would be missing among a series of ejectives, it would be most likely the bilabial /pʼ/.…
One data digitization project I have had proceeding again nicely in the background is the comparative Ob-Ugric corpus, primarily as collected by László Honti in his 1982 book Geschichte des obugrischen Vokalismus. The initial round, covering the reflexes of his…
A standard etymology standing for a century and a half holds that Finnic ⁽*⁾vasara ‘hammer’ is a wholesale loanword from Indo-Iranian, from a forerunner of the Vedic vajra ‘mace, thunderbolt, esp. as a weapon of the god Indra’ (with similar…
Back to Ethiopia again. Or slightly north from there: today I am dumping here several notes on and inspired by the Dahalik language, spoken by a couple thousand people on the Dahlak archipelago off the coast of Eritrea. This might…
Freelance reconstruction 
The Old Hungarian Vowel Shift
Talking with people about the history of Hungarian over the last couple of centuries usually leaves me with the impression that the topic would deserve to be better-known. It’s after all about as well-researched as the history of any modern…
Posted in Commentary, Reconstruction