I just noted in the previous post that some internal reconstruction of the structure of Koman roots might be a good idea, e.g. for reducing the large stop inventory of maximally five series /p pʰ pʼ b ɓ/ (broadly retained…
Another Africanist sideproject I have around, and have had for a while: bits of further development on the Komuz, i.e. Koman–Gumuz hypothesis. Given newer ongoing documentation, the relationship looks fairly clear to me, and their removal from the Nilo-Saharan macro-hypothesis…
Exposure to the comparative dialectology of Finnish is good for spoiling your expectations: “Here, have dozens of monographs working out the history of individual dialect groups in detail or the history of every dialect in outline, also here’s our six-digit-strong…
(Part ca. 3 of n in my irregularly scheduled series of Introducing Named Soundlaws in Uralic Studies. [0]) The issue, as I see it Most of the vowel correspondences we now think to be regular between Samoyedic and the rest…
I was recently asked on Twitter about the history and subclassification of Finnic. [1] Whipping up a full-length discussion paper or even a polished nice-looking family tree would be more work than I can produce on short notice or on…
In 1907, E. N. Setälä published one of his last comparative linguistic works: [1] “Finnisch-ugrisches pk (~ βk)” (in FUF 6; nominally dated to 1906), on a minor addition to the cluster canon of Proto-Finno-Ugric. This was a follow-up to…
Another word of previously notably unknown etymology recently has a new lead for it: Finnic *sana ‘word’, suggested by one Otso A. Bjartalíð (in a draft that was briefly posted on Academia.edu but seems to be currently down) to have…
There are broadly two commonly seen ways of thinking about progress in science. The first is the “naive” Science Marches On narrative where we have ever-increasing aggregation of solid Results; the archetype is mathematics, where results indeed stay around as…
A recent open access paper by half a dozen Leiden Indo-Europeanists: Palmér, Jakob, Thorsø, van Sluis, Swanenvleugel & Kroonen, “Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’ and the reconstruction of an athematic ḱ-stem” presents a very thorough analysis of various core IE words for medium-sized…
Freelance reconstruction 
Against North Afrasian Palatalization
Despite decent acceptance as a real language family, the state of Afroasiatic reconstruction remains very precarious. Not many basic sound correspondences have been generally accepted, perhaps some trivial ones such as broad stability of the “standard” sonorants *m *n *l…
Posted in Commentary, Reconstruction