A small definition of a concept. Across the dialectology of various languages we very often find almost the same segment inventory despite various innovations. I call this phenomenon “phonological renormalization”. It seems somewhat mysterious at first: it is hard to…
I recently read “Deconstructing ‘height dissimilation’ in Modern Greek” (Journal of Greek Linguistics 3, 2002) by Julián Méndez Dosuna. I don’t really dabble in Modern Greek dialectology, but this struck me as an interesting paper for its methodology regardless, and…
The standard Finnish word for the buckbean (Menyanthes trifoliata) is raate. This word often appears in overviews of Finnish historical phonology as a supposed example of irregular development of early Finnish *ð. Sure enough, dialect forms like Satakunta rarake, Tavastian…
I happened today upon a small etymological review article “Lat. scrībere in Germanic“, which argues that this is indeed a loanword rather than a cognate, but a relatively early one, already roughly into Proto-West Germanic. This got me thinking about…
In Probing the roots of Samoyedic I note that already the clear fragmentation to separate languages demands a deeper age for Samoyedic than for the other Uralic subgroups. H.-W. Hatting asks in the comments a good argument-sharpening question, and writing my answer…
Loanwords from Germanic and, more recently, Russian have been feeding *f into Finnic for a good while. Today /f/ has been established as a loanword phoneme in most Finnic varieties (including, I think, all of the literary standards), but for…
I find it interesting how modern advances in Uralic historical phonology can occasionally turn out to vindicate old sketchy etymological proposals, dating from the earliest phases of scientific comparison of the word stocks of the Uralic languages. One of these…
Reading old source literature is often dreary kind of work, but it has its occasional rewards: you might find out that some problem you’ve been dwelling on has actually long since received a solution, or at least a sketch to…
Freelance reconstruction 
The origin of the Finnic long vowels: An outline
Continued from my thesis release post, as is perhaps appropriate now that I finally have wrapped up my graduation as well. To make it a bit more convenient for readers, I provide here an English outline of the specific topics…
Posted in Commentary, Reconstruction