Blog Archives

Will Someone Please Reconstruct Proto-Kurdish Already

Posted on Wed 2022-02-09 by sansdomino — 17 Comments

Some things about comparative linguistics you might just take for granted in your own little corner of a particular language family, until you start looking at how they do things in others. In Uralic studies, we’ve known for 200+ years,…

A Fourth Laryngeal in PIE

Posted on Fri 2018-09-28 by sansdomino — 38 Comments

The Proto-Indo-European laryngeals seem to form, in most people’s thinking, a kind of a phonological subsystem. Usually they end up as a class of back fricatives, or at least some kind of weaker back consonants. They certainly have similar diachronic behavior……

The phonetic vagueness of laryngeal theory

Posted on Sun 2016-03-27 by sansdomino — 23 Comments

While I continue to be strictly speaking Not An Indo-Europeanist, I regularly keep reading about comparative Indo-European research just as well. Including not only matters with immediate relevance to Uralic studies, but also the usual controversy honeypots: interpretations of the…