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…
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…
Followup on my previous overview of comparative Cushitic: a slightly more involved look at Ehret’s Proto-South-Cushitic from 1980, and some readily observable issues in it. To reiterate slightly, his view of South Cushitic includes four basic units: There’s a couple…
Long time no post! Those who have been following me on Tumblr or Twxttxr will know I’ve been recently digging into the history of the Cushitic languages — actually something I’ve wanted to get into for a while now. Here…
(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…
One of the rationality-cluster blogs here on WordPress, Aceso Under Glass, a while ago posted about a concept I find immediately useful: “Butterfly Ideas“. Roughly speaking, hypotheses that need further development, are probably not ripe for serious criticism as they…
Basic research in historical linguistics is mostly done within individual families: we take a swath of attested (in most cases modern) languages, and work towards the past to figure out their development from a common origin, one group at a…
Freelance reconstruction 
Second postscript: Bender on Komuz
Still on the Komuz thread: while looking into work on its western neighbors, I have accidentally run into what must be one of its more recent published defenses: M. Lionel Bender’s “The Limits of Omotic”, from the 1990 collection Omotic…
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