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…
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…
So here’s the hypothetical (as developed previously). Suppose modern humans have been hanging out at least somewhere around Eurasia already for 100, perhaps 200, maybe as much as 300 millennia, instead of merely 50–70. Should any of our views on…
Out of Africa (OOA) has been the main theory of the origin of modern humans since the mid-20th century. Strictly speaking this is only a theory of anthropology. Since language is a human phenomenon, [1] it has however also sprouted…
A fairly striking typological commonality between the “micro-Altaic” language groups: Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic (Tk, Mg, Tg) is the lack of a labial glide such as /w/. This is clearly out of line among both the world’s languages in general,…
Minor apologies for the clickbait-satire title (I do not actually enumerate any shortcuts in this post), but the arriving summer is making me jocular I guess. :) My current stop on what seems to be turning into an unofficial world…
On a whim, I’ve started to investigate the lexicon of Proto-Tungusic, which the Moscow school of Nostraticists maintain a handy database of (as they do for pretty much all Eurasian language families). I am currently about 10% in, having looked…
A project I am working on and off is compiling lexical parallels that have been proposed in connection to various proposed external relationships of Uralic. Occasionally this kind of work turns up nice new etymological insights. One of the best-retained…
One of the more popular proposals for external relationships of the Uralic family is the Uralo-Yukaghir hypothesis. By certain measures it might even count as the most popular one. The idea has been around for a long while, but in…
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