From a Uralicist perspective, one thing that I find goes underappreciated in Indo-European studies is the extensive phonotactic complexity of most IE languages. Certain types of studies on PIE consonant clusters can be found these days in abundance, yes… but…
There are, I think, several things off about the current understanding about the treatment of the consonant clusters *wr and *wj in Proto-Finnic. There are no generally accepted instances of *-wr- in Proto-Uralic (though see below for one proposal), and…
Last fall I blogged about a possible project on charting the distribution of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European terms in the descendants languages. Some discussion on here focused on the likely unreliability of the data, sourced for my initial survey from a conveniently…
My previous example of phonotactic combination analysis was on data that was, despite a few kinks, still largely homogenous. But to showcase how it’s important to have a decent basic hypothesis before going into more fine-grained analysis, here’s a look…
A reply I was writing in the comments to the previous post on laterals and palatals was getting long, and started to require tying in some related issues. So, after some further expansion, y’all’re getting a full post on approaches…
Similar Place Avoidance in language history
An interesting paper I’ve found a couple days ago: Pozdniakov, Konstantin & Segerer, Guillaume (2007). Similar Place Avoidance: A Statistical Universal. In: Linguistic Typology 11:2. The main thesis is relatively simple: most languages of the world disfavor word roots where…
Posted in Commentary, Uncategorized