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It is Latin written in a hand I can hardly read and full of medieval abbreviatures that are hard to decipher (for instance, the word looking like Dõs reads "Dominus"). If you really want to read it, g …

When you want to test mutual intelligibility you need to do experiments with test persons. Note, that the mutual intelligibility is not a symmetric relation, in general there is a difference in the in …

Words die out and become replaced by neologisms at any time. When it happens shortly after a major fork into branches we see only one branch retaining the original word. It is not really uncommon to …

I'd read that double colon sign as "compares to" or (given appropriate context) "is cognate to" or "is analogous to".

On the individual level, there is the well-known phenomenon of Phonetic accommodation when two speakers in a dialogue tend to converge phonetically. I would consider this kind of levelling still as an …

I will tackle the question "How to show this as a sound change". There are several methods available: Study borrowings from Egypt to other languages (Especially the names of rulers and other import …

As you already sketched out, it is a difficult question. Usually (e.g., in the OED) the age of a word in a certain language is defined by its first attestation. This works well for the large part of v …

For the 6th century CE, the answer is a definite no, there weren't any speakers of Celtic languages on the iberian peninsula. The attested inscriptions in Celtiberic and Gallacean end in the 1st cent …

It is mainly the judgement of the compilers of such etymologies. When you read original work by great historical linguists, you will often find some hedging language when they are not sure, or even me …

Old Arabic, the oldest attested form of the Arabic language, evolved on the territory of the Nabatean kingdom comprising parts of the territory of the following modern countries: Egypt (Sinai), Israel …

Spanish shifted Latin /f/ to /h/ but /v/ to /β/, ending up at different points of articulation. The Celtic branch of Indogermanic shifted *p to nothing, but kept b and bh in place.

Interesting question. The shape of pronouns goes further back in time than the methods of historical linguistics reach. There are two major groupings of languages that are not demonstrably related, bu …

Words like cuckoo or зозуля zozúlja are onomatopoetic and thus impossible to tract by historical linguistic methods. Because they are linked to natural sounds (in this case the call of the bird) they …

"Early PIE" refers to the stage before the split of Anatolian and the rest ("late PIE"). I don't think that we really know much about that stage of the proto-language because Anatolian is very diverge …

At least for Romance and Germanic languages, the colour terms seem to be less stable than other parts of the core vocabulary. Examples: Latin flavius and english blue are cognates, but flavius means …