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Unanswered Questions

89 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
8 votes
0 answers
220 views

Historical pronunciation of Hindi यह and वह

The Hindi 3rd person singular proximal and distal pronouns यह and वह are commonly pronounced [jeː] and [ʋoː], in contrast to the [hyper-correct?] pronunciations [jəɦ(ə)] and [ʋəɦ(ə)] one might expect ...
8 votes
1 answer
2k views

Agglutination in Proto-Indo-European

Based on numerous sources, it seems clear that Proto-Indo-European was Productively agglutinative with non-root morphemes (and perhaps some specific roots that are also able to act like bound ...
7 votes
0 answers
204 views

Northumbrian pronunciation of ge-/gi- prefix and -g suffix

I'm working on a musical setting of Cædmon's Hymn, and I'd like to have the primary setting be in the Northumbrian dialect of its earliest written example (the 737 "Moore" Bede manuscript). I'm ...
5 votes
0 answers
448 views

Cellar door and Indo-European languages

Where I grew up (UK) there was a pub called The Drysalters. I always liked this name without having any idea what a drysalter was, or having any association or emotional connection to the pub itself. ...
5 votes
0 answers
217 views

Is there a prohibition on stems starting with /g/ in PIE?

Is there a law that prohibits PIE stems starting with what traditionally reconstructed as non-palatal /g/? So far I encountered with only one stem that the sources consistently reconstruct with this ...
4 votes
0 answers
99 views

Does California vowel shift occur in bilingual Spanish speakers?

I know that recently there has been a lot of research done on the California vowel shift being a key part of a California accent for younger kids who have grown up there. Knowing that there is a ...
4 votes
0 answers
633 views

PIE Aspect: (Im)perfective or (Non-)progressive?

According to Wikipedia Proto-Indo-European had four tense-aspects, the first being stative and the latter three being eventive: stative aspect, perfective aspect, and past and present tense of ...
4 votes
1 answer
304 views

Loans in Indo-Aryan languages indicating possible migration routes

I am aware of only few Uralic loans into Indo-Aryan languages that show migrations from Eurasia to India, Iran etc. What are typical examples of loan words that are unquestionably a result of a ...
3 votes
0 answers
87 views

Etymology of Persian suffix 'ـش-' (-eš)?

This suffix equivalent to English '-tion' or '-ment' occurs in many Persian words such as ستایش (setâyeš, "glory"), etc. But its ultimate etymology cannot be found anywhere. Wiktionary stops ...
3 votes
0 answers
99 views

Can you provide a cheat-sheet for turning Proto-Indo-European dictionaries from the older style into laryngeal notation?

Much of the resources I have for Proto-Indo-European itself (not etymological dictionaries for other languages) either use Laryngeal notation but are limited in scope (like Wiktionary) or are written ...
3 votes
0 answers
107 views

Was there a tendency of Indo-European languages to avoid syntactical ambiguity by introducing more complex morphology?

In (Peškovskij, 1914, p. 246) I stumbled upon the following (Russian) assertion: Opisannoe vytesnenie predikativnogo imenitel'nogo tvoritel'nym možno rassmatrivat' kak častnyj slučaj obščego ...
3 votes
0 answers
123 views

Can a trill be creaky?

Or in other words, is it possible to pronounce [ʙ̰], [r̰], [ʀ̰], or [ʢ̰]? I tried to pronounce these phones by myself, and I always failed. It seems the airstream from the constricted glottis cannot ...
3 votes
0 answers
187 views

Are Russian words пять (five), пясть (fist), пятка (heel) related? What about English "fist"?

I wonder whether the PIE word for five in fact meant "fist", in other words, when people counted, they closed their fingers and when they obtained the closed fist, it was "five"? ...
3 votes
0 answers
84 views

Is there any IPA TTS software that also considers tone

I want to create audio files for a conlect of Chinese I am studying, and therefore tone is one aspect I have to consider. Many of the IPA to speech software I've seen so far don't consider tone (or ...
3 votes
0 answers
273 views

Sound laws in Balto-Slavic and Slavic changes

What are the regular sound laws that explain the modern form of the words in baltic and slavic languages? I am aware of the centum/satem separation, which already helps to identify a lot of cognates ...

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