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Finished reading after a week and a half, and my recommendation stands! A well balanced review: makes the basics of the field clear for newcomers, does not stray into either speculation or "it hasn't been done so it can't be done" skepticism, some minor engagement with primary data like a few key vocabulary items identified as Niger-Congo membership markers, often marks out areas where more work is definitely needed.

The "domains" of Khoisan (13 pages) and Niger-Congo (128 pages) are discussed in the best detail I think. The latter especially makes it clear how, between the various perhaps spurious units, many are only really spurious as subgroups but their members belonging in the family overall still looks likely, e.g. Adamawa, Ubangian.

To throw out one follow-up idea, this also suggests to me interesting new possibilities on the origin of Niger-Congo. The traditional classification of the family "starts" in the west, with Mande, Dogon and Atlantic branching early and splits then proceeds eastwards / clockwise around Gulf of Guinea towards Bantu; if so it would be very mysterious how some really early branches would have ended up in Kordofan instead. However if Mande & Dogon are now excluded and the components of Atlantic cannot be definitely shown to be early splits, and the Adamawa / Ubangi area also abounds in small language groups only weakly established as NC members — maybe it's instead there in the northeast that we have some early-splitting branches, with later areal convergence producing some superficial appearence of large subgroups. And from a homeland somewhere in this direction, it would be then already more reasonable to then find a few other early-diverging branches in Sudan. (Or indeed even further; Güldemann takes even the very speculative concept of "Niger-Saharan" surprizingly seriously and, with full Nilo-Saharan basically obsolete now, there would be in principle openings also there for even more distant relatives to the family. Getting ahead of things here though.)

The treatment of the also large Nilo-Saharan "domain" ends up necessarily less in-depth (75 pp.) due to almost everything about this being still in the air. There are good reviews especially about the state of the large subunits Central Sudanic (solid, needs more reconstruction especially in its eastern end) and Eastern Sudanic (several likely connections in there, the idea fully panning out is not yet a given). Many of the other small units are left basically at mention that they exist and may not be documented too well. (George) Starostin's interesting basic-lexicon survey from some years back gets no mention unfortunately, even though he has many of the same conclusions as Güldemann, and though he does not generally shy away from citing also only preliminarily circulated manuscripts if particularly relevant.

Afroasiatic is also covered in less detail (38 pp.), now for somewhat opposite reasons: it's fairly solidly established and has proportionally lots of specialist literature on the overall family already, so there's less about overall classification to even review. The history of its overall assembly is probably good for context but, unlike in the other cases, maybe doesn't have too much to contribute to understanding the current situation. Finer attention to open questions within Chadic, Cushitic and Omotic would have been nice, but perhaps there is indeed a better place and better writer for those elsewhere.

The title of the paper still is "Historical linguistics and genealogical language classification in Africa" though, and it might have been nice to underline better that former does not end once the latter has been established. Classification clearly takes front seat here and a couple issues of historical linguistics (e.g. any proto-cultural reconstruction, engagement with neighboring disciplines like archeology and genetics) get sidelined entirely. Maybe it's for the better, across a whole continent there would be easily some additional 400 pages to be written on each these!; don't get your hopes too high.

The whopping 83 pages of bibliography lastly seems like a very good starting point for branching more into particular issues, although obviously also this is only the peak of the iceberg.

Reading Güldemann's recent ~400-page handbook review on the classification of the languages of Africa; so far seems like fair treatment & in decent detail. Already the introduction has good underlining of basic methodological points like

where substantial shared material exists, one should default to a relationship and not propose mass loaning / creolization / "mixing" without further arguments

correspondence sets without proper reconstruction can be almost as important for tracing external relationships as fully reconstructed proto-forms

not every language has numerals and thus not every relationship involves them either

lack of proper documentation is an obstacle for proper classification

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I know of A Guy who's been doing independent reconstruction of Proto-Great Andamanese; he seems to agree there's parallels with Austroasiatic, especially Munda, and that Great Andamanese should be seen as an independent and newer arrival to the archipelago than Ongan; but also that Blevins' reconstruction kind of sucks and needs to be re-done with better coverage of the data. We'll see what happens after that.

No full linguistic report out yet, but here is a multidisciplinary essay that goes in some part into the issue: The isolation of the Andaman islanders

Call me convinced: by all appearances, the ancestors of the Proto-Great Andamanese speech community were participating in the same maritime network that connected Austroasiatic Pre-Munda speakers in Southeast Asia with the Mahanadi Delta. And the pigs can inform us of the direction the contact was coming from: based on the genetic affinity of the introduced Andamanese wild boar with populations from eastern India, these would have been Munda-speaking seafarers from eastern India, post-maritime migration.

(Plus more! Do read, makes quite a good example of how to combine evidence from multiple disciplines.)

Ok like nobody seems to have noticed but Juliette Blevins has recently put out a case that Great Andamanese might actually have been Austroasiatic all along (to complement Jarawan possibly being an Austronesian relative). There's some stuff that's certainly suggestive, but it'll be a bit more work needed before I'm ready to accept these 32 proposed correspondences as anything more than chance, particularly after the Indo-Vasconic debacle. Still, below the cut I'm going to try and give this a fair review.

All of this is from 'Linguistic clues to Andamanese pre-history: Understanding the North-South divide', in The Language of Hunter Gatherers, edited by Tom Güldemann, Patrick McConvell and Richard Rhodes and published in 2020 (a free version of the chapter can be found on Google Scholar).

Looking through the data, it actually seems relatively rigorous as a set of comparisons; she's done a shallow reconstruction of a Proto-Great-Andamanese from wordlists (seemingly a relatively trivial exercise, though with caveats noted below) and is seemingly comparing these to reconstructions from the Mon-Khmer comparative dictionary.

Many of the correspondences are basically identical between the two reconstructions with at most minimal semantic differences, e.g. (in the order PGA~PAA respectively) *buə 'clay' ~ *buəh 'ash, powdery dust'; *muən 'pus, dirt' ~ *muən 'pimple'; *cuər 'current, flow' ~ *cuər 'flow, pour'; *cuəp 'fasten, adjoin' ~ *bcuup/bcuəp 'adjoin, adhere'. However, I wonder if the Proto-GA reconstructions here have been massaged a bit to fit the Austroasiatic correspondence more closely; in Aka-Kede for example, each of these words shows a different vowel; pua, mine, cor(ie), cup. It's not fatal by any means (in fact if the correspondences could be shown to be more complex than simple identity that would actually help the argument), but definitely annoying.

There's a couple of PGA items which are presented as having a straightforward sound correpondence in PAA where the semantics is close but doesn't quite match, but also alongside a semantic match that differs slightly in sound, e.g. by a slightly different initial consonant, e.g. *raic 'bale out' ~ *raac 'sprinkle' /*saac 'bale out'; *pila 'tusk, tooth' ~ *plaaʔ 'blade'/*mlaʔ 'tusk, ivory'; *luk 'channel' ~ *ru(u)ŋ 'channel'/*lu(u)k 'have a hole'. I think there's possibly a plausible development here, with perhaps one form taking on the other's semantics because of taboo, or maybe due to an actual semantic shift (she notes that the Andamanese use boar tusks as scrapers, which could explain a 'blade'~'tusk' correspondence in itself).

There's an item which seems dubious on the PAA side, e.g. she proposes a correspondence *wət ~ *wət for 'bat, flying fox' but I can't find a *wət reconstructed anywhere in the MKCD with that meaning, not even in Bahnaric where she claims it comes from (there is a *wət reconstructed but with a meaning 'turn, bend'). Meanwhile, *kut 'fishing net' ~ *kuut 'tie, knot' seems wrong at first, as search for *kuut by itself only brings up a reconstruction *kuut 'scrape, scratch', however there is also a reconstruction *[c]kuut which does mean 'tie, knot'.

There's an interesting set of correspondences where PGA has a final schwa that's absent from the proposed PAA cognates, e.g. *lakə 'digging stick' ~ *lak 'hoe (v.)'; *ɲipə 'sandfly' ~ *jɔɔp 'horsefly'; *loŋə 'neck' ~ *tlu(u)ŋ 'throat'.

More generally, a substantial proportion of the proposed correspondences are nouns in Great Andamanese but verbs/adjective (stative verbs) in Austroasiatic, some of which are above, but also including e.g. *cuiɲ 'odour' ~ *ɟhuuɲ/ɟʔuuɲ 'smell, sniff'; *raic 'juice' ~ *raac 'sprinkle' (a separate correspondence to 'bale out' above); *mulə 'egg' ~ *muul 'round'; *ciəp 'belt, band' ~ *cuup/cuəp/ciəp 'wear, put on'. This also doesn't seem too much of an issue, given the general word-class flexibility in that part of the world, though there don't seem to be any correspondences going the other way, which could perhaps be a sign of loaning/relexification instead.

I mentioned that a lot of these seem to be exact matches, but of course what you really want to indicate relatedness are non-indentical but regular correspondences, and here is where I can see the issues probably starting to really arise. We've already noted some of the vowel issues, but we also have some messiness with some of the consonants, though at the very least the POA matches pretty much every time (including reasonable caveats like sibilants patterning with palatals and the like). However, that still leaves us with some messes.

The liquids and coronals especially are misaligned a fair bit in ways which could do with more correspondences to flesh out. Here's a list of the correspondences found in initial position in the examples given.

*l ~ *l: *lat ~ *[c]laat 'fear', *lakə 'digging stick' ~ *lak 'hoe'

*l ~ *r: *lap ~ *rap 'count' (*luk 'channel' ~ *ru(u)ŋ 'have a hole'/*lu(u)k 'channel' could be in either of these)

*r ~ *r: *raic 'juice' ~ *raac 'sprinkle'

*r ~ *ɗ: *rok ~ *ɗuk 'canoe'

*t ~ *ɗ: *tapə 'blind' ~ [ɟ]ɗaap 'pass hand along'

*t ~ *t: *ar-təm ~ *triəm 'old' (suggested that metathesis occurred, though to me there probably would need to be some reanalysis as well to make this work)

I invite any of my mutuals more experienced with the comparative method to have a look for yourselves and see what you make of the proposal as it currently stands. It would certainly be an interesting development if more actual correspondences could be set up, though I do have to wonder if more work would also be needed on Austroasiatic to double-check these reconstructions as well.

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Reading Güldemann's recent ~400-page handbook review on the classification of the languages of Africa; so far seems like fair treatment & in decent detail. Already the introduction has good underlining of basic methodological points like

where substantial shared material exists, one should default to a relationship and not propose mass loaning / creolization / "mixing" without further arguments

correspondence sets without proper reconstruction can be almost as important for tracing external relationships as fully reconstructed proto-forms

not every language has numerals and thus not every relationship involves them either

lack of proper documentation is an obstacle for proper classification

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This is what we in the field of linguistics call "nonsense", or a bit more specifically, "exotification".

Just because something is a verb does not mean that it "attributes aliveness", or any kind of activity — nor is there any deep conceptual difference here between English and Potawatomi, as you might notice from the ability in also English to describe hills by all sorts of verbs like "looming", "lying (at)", "rising", "covering (an area)"; then likewise "it" does not imply inanimacy, it is after all routinely used e.g. of any nonhuman animals…

Do the Potawatomi think in general (and not just specifically Kimmerer) that all hills "are actively being hills"? Who knows, perhaps they do, but them simply having a verb meaning 'to be a hill' is neither sufficient nor necessary for that worldview.

“The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for “hill,” for example, is a verb: to be a hill. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. Equipped with this “grammar of animacy,” it is possible to talk about the life of other organisms without either reducing them to an “it” or borrowing concepts traditionally reserved for humans. By contrast, in English, writes Kimmerer, there is no way to recognize the “simple existence of another living being.” If you’re not a human subject, by default you’re an inanimate object: an “it,” a “mere thing.” If you repurpose a human concept to help make sense of the life of a nonhuman organism, you’ve tumbled into the trap of anthropomorphism. Use “it,” and you’ve objectified the organism and fallen into a different kind of trap.”

— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

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oh huh native languages in Yukon doing pretty terribly, if they can't even beat 860 speakers of German — by population Yukon is 8k+ native

Most Commonly Spoken Language in Canada Other than English or French by Province/Territory

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I know how it's pronounced but I don't know offhand which language it is: clearly the equivalent of Devanagari ठ in some Indian script, thus gotta be /ʈʰ/

Bonus points if you guessed which language it is :)

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We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

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First word is a simple compound: pörssi 'marketplace' + sähkö 'electricity' + marginaali 'marginal'… The second gets a bit more involved morphologically: kaksi 'two' → kaksin 'twice' (instructive plural); kerta 'time, instance' → kaksinkertainen 'double, two-fold' → kaksinkertaistaa 'to double smth, make double' (transitive) → kaksinkertaistua 'to double' (intransitive) → kaksinkertaistuminen 'doubling' (so-called fourth infinitive)

Every time I start to think Finnish words aren't that long really, I see something like this:

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Joitakin wanhoja salaisia vaihtoehtoja Suomen Murteiden Sanakirjan mukaan:

plätti (yleinen läpi Varsinais-Suomen ja Ala-Satakunnan)

lätti (Somero, Humppila, Viljakkala ja Kangasalan…Kurun tienoilla)

flätty (Ikaalinen)

pletti (Perniö, Muurla)

Lettu näyttää olleen suuressa suosiossa Savossa, löytyy myös Kaakkois-Hämeestä ja Hyvinkäältä. Helsingin puhekieleen se on voinut tulla joko noista jälkimmäisistä, tai sitten suoraan mummoloista, koska muurinpohjaletut on lähtöjään nimen omaan savolainen herkku. Lätty näyttää syntyneen kaistaleella suunnilleen Tampereelta Ouluun, plätty löytyy tästä länteen etenkin Keski- ja Etelä-Pohjanmaalla + Länsi- ja Keski-Uudellamaalla, muita osumia mm. Akaalla, Nakkilassa ja Kemin–Tornion seudulla.

Plettu puuttuu luonnollisesti, koska koko Itä-Suomessa ei ole osattu konsonanttiyhtymiä; letti ehkä siksi puuttuu koska tarkoitti jo hiustyyliä; ja toi pletti oikeastaan ehkä pitäisikin olla [plɛtti], Perniön ja lähiseudun murteissa ä vanhastaan äännettiin ruotsalaisella aksentilla eli suppeampana.

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The world’s 7,168 Living Languages analysed by Language Status

by u/derivationllc

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Standard Finnish is almost strictly more conservative-up-to-isomorphism than standard Estonian (i.e. even when Finnish is more innovative, it's usually innovative in a non-lossy way that you can still back-derive Estonian from), and higher-ed Estonian classes in Finland have been pedagogically exploiting this for decades already

you will still have to memorize also 500 awkward-to-subtle false friends and a bunch of grammatical differences, but it works well enough that I can read Estonian quite fine and halfway understand it spoken basically just from having studied enough comparative Finnic + knowing German, which is the main source for noncognate vocabulary

(The keyword if you want to read more about comparative linguistics applied to language learning is "contrastive linguistics", FWIW)

I wonder how far you could get in German by just applying the sound change rules backward to get the protogermanic form and then forwards to German. I know sound changes are lossy and also there's a lot of non cognate but i bet you could get pretty far

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fwiw boreas is from Greek (cf. Hyperborea), the native Latin for 'north' is septentrio which, unlike occidens / auster / oriens, has alas somehow gotten mostly snuffed out even from scientific terminology

just found out that the “aust-” bit of “Australia” comes from the Latin auster, “south,” rather than the Germanic ost, “east,” and now I’m sad

I just wanted to ask “is there a Westralia?” and now I’m cursed with this knowledge

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yes, but also, it probably is still a reasonable transcription of someone's phonetics and the biggest problem here is instead the pretense that a language variety with millions of speakers has "a" single specific pronunciation. I mean even before getting to anything that requires diacritics, you can easily find people whose Sᴛʀᴜᴛ vowel is closer to "standard" [ɜ] or [ɐ] or [a] or …

stray thoughts: IPA isn't perfect and has always been phonologico-phonetic in practice. i still see people consider it to be something that can fully represent human phonetics, a belief that i think underlies those diacritic-crazed transcriptions you very often see. that IPA can work fully self-sufficiently and interpreted completely mechanically isn't really a good way of thinking about it

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Also will fit areal typology if you simply think "SE Asia used to look more typologically-Austronesian some 2–4 millennia ago" :)

(this is just-about-proven for Kradai, has some potentially-archaic examples within "Tibeto-Burman" too, and I've already thought for years that one rather ought to investigate the possibility that the Old Chinese A/B "syllable type" distinction was rather *CaCVC versus *(Ci/u)CVC… about Hmong–Mien I don't know enough alas.)

Austronesian kinda fits into the areal typology if you buy the theory of Austronesian roots. The theory that Austronesian don't really have many monosyllables because of the presence of a formative (often meaningless/abstract prefixes) and a root (which carries a broad, often onomoatopoeic connotation) Which creates a bimoraic limitation of stems, which exists in more conservative Austroasiatic languages. Like as I've read in Pacoh, the major syllable must be long, or have an obligatory coda.

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…first guy in the Americas maybe; Europe had been already aware of the notion of transcription since what, the early 1800s, put into practice in outright documentary linguistics at least since the mid-century too (lots of people debating other people's transcription practices and occasionally pointing out likely errors e.g. in early grammars of Volga region Uralic languages).

still is weird to me though how it had to wait until Boas for Americanists to catch up with all sorts of basic descriptive practices!

Funny how Boas was the first guy to say like "Maybe you were transcribing the same sounds differently, instead of it being evidence of regional speech variations?"

Hmm yes two researchers wrote down "Eegloo" and "Iglu", wonder if it's because the preconceived bias of the researcher's native language/dialect or just two different speakers taken from the same village having vast phonetic differences

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Maybe not a record-breaking region at having /x ~ χ/, but it's definitely making a strong branding effort.

+ bonus task: which of these do you keep confusing with each other?

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Also worth noting: his attitude to subgrouping, and its reception

e.g. Janhunen (2009): "Proto-Uralic—what, where and when?":

vs. Salminen (2023): "On the demography, endangerment and revitalization of the Uralic languages":

(…)

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There's probably legitimate debate to be had especially on "Mordvinic", as many of the Erzya and Moksha dislike plain "Mordvin" for connotations of lumping them as a single ethnic group; both of "Sa(a)mic and "Samoyedic" also definitely have some regular usage anyway (including me in most of my work thus far)… however I believe the only one out there taking this all the way to "Mariic", "Mansi(i)c", "Khant(y)ic" is indeed Janhunen

Janhunen if he wrote about Sumerian: Sumerian belongs to the Euphratic family of languages