Some musings on Japanese onbin changes
Japanese is a weird language. In its modern form it is surprisingly regular and nice, but to compensate its historically attested linguistic history seems to be utterly filled with irregular sound...
View ArticleLength alternation between go-on and kan-on readings
Japanese doesn't have many long vowels in native vocabulary, but in Sino-Japanese it has many. But as with the native ones, these are almost invariably the result of contractions of bi-moraic...
View ArticleIssues with Lexical Comparison of Berber within Afroasiatic
I have just finished a really inspiring and interesting course at the Leiden Summer School named "Reconstructing Afro-Asiatic" together with Benjamin Suchard, Marwan Kilani, Ahmed Sosal and Maarten...
View ArticleProto-Berbero-Semitic Primae Waw Verbs
So after our Summerschool course Benjamin Suchard and I were excited to finally get working on a paper together, something we've always wanted to do but somehow the stars never aligned. We had a cool...
View ArticleProto-Berber Primae Waw: Is it really a /w/?
Last time I talked a bit about an interesting possible connection of how Berber and Semitic treat verbs with initial w as the first root consonant, both of them notably seem to lack the w in the...
View ArticleMore Proto-Berber Primae Waw
After my previous blogpost, Maarten Kossmann pushed back in the comments on Twitter on the idea that *əw really yields *u, which is something that would be needed to derive *əssuɣəd from *əssəwɣəd....
View ArticleMedio-Passives of the Primae Waw verbs
A final conundrum among a whole slew of conundrums among these among the primae waw verbs is the behaviour of the mediopassive derivation.In general, I don't think we are quite ready to reconstruct the...
View ArticleTawātur al-Qirāʾāt according to ibn al-Jazarī
One of the interesting parts of modern Islamic orthodoxy is the belief that the ten canonical reading traditions are transmitted by tawātur, mass transmission so massive that it is unthinkable that...
View ArticleLaysa r-rasmu bi-qirāʾah!
Me and my dear friend and colleague Hythem Sidky keep on telling each other that every time we're at a conference, we should get pins that read ليس الرسم بقراءة "The consonantal skeleton is not a...
View ArticleSegolate Plurals and North-West Semitic
Yesterday, I wrote a little thread on the productive segolate plurals in Arabic, and how this challenges some of the notions of this as a North-West-Semitic isogloss. I received some pushback, several...
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