Hey, I ain’t dissin’ Chilean varieties!

…plus my native language (Portuguese) is a lot like “Spã’ish but you’re too lazy to prõ’ounce a few softer cõsonants, so you simp’y skip them.”, accordingly to some folks.

I remember a fair bit of my early childhood:

• My older sister playing school with me. I was three or so. That’s how I learned to read.
• When my mum taught me about the “little dragons” in our bodies; basically a child-friendly way to teach how sickness works, and how our bodies deal with them.
• My 4yo birthday. It wasn’t anything special, but I remember jumping all happy across the kitchen.
• A few times that my father ruined family meal. Making my sister cry, making me cry, whining incessantly about the food, encouraging me to eat the cooked yolk that my mum would use in the dish, this kind of thing.
• My grandma pouring condensed milk over my chocolate milk, and saying “shh, don’t tell your mum”.
• Locking my grandpa’s dog inside the basement, and getting gently lectured by him, on how the dog would feel afraid and lonely.
• My ophthalmologist asking me if I wanted pineapple or strawberry-flavoured eye drops. I was six or so. (More than three decades later, he’s still the one taking care of my eyes.)

Thank you! Sadly, I don’t talk too much about PIE in Lemmy because… well, it’s kind of a niche subject that most users don’t care too much about.

Feel free to ask for further info on stuff, though. I do enjoy talking about it!

Biting to call attention
Lying on someone else’s belly
Neck scritches

…are those feathered cats or what? Awesome.

I hope your back gets better!

Thanks!

Ha, ha. Veeeeeeeeeerrry funny.

[Okay, that’s actually fun.]

I’ll be sure to drop some posts about Semitic languages and such later on :)

Please do it! I’d bet that a lot of members would love it. (I do, at least.)

how did we figure out they were there, and which PIE words had them and which ones didn’t?

Mostly by the effect in the nearby vowels - often, a sound triggers changes in nearby sounds, before being dropped.

Here’s an example. Greek often shows an initial vowel where other IE languages show none. Like this:

Disregard for a moment the last line, focus on the first four. Why is Greek showing “random” initial vowels where Sanskrit and Latin have none? There’s no underlying pattern; it’s probably inherited then.

However, you can’t simply claim that Greek inherited the vowel and the other two lost it, without causing a problem: why didn’t Sanskrit and Latin delete the initial vowel from अज्र / ájra and ager?

The solution that a linguist called Saussure found to oddities like this was to propose that PIE had three sounds, not directly inherited by the descendants. He called them *ə₁ ə₂ ə₃; nowadays we call them *h₁ h₂ h₃. In that specific environment (word start, before a consonant):

• Greek: h₁→e, h₂→a, h₃→o.
• Latin, Sanskrit: get rid of them

And the initial vowel in the fifth line (that pops up in all four) is actually inherited.

(The ancestors of those five words are nowadays reconstructed as *h₁lewdʰ-, *h₁régʷos, *h₂stḗr, *h₃dónts, *h₂éǵros. Sure, the fifth one has a laryngeal… but also a vowel, that’s the vowel being inherited by Sanskrit and Latin.)

That hypothesis also helps in quite a few other situations, like:

• Why do sometimes a long vowel pops up from nowhere? A: short vowel + laryngeal.
• If PIE loved triconsonantal roots so bloody much, why do some roots have less consonants than expected? A: a laryngeal got deleted.
• Where did Sanskrit get those aspirated consonants from? A: from a stop consonant followed by a laryngeal.

Also, note that, when Hittite was discovered, all that “laryngeals” talk stopped being just a conjecture - because Hittite did preserve at least *h₂ and *h₃, and probably also *h₁ (it depends on how you analyse the cuneiform spelling).

Welcome! I didn’t realize there were this many Latin hobbyists on Lemmy, either :)

I’ve studied it in my grad. Nowadays I’m a bit rusted in the language, so doing weird shit like translating Pulp Fiction excerpts into it, just to avoid the brain rot. (Or to deepen it.)

Those are placeholders. “We don’t know what this sound is supposed to be, so we plop h+number there and call it a day.” You’ll see some reconstructions using *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ instead, same deal.

That said, the Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian etc. - the whole branch is extinct) preserved a few of those laryngeals; compare for example Latin ⟨ouis⟩ and Hittite ⟨𒇻𒅖⟩ ḫāwis, from PIE *h₂ówis (sheep). Since Anatolian split way before the other languages, this makes me wonder if they weren’t vocalised already in Late Proto-Indo-European.

Cross posted from: Latin@lemm.ee

…communitatem de linguā latinā habemus? Nesciebam! /me subscribit

Feel free to cross-post this stuff in !linguistics@mander.xyz by the way, it’s right into the comm’s alley.

There’s a bunch of guesses on how *h₁ *h₂ and *h₃ were pronounced in this Wikipedia page. They’re usually defined by their effect in child languages though, so it’s possible that some of those were actually multiple sounds.

For *h₃ you’ll often see values like [ɣʷ] or [ʁʷ]; a labialised consonant (to explain why it often turns nearby vowels into [o] ) and voiced (as there are some claims that it voices nearby consonants, mostly Cowgill’s Law)

My personal guess for *h₃ is completely heterodox, [ɸ]~[β]. I think that it’s directly associated with *b being so uncommon in PIE.

I think it’s Sunday.

That sounds awesome. I hope that they like the game!

That makes a lot of sense.

I’m planning a lot of stuff actually.

By far the most important is to build some small decorative stone walls in my cactus garden. The garden is in a slope so I had to make it in three levels, with a plastic separator holding the substrate of the higher two; it works like a charm but it’s ugly, so I’m going to hide the separator with stones and some cement.

I wish that I could graft my pepper plants, but most of them have green fruits so I’d rather not. Harvest has been really nice though, enough for some homemade hot paprika, I’ll probably dry and grind it this Saturday.

Then there’s some bash script that I use to cheat on a silly clicking game. I refactored it recently so it doesn’t stop working once I change the window decorations, it’s working great but I want to automate a few more things. To be frank it’s a lame excuse to learn bash, I don’t even care about the game.

Then I’ll cook a bunch of dishes that my mum is asking me. She had enough of “festivity meals”, and wants simpler stuff. Rice with hot dogs, one-meal “put everything here” salad, stuff like this. Plus a focaccia but that’s for my own sake, I’ve been craving some.

Let’s roll with this hypothesis for a moment and say that Musk, Mellon, Adelson etc. want to instate a dictatorship in USA. In that case isolating USA politically seems like a bad deal, since it would make it harder for them to conduct businesses elsewhere.

If however they are trying to do this, I’d expect an autocoup similar to Hitler in 1934. For that they’d need to solidify Trump’s power, and remove the ability of the house of representatives to impeach him - by getting rid of it, or silencing it, or transforming it into meatpuppets.

I’m barefoot.

Ditto - it’s 18°C here. That weird gap that I’m still shirtless, barefoot, but my cat is already looking for her blanket.

Putin is a bit too serious and conscious of the impact of his decisions to be jesting, specially near some clueless moron. The other hypotheses that you laid out seem sensible, though.

Also, bold of you to presume that the USA will ever have another election again… […]

Even then, his successor won’t be as easy to manipulate as Trump himself.

It does but it’s unreliable; mining is faster once you have it set up properly.