Alternations and “alternations”; with data from Finnish
A theoretical device in historical linguistics that I think can easily go abused is the basic morphophonological concept of “alternation”. To lay some groundwork: an initial issue, on which I may...
View Article*wu > *u in Finnic
One minor phonological innovation in Finnish is mentioned in historical overviews far more often than could be expected from its lexical frequency: the loss of a palatal semivowel *j when preceding its...
View ArticleEtymology squib: Moknams
Reading old source literature is often dreary kind of work, but it has its occasional rewards: you might find out that some problem you’ve been dwelling on has actually long since received a solution,...
View ArticleAn old etymology: aisti ~ ész
I find it interesting how modern advances in Uralic historical phonology can occasionally turn out to vindicate old sketchy etymological proposals, dating from the earliest phases of scientific...
View ArticleBonus Material 2017
A little recap of history: Freelance Reconstruction, the blog you’re currently reading, [1] was originally started as a Tumblr microblog. It turned out though that my blogging style needs a sturdier...
View ArticleThe treatment of /f/ in Finnic
Loanwords from Germanic and, more recently, Russian have been feeding *f into Finnic for a good while. Today /f/ has been established as a loanword phoneme in most Finnic varieties (including, I think,...
View ArticleMusings on the sociolinguistics of dialect levelling
In Probing the roots of Samoyedic I note that already the clear fragmentation to separate languages demands a deeper age for Samoyedic than for the other Uralic subgroups. H.-W. Hatting asks in the...
View ArticleThe origin of the Finnic long vowels: An outline
Continued from my thesis release post, as is perhaps appropriate now that I finally have wrapped up my graduation as well. To make it a bit more convenient for readers, I provide here an English...
View ArticleEtymology squib: riipustaa
I happened today upon a small etymological review article “Lat. scrībere in Germanic“, which argues that this is indeed a loanword rather than a cognate, but a relatively early one, already roughly...
View ArticlePhonology squib: raate
The standard Finnish word for the buckbean (Menyanthes trifoliata) is raate. This word often appears in overviews of Finnish historical phonology as a supposed example of irregular development of early...
View ArticleNo mid vowel dissimilation in Greek — nor Finnish?
I recently read “Deconstructing ‘height dissimilation’ in Modern Greek” (Journal of Greek Linguistics 3, 2002) by Julián Méndez Dosula. I don’t really dabble in Modern Greek dialectology, but this...
View ArticlePhonological Renormalization
A small definition of a concept. Across the dialectology of various languages we very often find almost the same segment inventory despite various innovations. I call this phenomenon “phonological...
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