Alternative to the laryngeal theory

So, whom all on this forum do you consider a "word nerd"?

Anyone who knows the proto-indo-european word for catfish is a candidate. 

Plus I never knew gym's were supposed to be naked,  that was a bit of a shock.  Last time for me I suspect.

You, FalseProphet, and Flatassembler. By word nerd I mean people have at least studied some linguistics on the internet, if not in school. Y'all know some shorthand for terms that I don't know. 

You, FalseProphet, and Flatassembler. By word nerd I mean people have at least studied some linguistics on the internet, if not in school. Y'all know some shorthand for terms that I don't know.

3 word nerds in one place irrelevant to linguistics is way, way more than normal. I think a spacetime rift is about to happen.

That is one of the things I love about this forum! SPACETIME RIFTS!

All we need is one more word nerd and the rift will be in order!

Then you could become one. Or, better yet, just read a few blog posts about interesting etymologies and tell us which etymology you liked the most. Later you could invite someone active on forums about linguistics to join us here, but I don't know if they would like to join a forum named "The Flat Earth Society".

Well, you joined!

Well, I assume you will be honest and not make the linguist you invite think we've actually had a huge thread discussing the Laryngeal Theory in greatest possible details, will you?

OH I have an idea. You could start threads about several different linguistic theories as linguist bait.

Or maybe we could rename this thread to "Discussing linguistics" (or something like that) and stick it. And someone who looks at the first few posts would realize that it's not about something extremely pseudoscientific. What do you think?

Well, I recently read about the etymology of νερό (nero), which means water in Greek. In ancient Greek water was ύδωρ (hydor), so I didn't know how νερό came to be. Well it turns out that in medieval Greek fresh (as in not old and spoilt) water was called νηρόν ύδωρ (neeron hydor). Neeron came from the word nearos, which meant young or recent. So it seems like at some point they dropped the ύδωρ part for brevity purposes and νηρόν turned to νερό.

SCG, can you feel a rift forming yet?

That's an excellent example of a common effect in linguistics, called metonymy!

Anyway, when you were discussing Indo-European grammar, you somehow assumed that Indo-Uralic hypothesis is certainly wrong, that it's absurd to say that Finnish grammar is related to the Latin grammar. Why do you think that's the case?

I personally wouldn't assume an especially close connection between Indo-European and Uralic, as most of the people who try to reconstruct and older proto-language do, but between Indo-European and Austronesian. Look at the pronouns. Most of the proto-languages have a nasal in the 1st person singular, while both Indo-European and Austronesian have a velar. In PIE, it's *egjoh2, in PAN, it's *aku. Then look at the PAN Swadesh list. Doesn't it seem to you that PIE *r corresponds to PAN *l, that PIE *s corresponds to PAN *q and that PIE *d corresponds to PAN *d?
*treys (three)-*telu (three)
*romk (hand)-*lima (hand/five)
*ser (to flow)-*qalur (to flow)
*skend (skin)-*qanic (skin)
*stembh (to walk)-*qaqay (foot)
*smew (smoke)-*qabu (ash)
*serw (to watch)-*qalayaw (day)
*bheh2s (to talk)-*baqbaq (mouth)
*dwoh1 (two)-*dusa (two)
*dyews (sky)-*daya (upwards/height/sky)
*danu (river)-*danaw (lake)
Another potential cognate on the Swadesh list might be PIE *men (to think) and PAN *nemnen (to think), by the metathesis. FalseProphet, you know a lot more than I do about Austronesian, so, what do you think?

To me it seems more like that *s (s-mobile) was disproportionately common in the beginning of a word in PIE and that *q was disproportionately common in the beginning of a word in PAN, rather than that PIE *s actually corresponds to PAN *q. Also, you realize how much PIE and PAN were different grammatically, including the phonotactics (let's ignore the fact that their homelands were VERY far away from each other)?
To me it seems like you are a victim of the Bongo-Bongo effect, or are just trolling.

ASorryx for myx current speech impediment

Flast asasasembler, give me tqwo rasndom lasnguasge fasmilieas, asnd I casn ashoqw yxou, thast theyx asre relasted.

I think that FlatAssembler is falling to a trap called "The Birthday Paradox". If you choose a random person, the probability of that person having the same birthday as you do is only 1/365=0.27%. However, if you choose 20 random people, the probability of some of them sharing a birthday is not 1-((1-(1/365))ˆ20)=5.3%, as would appear at the first glance, but is actually 1-((1-(1/365))ˆ(20*20))=66.6%.
The same goes for phonemes on the Swadesh list. The probability of there being any particular apparent regular sound correspondence, like s:q or r:l, is very low. But if there are twenty phonemes, and twenty times twenty potential correspondences, you will probably find one if you search.

I think that FlatAssembler is falling to a trap called "The Birthday Paradox". If you choose a random person, the probability of that person having the same birthday as you do is only 1/365=0.27%. However, if you choose 20 random people, the probability of some of them sharing a birthday is not 1-((1-(1/365))ˆ20)=5.3%, as would appear at the first glance, but is actually 1-((1-(1/365))ˆ(20*20))=66.6%.

That's not quite right. The probability of at least 1 shared birthday among n people is given by
(ignoring leap years).
For n = 20 this works out at 0.411 or about 41%.

If you choose 23 people at random it is odds-on that at least 2 will share a birthday.

Well, yes, I made some easy-to-understand statistical approximation to explain my point. Or do you think that FlatAssembler is right?

Well, yes, I made some easy-to-understand statistical approximation to explain my point.

Well, if you imagine your formula to be both easy-to-understand and a sufficiently accurate approximation to justify using the phrase 'is actually', then fair enough.

...is not 1-((1-(1/365))ˆ20)=5.3%, as would appear at the first glance, but is actually 1-((1-(1/365))ˆ(20*20))=66.6%.

What do you guys think, would teaching linguistics in schools (not prescriptive grammar, but the actual linguistics, like the things we were discussing here) help students learn foreign languages more easily?

What do you guys think, would teaching linguistics in schools (not prescriptive grammar, but the actual linguistics, like the things we were discussing here) help students learn foreign languages more easily?

Linguistics is interesting, as far as I could understand what this thread was about, but I don't think many students could understand it. I've also made some topics about the language, such as this one:
‎https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=66665.0
FlatAssembler is also active here? What a surprise! He is also active on the linguistforum. And my nickname on the linguistforum is LinguistSkeptic.

Well, you know, there is a lot of evidence that teaching phonology early in schools helps children learn how to spell (It's called phonics.).

There is evidence that phonics helps? Teaching young children to read nonsense words helps? Think with your own head, LovesLinguistics, please.

So, you think we should teach linguistics at schools. Based on what I've seen, linguistics turned to guessing the grammars of some hypothetical ancient languages that probably didn't even really exist. We should teach that in school? We need free thinkers, people! And, yes, we should stick this thread, just so people know what modern science has turned into.

So, you think we should teach linguistics at schools. Based on what I've seen, linguistics turned to guessing the grammars of some hypothetical ancient languages that probably didn't even really exist. We should teach that in school? We need free thinkers, people! And, yes, we should stick this thread, just so people know what modern science has turned into.

Are you Croatian, too?

No, I am from America and I, unlike LovesLinguistics, actually have the experience with phonics being taught in school.

Are you still hooked on phonics? There's probably a 12 step program for that.

Absurd number of word nerds reached. Spacetime rift imminent.

What's absurd there?

Someone has just openned a thread to give examples of some actually absurd discussions:
‎https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=72120.0