Just learnt from that Johannes Bronkhorst passed away in May of this year. Here's Elisa Freschi's post about it (she shared this on the other app, I don't think she's here anymore):.

Completely unrelated: "implode a fricative" sounds funny, for whatever reason.

RT @phono_logical: @langofmind Not sure if this counts but I’ve argued with colleagues that many so-called phonological processes in Turkis….

What lack of logophoric pronouns do to a language. Smh english do better.

RT @maria_esipova: New paper: . tl;dr: Exclamatives like 'How smart Anya is!' do not in fact behave in the discours….

RT @LangSciPress: Just published "Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic" edited by Ulrike Demske & Barthe Bloo….

RT @LangSciPress: Just published "Foundational approaches to Celtic linguistics" edited by Andrew Carnie, Diane Ohala, Dee Hunter, Samanth….

The USDefaultism here is funny. It's only a "Western" Conference if it's held in the western part of the US (tbf also Canada). Western conferences elsewhere need a qualifier.

RT @ramaphala1: किंघै, ईंघै, ऊँघै, जिंघै, न्यूँघै. कींघानैं, कींघाकै.कींघानसी, कींघानसिक.कींघानसीनैं, कींघानसिकनैं.कींघानसीकै, कींघानसिककै….

Correction: I've found out that "black bear" in the context of Asia refers to the Asian black bear (genus Ursus), which is endemic across much of Asia but nowhere near South India. South Indian black-furred bears are Indian sloth bears (genus Melursus).

*Krishnamurti (2003).

Whatever the reconstruction of the original 'bear' word, I think it is more than reasonable to say that in South Dravidian, *karaṭi is an innovation borne out of taboo replacement. Also, the only bear species endemic to South India is the Indian black bear, so that fits too.

The original word for 'bear' is still found in, for example, Telugu elugu(-banṭi), Hill Maria Gondi eṛj (Western Gondi aṛjal), Gadaba ilij, and Malto eju. Krishnamurti reconstructs these to *eḷ-V-ñc- (p. 12; in his discussion of flora & fauna known to PDr speakers).

It's a bit of a meme that the word for 'bear' in northwestern Indo-European was replaced by euphemisms, like 'brown one' in Germanic. The same thing probably happened in South Dravidian. Black bears were renamed euphemistically as *kar-aṭi, from *kar- 'to be(come) black'.

RT @linguistlist: Books: The Licensing and Usage of Topic Drop in German: Schäfer (2025): This book is concerned with the licensing and usa….

"Because the Safaitic authors, they call upon their gods all the time, they always ask them for very practical things: security, [b̥uɾi], vengeance, [. ]". [b̥uɾi] took me a second to parse. I associate the Americanised [b̥uɾi] with 'butt' & not 'loot'.

RT @LangSciPress: We accepted "The Stories of Siko and Yowao: Jarawara texts" by Alan Vogel

Managed to get a sizeable chunk written today. I hope this continues for the next few days.

This takes me back to when the previous Fantastic 4 movie came out. I was big into the MCU then. For some reason my interest peaked with Infinity War and then cratered, I didn't even watch Endgame. Dunno why. I was hyped after Thanos, but couldn't care less about Endgame.

Are two sentences really "string-identical" if they are very clearly disambiguated by prosody in speech, so that the only reason they seem string-identical is that we don't write prosody? Is there a reason to not consider prosody as part of the string, so to speak?.