Recent content by ToMach

It's not surprising that a good number of Welsh and Hindi words are very similar. It is established that they both belong to the same linguistic family, and descend from a common ancestor, proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of most of European and Indian languages. Here is the affiliation of the...

The correct terminology is indeed declension, which refers to the variant inflectional realizations of a word. In most cases, like Latin, declension means the set of alternative forms a word can take depending on its grammatical function (subject, object, etc), or the class of words that show...

Well from my point of view, it is you who seems not to understand. Let's say we aren't both clear. In your hypothesis, cultural change X is due to sound change Y, right? But we see this Y sound change in many different languages in different times and different places, whose societies have very...

This is my point : if societies evolve differently why do we find universal tendancies in the sound changes. I think this is wrong : climate rarely evolves (or on very large timespans) but language sounds evolve quite easily in comparison. And Hokkaido Japanese has 5 vowels, Aynu 5, Manchu 6...

But such changes are very common, they occured in different languages, in differrent places and at different times, so how could be this linked to one same change? I don't know about English vowels, but these kind of changes have sometimes simple linguistic explanations, which makes less...

Isn't all of this just stereotypes? I am not talking about letters but about sounds. Japanese does not have [f] but it has [Φ] (or [F]), also a labial fricative, which is romanized by "f" in the Hepburn system. But my point is that Modern Japanese has a sound [h] but it is quite new. Before...

Maciamo, are you serious? Your story about the feelings you associate with consonnants is funny, but this is has no scientific basis What about languages that don't have the consonnants you talk about? Does it mean that Japanese have no "analysis" (no v), Hawaiian no critical sense (no s)...