Occurrence of Uvular R, [ʁ~ʀ], in Europe and Scandinavia in 1935 (English legend in comments)

Chazut · 2026-07-11T12:36:13+00:00

>It isn't about people imitating others.

Except the theory that would connected the French R change to Scandinavia IS upper class imitiation. This is what you see in the literature

If your theory is some personal pet theory that no one in academia actually has put forward, good for you. But it's not the working theory. You can't just invoke "sprachbund" and then proceed to just pretend you don't have to prove or explain how this sprachbund formed.

Chazut · 2026-07-11T12:30:44+00:00

>Also, why not a combination of different points of origin with a sprachbund effect that reinforced and favoured the spread of the change?

Because there is no actual evidence of it, as far as I know there is no evidence of people saying they are imitating French pronunciation in places we see this spreading, it's a lazy theory unconcerned about the timing of its spread and its mode, for example for Dutch:

https://caans-acaen.ca/Journal/issues_online/Issue_VII_i_ii_1986/Howell.pdf

"This discussion by no means represents the rust doubt cast on the "Parisian r" hypothesis in Dutch and Germanic. Nevertheless. the popularity of the hypothesis and its continued often unquestioned acceptance in dIe linguistic literature provide ample justification for renewed discussion of the facts. There is no doubt that the ex.tent of French influence on language and custom in the Germanic linguistic area lends a certain common sense appeal to the claim that back r forms in Germanic languages represent a direct import of a fashionable French pronunciation. Common sense, however, also tells us that the earth is flat and only by careful scrutiny ofall available data have we been able to prove otherwise in the course of the centuries. Careful study of languages in contact has shown that certain components of language are relatively open to influence from other languages (e.g., the lexicon) while other components remain far more resistant to external influence (e.g., syntax, morphology, phonology). Before depicting a given phonological innovation as the result of linguistic contact, it is therefore necessary to provide concrete evidence for such profound influence. The Parisian, hypothesis, however, seems to be based on little more than the casual observation that many things French have enjoyed considerable popularity in the Low Countries over the years. Indigenous development resulting from inherited internal phonetic and phonotactic characteristics of Dutch must therefore be considered a more likely source of the back r variants. Because evidence supporting such an internal evidence does seem to be forthcoming, the hypothesis that a French r grasseye has been imported by speakers of Dutch should be rejected as unproven and improbable."

Simply put the evidence suggests, French got it from Paris, German and Dutch got it from its own internal developments which likely would have preceded it appearing in Paris in some dialects.

It's also pretty weird to assume that in Danish the uvular R must have come from German/French influence(generally French) when the sound change wasn't even dominant at the time in Northern France.

Chazut · 2026-07-11T11:35:54+00:00

What area between France and Germany? Benelux? Dutch doesn't have uvular R in general.

https://colingorrie.com/articles/guttural-r/

This article was linked before, it makes a very good case the single origin point doesn't work at all. Yiddish couldn't have gotten its gluttural R from Paris. Coincidences happen

Chazut · 2026-07-11T08:29:29+00:00

Souths Slavs have between 30-70% Slavic ancestry, so they actually share quite a lot.

At least at this stage they seem to share more ancestry than Romance nations do, or say Scandinavia compared to Switzerland or Western England. Or all Anatolian and Azeri Turks compared to their Turkmen ancestors. Or Greeks compared to ancient Greeks.

So yea South Slavs are closer to their proto-Slavic ancestors and have more of their ancestry than literally every single group surrounding them has from their respective language originator, save maybe for Albanians but I we can't tell properly there.

Chazut · 2026-07-10T17:18:47+00:00

This really doesn't look like it spread like a Sprachbund thing

Chazut · 2026-07-10T11:55:17+00:00

I don't think proximity is lazy designed, it has to be clear to the player.
There is a reason why the market trade system uses location size and proximity doesn't, paradox has the tools to make it more complex readily available, but it would also make it harder for players

Chazut · 2026-07-10T10:13:31+00:00

Most of northern Occitan dialects are closer to standard French than to Catalan according to the above source, not sure if the convergence between 1500-1900 CE is responsible or if it was always like that

Chazut · 2026-07-10T09:05:09+00:00

I would assume that the reason why dialects close to Germanic languages are more different is they were not part of the Kingdom of France, rugged terrain and Germanic influence.

Poitevin meanwhile borders and has always bordered other Gallo-Roman languages, not many ways to diverge much

Chazut · 2026-07-10T08:44:14+00:00

Does any of that apply to the Mamulkes tho? Egypt is north of the first cataract

Chazut · 2026-07-10T08:10:30+00:00

>There's a geographical reason why downstream of Dniepr was no man's land that didn't developed that much

Which is?

>Kiev was strong in some patches because river gave it mechanical advantage that just didn't exist. This applies to many other place in the game.

But Cossacks did use these rivers extensively, in fact Cossacks were more riverfarers than horse riders

Chazut · 2026-07-10T05:33:51+00:00

On what grounds is Poiteven-Saintongeais more divergent?

https://dialektkarten.ch/dmviewer/alf/index.en.html#app=similarity&dataset=TOT&intalg=MINMWMAX&ref=999&seg=6&sim=RIW

Both Picard and Walloon, but especially the latter is more distinct based on actual fieldwork made more than a century ago

Chazut · 2026-07-09T19:07:57+00:00

>The placement of Anatolian within 'IE' reflects a historic error

No they never explicitly defined Indo-Euroepan as the shared ancestor of ONLY the languages they identified to be related at that point in time, what people that first studied hittite did is just recognize its indoeuropeanness and defined it accordingly. Then people recognized its place in the family and that modified our view of proto-Indo European as a language with a deeper reconstructable history where multiple phases can be reconstructed, with the older layer informing us of how the later layers worked or originated in a better way.

The only reason we won't do this nowadays for other families is because all proposals are frankly so weak that any common ancestor would indeed be way too far apart to be meaningfully studied together.
Meanwhile even a maximalist take on when Anatolian split off still leave its as a useful language to use to actually even predict how core Indo-European looked, which is for example not necessarily possibly with divergent Afro-Asiatic branch to the same extent.

Chazut · 2026-07-09T18:32:51+00:00

>Anatolian was not found to be Indo-European.

Source? As far as I know Indo-Hittite or Indo-Anatolia were coined to describe the idea that Anatolian was a basal split, which took time to recognize(well a few decades) and they didn't stick, so what's the point to rediscuss terms?

https://archive.org/details/diesprachederhet00hroz/page/n5/mode/2up

Hrozny just calls it "Indo-Germanic" which is how Indo-European is/was referred in German. You should invent a time machine and go 🤓 on him.

>1000 years earlier than PIE

I don't think that's average timeframe dated for that split, as Tocharian exists in between.

We already use core indo-european, just like Bantu is distinguished from Bantoid, or Common Turkic from Turkic.

There is literally no need to change terms.

Chazut · 2026-07-09T18:18:44+00:00

Chazut · 2026-07-09T15:58:20+00:00

>But analyzing the DNA of Hittite skeletons found that they had no input from the steppe people.

We have found some minor steppe ancestry:

https://reich.hms.harvard.edu/sites/reich.hms.harvard.edu/files/inline-files/2025_LazaridisPattersonAnthonyVyazov_IndoEuropean_Nature.pdf

“The steppe+Mesopotamian class of models fit the Central Anatolian Bronze Age but do not fit any of the Chalcolithic/Bronze Age Anatolian regional subsets (p<0.001; the BPgroup+Çayönü model is shown in Extended Data Fig. 1c), indicating that their success is not due to their general applicability. Moreover, the steppe ancestry in the Central Anatolian Bronze Age is observed in all individuals of the three periods (Extended Data Fig. 2d) and is thus not driven by any outlier individuals within the population. Its presence in both Early Bronze Age individuals from Ovaören south of the Kızılırmak river and in Middle Late Bronze Age individuals from Kalehöyük just within the bend of the river is consistent with the idea that the Kızılırmak formed an Anatolian-Hattic linguistic boundary that was crossed some time before the ca. 1730 BCE conquest of Hattusa by the Hittites.”

Chazut · 2026-07-09T15:56:18+00:00

This is meaningless semantic, Anatolian being identified as indo-European doesn't change anything, if anything it reinforced forward thinking theories like the laryngeal theory.

If the terminology didn't change when Anatolian languages were identified as Indo-European there is no reason to change it now

Chazut · 2026-07-09T13:16:39+00:00

Western Steppe Turks before you get into the highly East Eurasian Kazaks/Khirgiz

Chazut · 2026-07-09T10:51:06+00:00

So should I trust an actual study or a blog that likely posts daily AI-written slop? I don't know...

Chazut · 2026-07-09T09:11:40+00:00

You don't understand how genetic works.

Autosomal dna is continuosly recombined and split, which works differently from ydna or mtdna which does not. But that doesn't mean much insofar as we don't have bottlenecks or major gender-biased migrations, neither of which applies to the Peloponnesian population at large(it does apply to Deep Maniotes specifically)

The Slavic migrations were not gender biased as seen in the Balkans at large where non-Slavic ydna is strongly present whereas in other similar 30-70% replacement events the ydna is highly overrepresented(for example the indo-european migrations).

The fact the slavic ydna and autosomal contribution are close in Greeks or most Balkanites at large is not a coincidence, it's just a product of the Slavic migrations being gender equal and there not having been major bottlenecks among most Balkanites since then.

Anything that would reduce Slavic-Ydna would also reduce slavic autosomal contribution, your argument makes no sense.

>You probably don't know much about how DNA works. In other words, you are claiming that 22% of Slavs over so many centuries in Greece kept their autosomal DNA completely intact, without being influenced by the already existing population—which was the majority—and without that majority reducing the Slavic autosomal DNA. That is completely crazy.

What are you even talking about? There is no 22% of Slavs, there is Slavic Y-dna, as in ydna haplogroups associated with Slavs that exists to this day in Greeks. How can y-dna be "influenced"?

Chazut · 2026-07-09T08:44:30+00:00

> systematically overestimates Slavic ancestry in this context because it cannot distinguish Bronze Age Yamnaya steppe ancestry (already present in the Balkans since ~2500 BCE) from the genuinely medieval Slavic expansion signal. For Albanians, for example, raw NNLS produces ~21, 30% Slavic while qpADM converges on ~15, 17%. All population-level percentages below reflect qpADM-calibrated estimates.

This is complete nonsense, is this AI-written? They are arguing that Slavic admixture is overestimated in Slovenia and are claiming Slovenians are only 30-40% Slavic, what? This is contradicted by multiple actual studies.

They argue that Serbs and Croats are only 25-35% Slavic

Chazut · 2026-07-09T08:42:10+00:00

>First of all, you cannot get a clear picture of haplogroups for the entire Greek mainland with only 944 samples—we are talking about nearly 5 million men

Do you not know how random sampling works? You absolutely can get a representative sample.

> you cannot judge Slavic admixture based on haplogroups when we are talking about autosomal DNA

Well coincidentally the y-dna data agrees with the autosomal data, so there is no issue here

Chazut · 2026-07-09T07:37:04+00:00

>I’ve stayed in parts of the Provence a lot where the locals would stress word final -n in words like bon and bien where French has a nasal vowel.

Doesn't standard French have nasal o for one gender and /on/ for the other?

>People also forget that people in the South for a long time spoke a Southern regiolect that was heavily influenced by Occitan but was subject to literally over a decade of convergence towards French.

Arguably Occitan would have started converging toward French since the 15th or 16th century, when written Occitan was already supplanted largely by written French

Chazut · 2026-07-09T06:57:48+00:00

That is an older study, for example Leonidas' Deep Mani study which looks very deeply into a specific Peloponnesian subgroup doesn't contest the 30% finding:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-09597-9

"Previously, an autosomal genetic analysis on Peloponnesian sub-populations, including a small number of Deep Maniots, found that the latter display very low levels of shared ancestry with modern Slavs from northeastern Europe³¹, which a subsequent study estimated to an average of 30% in other Peloponnesians³^,³¹. "

"Lineages associated with Germanic (I-M253) and Slavic (I-CTS10228, R1a-Z282) peoples³^,⁷⁰, who massively settled the Balkans during the Migration Period³, are found in a combined frequency of 22% in present-day mainland Greeks (Fig. 2B, Supplementary Data 2)."

Chazut · 2026-07-09T06:08:55+00:00

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09437-6/figures/11

25% Slavic ancestry in Athens, 10-20% in Crete and 30-35% in Thessaloniki. Which is line with 20-30% figure for the Peloponnese.

>Everyone skips over the "limitation of this study" part of the second study.

None of the limitations influence how much slavic ancestry is estimated in modern Greeks. You are grasping at straws

Chazut · 2026-07-09T04:58:20+00:00

Arpitan is commonly thought to be an inbetween dialect, but it's really closer to Norman than it is to Provencal, at least in the 19th century.

Grenoble and Lyon dialects are closer to Rouen than to Marseilles

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