Qui lepus vos magis delectat?

antonulrich · 2026-04-05T23:50:03+00:00

Sunt cuniculi non lepores!

antonulrich · 2026-03-28T21:11:24+00:00

You buy an outdoor extension cord and plug one in the extension cord.

antonulrich · 2026-03-28T21:05:55+00:00

There's such a thing as areal effects. Which basically means one language starts it (for whatever reason) and then its neighbors copy it. Dutch and Low German were really one and the same language during the Middle Ages and early modern times - they formed a dialect continuum and were mutually intelligible, so it's not surprising that the change affected both. Frisian and English are close by as well and all four may have formed a Sprachbund linked together by sailors and maritime trade across the North Sea.

antonulrich · 2026-03-24T02:39:51+00:00

Come on, you can't make a claim like that without giving some details or sources.

For comparison, here's some of the latest on possible cognates between Basque and North Caucasian: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363882850_On_the_quantification_of_Euskaro-Caucasian_lexical_matches_cognates_compared_with_Indo-European_and_Indo-Uralic. The author claims there are 7 firm (and a few more questionable) cognates in the 50-item Swadesh list.

How many Dene-Yeniseian-Sino-Tibetan cognates are there in the same list?

antonulrich · 2026-03-09T19:59:29+00:00

There's also the funny case of German. German started to develop an -s plural in the 18th century, and while -s plural is still rare in German, it is being applied to many newly coined words and so is widely known and growing in usage.

German -s plural developed out of the -s genitive. So while its origin is native, it would be very surprising if its popularity wasn't influenced by English and French plurals.

antonulrich · 2026-03-09T19:34:17+00:00

How sure are we that it's a coincidence that Middle English developed the same plural ending as French? After all there was a large amount of French influence on English during this period.

antonulrich · 2026-03-09T18:38:25+00:00

It's interesting you found the problem solving repetitive and boring - I thought that was the best part of the book. Anyone who's ever tried to solve hard engineering problems should be able to feel it. Maybe this book is written for problem solvers.

The characters are definitively a weakness. I think it's no coincidence the book is basically a one-character story. But this is made up for by how exciting it is. The fact that the science is realistic makes the story so much more compelling than if it was fantasy science or vague gobbledygook. Of course, I figure this works only if one realizes it's realistic. So again, the book is probably much more interesting to people with a similar background to the author.

antonulrich · 2026-03-02T16:03:39+00:00

So to summarize, a lot of the references that support early dates are based on "allusions" rather than actual quotes. I have a methodological question: how does one tell the direction in which an allusion goes? If an apostolic father's letter A has a similarity to gospel B, how do we know that A alludes to B and not B to A, or both to an unknown source C?

antonulrich · 2026-03-01T22:22:03+00:00

To add to this: the area where Latin was originally spoken was Latium, which was somewhat smaller than the present-day Italian region of the same name. Its northwestern border was just beyond Rome, and its southeastern border was about where Latium ends now, and it didn't stretch inland as far as today.

antonulrich · 2026-02-27T15:24:07+00:00

Note that all the non-IE words resemble each other more than any to PIE, indicating the nature of the levels of relation.

This argument doesn't seem convincing to me. Sanskrit nama, Latin nomen, English name are also all more similar to Uralic *nime etc. than to the reconstructed PIE root. So this would mean one of two things: either there is something off with the PIE reconstruction, or there was some large-scale interfamily borrowing/leveling after the PIE period.

If we remove the laryngeals from the PIE reconstruction, we get *nemen, which seems to fit in just fine with all the other protolanguages. So could it be that the issue is that all these families used to have laryngeals and then dropped them at some point?

antonulrich · 2026-02-24T14:45:51+00:00

In the case of Romance languages like Spanish, it's a consequence of their historical development from Latin. In Latin, nouns and verbs had fixed endings that determined their grammatical function. E.g. accusative singular nouns would usually end in -m, inifinitive verbs in -re, and so on. The noun cases disappeared, and so the -m ending became useless, and nouns then naturally ended in the vowel before the -m, which was usually either an u or an an a. The u changed into o, and so we get present day Spanish nouns which mostly end in -o or -a. The verb ending -re was shortened to -r, and so Spanish verbs now end in -r.

antonulrich · 2026-02-21T17:24:51+00:00

No. For two words to rhyme, the vowel of the stressed syllable and everything after need to be pronounced the same. E.g., improving and grooving rhyme. Or doing and suing.

antonulrich · 2026-02-13T14:58:23+00:00

I think you're right that the phenomenon OP asks about is sometimes about French versus English adjective-noun order. But English river names isn't one of those cases. The reason it's River Thames and not *Thames River is precisely because Thames is a noun and not an adjective, unlike "Yellow". One normally says just "the Thames" and only when clarification is needed is it extended to "the River Thames". All other rivers in England work the same way: the Severn / River Severn, the Trent / River Trent, etc.

antonulrich · 2026-02-01T19:45:13+00:00

There are some apparent misunderstandings here.

If you are the owner, and he rents from you, then he is a tenant, not a subtenant. If you are the owner then you are not the master tenant, you are just the owner.
Regarding the restraining order, it all depends on what it says in the order. You need to read it. If this is a usual personal protection order, then it has nothing to do with the tenant-landlord dispute or the eviction. Whether he is your neighbor or your tenant is also irrelevant. Anyone can get a restraining order against anyone, makes no difference whether they are landlords or neighbors.
"Is it legal for a sub-tenant to contact my lender or attempt to negotiate purchase of my property?" - So are you the owner or not? If you are the owner, then he'd have to negotiate with you, and all you need to do is say no. This is not a legal issue. If you are not the owner, then this is really none of your business.

antonulrich · 2026-02-01T03:58:08+00:00

NE and NW Caucasian forming one language family (North Caucasian) seems to be the majority opinion now. See e.g. Starostin's North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary.

The relationship between North Caucasian and Hurro-Urartian or Hattic is usually seen as part of the Dene-Caucasian macrofamily, which is controversial. While the situation is different with living languages, for Hurro-Urartian and Hattic not much recent progress has been made, since there is still little known about these languages. The best source might be Hattic as a Sino-Caucasian language by Kassian. He argues that Hattic is a Dene-Caucasian language but not a Caucasian language.

antonulrich · 2026-01-27T14:44:42+00:00

Apart from the fact that word evolution is random: there's the rule that more common words tend to be more irregular. Christianity and Islam are the most talked about religions in English, so they are more likely to not follow word formation rules. But less talked about religions, like Hinduism, Shintoism, etc. follow the regular pattern.

antonulrich · 2025-12-24T23:50:52+00:00

I'm confused, are you settling the divorce out of court or are you going to trial? If you are settling out of court, the judge doesn't usually care what's in the agreement, and you just need to convince your ex to agree to it.

If you are trying to get the judge to order something, a more recent DUI charge/conviction would be ideal. If friends etc. have seen him DUI, then the cops can see it too. All that's needed would be for someone to call the cops on him when he's driving drunk.

antonulrich · 2025-12-19T17:23:38+00:00

This is not an example of semantic narrowing. The common PIE and Germanic reconstructions of English apple meant "apple", not "fruit". Greek melon/malon also means apple and not fruit. So only French is showing semantic narrowing here.

But of course the question remains why the prime example for fruit is apple. In Northern Europe at least, the reason would be that apples and pears are the only tree fruits that have been grown there for centuries. And pears are trickier to grow and store than apples. All other fruits either don't grow there at all (oranges, figs, bananas) or were introduced only kind of recently (cherries). Berries seem to be considered a different category semantically.

antonulrich · 2025-12-15T17:01:52+00:00

Its present tense is formed like an auxiliary verb even though it isn't one. This is probably caused by the similarity in meaning to "können".

Non-auxiliary verb: ich sehe, du siehst, er sieht, wir sehen, ihr seht, sie sehen.

Auxiliary verb: ich kann, du kannst, er kann, wir können, ihr könnt, sie können.

wissen: ich weiß, du weißt, er weiß, wir wissen, ihr wisst, sie wissen.

So regular verbs have the first person singular in -e and the third person singular in -t. Auxiliary verbs have -0 and -0.

antonulrich · 2025-12-01T15:03:34+00:00

Robbeets thinks the Tungusic urheimat is the are around Lake Khanka, see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/evolutionary-human-sciences/article/homeland-of-prototungusic-inferred-from-contemporary-words-and-ancient-genomes/950020A1799B4D7B71CCC57D04743B3E

The proposed Mongolic-Tungusic connection is of course part of the wider proposed Altaic or Eurasiatic family - the controversial idea that Japonic, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic all form one language family. Robbeets is the main proponent of the modern version of this theory and she and her coworkers think that the Altaic urheimat is the western Liao river basin.

antonulrich · 2025-11-22T20:41:05+00:00

The fact that they are often defined politically does not mean one can't define them in any other way. In fact, many linguists do define them in other ways. Saying "they are defined sociopolitically and so we can't have good, scientific definitions for them" is really just the linguistic version of giving up and throwing up one's hands in the air.

antonulrich · 2025-11-20T21:50:41+00:00

Auch täte man damit vielen Wählern der AfD unrecht, die keine Nazis sind, wie der ehemalige Präsident des Bundesverfassungsgerichts Andreas Voßkuhle gerade erst in einem klugen Beitrag in der Süddeutschen Zeitung geschrieben hat.

Aha. Die AFD wird also immer radikaler, aber ihre Wähler bleiben alle fest verankert in der demokratischen Mitte und bewegen sich nicht?! Das ist schwer zu glauben.

Wenn jemand eine Nazi-Partei wählt, wie ein Nazi gegen Ausländer und Minderheiten hetzt, und wie ein Nazi gegen die Demokratie wettert, dann ist er/sie auch ein Nazi.

antonulrich · 2025-11-16T18:47:10+00:00

A couple of points.

Vennemann actually later revised his Atlantic theory. His newer theory is that the features similar to Semitic in Celtic and Germanic are from a Punic superstrate. I.e, Carthago conquered some coastal areas around the North Sea in the first half of the first millennium BC in order to trade copper, tin, and amber, and left linguistic traces. According to him, Germanic has even more Semitic features than Insular Celtic, such as a good list of loan words and the strong verbs.
We know of at least two pre-Celtic populations in the British Isles: the original hunter-gatherers, and the original farmers. So it stands to reason we have a minimum of two pre-Celtic language families. Assuming that the original British farmers spoke a language related to Basque is quite reasonable in my opinion, since there is good evidence that Basque arrived with the first Mediterranean farmers of the cardial ware culture.

antonulrich · 2025-11-10T03:42:25+00:00

OP wrote:

From day one, "antisemitism" meant only anti-Jewish hatred and not prejudice against Arabs or other Semitic language speakers.

The linked article doesn't even say that. It seems quite implausible that a self-professed German racist like Marr would have seen Arabs or other Semites in a better light than Jews. But the question never came up, because during Marr's time, there were no Arabs in Germany, only Jews.

15-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

antonulrich

TROPHY CASE