The title is click-baity (e.g. what's an "ancient language"?), but the content is still interesting regardless.

A few highlights:

Acc. to the author Great Andamanese ("GA") speakers have been culturally isolated from speakers of other languages for millenniums. It has been described as a dialect continuum, but it's being replaced by Hindi and showing clear signs of language death.

What's unusual about its usage of body parts in the grammar is not the usage itself, but its frequency and how it does it. Excerpts from the article:

If the blood emerged from the feet or legs, it was otei; internal bleeding was etei; and a clot on the skin was ertei. Something as basic as a noun changed form depending on location.

My breakthrough was to realize that the prefix e-, which originally derived from an unknown word for an internal body part, had over eons morphed into a grammatical marker signifying any internal attribute, process or activity. So the act of seeing, ole, being an internal activity, had to be eole. The same prefix could be attached to -bungoi, or “beautiful,” to form ebungoi, meaning internally beautiful or kind; to sare, for “sea,” to form esare, or “salty,” an inherent quality; and to the root word -biinye, “thinking,” to yield ebiinye, “to think.”

Here's Johnny~

This should be a great resource for beginners interested on Historical Linguistics, specially Indo-European studies. Each "lesson" provides a few pieces of information about either one Indo-European language, focusing mostly on historical and cultural information, but they provide a lot of links for people willing to understand one or more languages better.

(And yes, the banner of this community was proudly stolen from that page.)

This paper is '98 and it contrasts the then prevailing theories, in contrast with dialectal and historical evidence, arguing that the origin of periphrastic "do" was a habitual aspect marker.

Two of the earlier hypotheses that the author addresses and criticise:

Contact with Celtic languages - the feature would be borrowed from other languages that English interacted with. Specially prominent due to distribution, as do-periphrasis appeared first on the Western dialects. However unlikely, given that Celtic substratum influence in English was relatively minor.

Some invoke more complex pathways, such as a potential early Germanic-Celtic creolisation; the author claims that this is unattested.

Causative 'do' - occasionally attested in Old English, and frequently in Middle English. I'll adapt the 5a example to highlight the construction:

• I do to-you know[=witan]... that those devil-idols to-you are harm-bearing

Here the usage of "do" would initially mean something like "make", "cause to", "have". For another example [from my own], consider "I did her tell me what was going on" - the "do" has some meaning but it's rather messy, and dependent on the sentence. (Does that "did" mean "encouraged?" "forced?" "asked?")

The author sees the following problems with this hypothesis:

• Origin - do-periphrasis originated in the Western dialects, but those were the one that used causative do the least.
• Motivation - it's harder to claim that an optional causative "do", with no independent semantic value, would eventually evolve into the do-support currently used.

Other hypotheses addressed were the usage of 'do' as a perfective aspect marker and verbal ellipsis. And then the author actually addresses the hypothesis he believes to be correct, linking current do-support to the habitual aspect; for example, in the sentence "I do browse Lemmy", that "do" can be understood as both an emphasiser and as conveying "by rule, usually".

Hey everyone, new mod here. I'd like to hear you on a few things, in order to make this community grow:

1. Who should be the primary target audience of this community?

We could tailor it primarily for layperson or for people with deeper Linguistics knowledge. Or we could simply let it roll.

2. Which type of moderation do you guys like? Stricter or laxer?

A stricter moderation would include rules like "quote your sources", "no crack theories" (proto- or pseudo-scientific hypotheses lacking methodological rigour), stuff like this; it would also mean that I'd discourage off-topic a bit further.

3. "Almost no crown or cross" rule: yes, no, indifferent?

By "almost no cross or cross" I mean that posters would only be able to talk about politics and religion as much as necessary for the subject of Linguistics. For example you'd be still fine posting something like this, but you wouldn't be able to discuss here the Marxist side of the matter, only the Linguistic one. Just an example, mind you.

4. How much do you know about Linguistics?

Are you a grad, undergrad, informed layperson, or just curious? Are there areas that you feel confident on, like Sociolinguistics or Phonetics or something like this?

5. Which type of content do you want to see here?

Papers? Videos? Discussions? Historical Linguistics? Sociolinguistics? Phonetics and Phonology? Since mods are IMO responsible to nurture a community, I don't mind looking for stuff to post here, but I'd like to know which one.

Thank you!

EDIT: I'm reading all your comments, even the ones that I didn't reply to, OK?

I just posted a paper, but I think that this should be more approachable for people here. It shows a rather interesting pattern between Germanic languages (English, German, Icelandic, Gothic...) and most other Indo-European languages, caused by a sound change. A few examples using Latin vs. English:

• pēs (foot) vs. foot
• trēs (three) vs. three
• canis (dog) vs. hound; see German "Hund" dog for reference
• decem (ten) vs. ten
• gelū (ice) vs. cold
• frāter (brother) vs. brother

Note how the consonants look like they went a "merry-go-round" from one language to another:

• Latin fricative vs. English voiced stop
• Latin voiced stop vs. English voiceless stop
• Latin voiceless stop vs. English fricative

That's all caused by the regular sound changes explained in the Wiki link.

This paper from Silvia Luraghi explores the origin of PIE grammatical gender system, as well as proposing how it appeared in the language, in a way that accounts for the following discrepancy:

• Hittite - two genders system: animate and inanimate
• Late PIE - typically three genders system: masculine, feminine, and neuter

The animate and inanimate genders would've been inherited by late PIE as the masculine and neuter genders respectively, while the feminine would be the result of a derivational suffix *-h₂ being attached to words, and eventually triggering agreement. Note that the typical IE feminine /a/ (you see it in Latin/Romance and Slavic languages, for example) is believed to be from *h₂, as it's the a-colouring laryngeal.

I know that this paper might be a bit too deep for most folks here to parse, so if you feel intimidated, don't be afraid to ask for help.

The sole current moderator of that community is banned, and I wish to see that community thrive. That's it.

Inflammatory picture obviously related.

A lot of deletion/edition tools rely on the API in order to work. As such, they'll stop working on the 1st of July, as the API price changes start being enforced. Better do it now than never.

In my humble opinion, the easiest of them to use would be Power Delete Suite. [See EDIT 2] It allows you to export your content if you so desire.

There's also dessalines' Reddit-History (yup, the Lemmy admin!) that helps you to export your stuff, in case that you want to do it in a more fine-grained way.

There are other tools to do it, however, so pick the one that you like the most.

Should I delete my content? Or edit it?

Up to you. I think that it simple deletion is enough.

However, if you want to edit your content, keep in mind that Reddit likely wants to capitalise on data model training, so pick one of the two choices:

1. Blabber.

Random words, in an agrammatical word order, devoid of any sort of meaning. Introducing noise on the data models makes the data from Reddit considerably less reliable.

If you feel specially uninspired, here's a random word generator. You could also try Zompist's gen, it's a tool intended for people constructing languages, but it's damn good to generate non-linguistic babble.

2. Some message against Reddit.

Don't use swear words, as those might get filtered. Something as simple and short as "potatoes are great because Reddit is a scummy company" goes a long way.

That would also help to pinpoint which companies are doing businesses with Reddit, and pressure them to stop doing it.

Noooo! Think on all the helpful threads!

You can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. While it's true that some information will be lost (less if you back up your content elsewhere), overall you're doing better for the internet by not playing along a clearly hostile agent in it.

EDIT:

Thinking about Reddit Inc.'s strategy to get money, perhaps it is better if you replace the content of your comments with random babble than if you simply delete it, if you want them to lose money.

Random babble is not just less useful for those large language models; it's outright poisonous, it's worth less than nothing. I might be wrong but I think that it decreases the value of the platform even further than plain deletion.

(EDIT 2 REASON: replacing j0be's Power Delete Suite link with one for a more updated version, that avoids a bug where posts/comments remain unedited.)

Popcorn, anyone?

A TL;DR:

• Laying out context and background info (API prices)
• Exposing maths on API access prices, in comparison with Imgur ones, to show that they are unreasonable.
• Concluding that Reddit is using the huge prices to intentionally kill third party apps*.
• Talking about the poor quality of the official app.
• How the move effectively deplatforms blind people, followed by a Torvalds style "fuck you, Reddit".
• ~~Cat tax at 7:20~~
• Devil's lawyer point: the fact that we cannot see Reddit's finances, as it is not a public company.
• The "fever dream" of the 2010s, and how many companies of those times were never profitable, as they were focusing on [my own words] on the value instead of the profit [/my own words]
• Mentions on how even the site originally hosting the video [Youtube - NB, the link is from Odysee] lost money in those times, as well as Twitter did, implying that Reddit is probably in the same bag.
• Talking about transparency - i.e. that if Reddit is bleeding money, it should say it, so the users do not assume the worst. That concludes the devil's lawyer point, as he shows that even if it was a necessary action from Reddit's side of the thing (is it?), it's still scummy as fuck.
• On users losing trust on Reddit and saying "we're leaving". Ipsis litteris "the community will remember what you did, and screwing over vast swaths of disabled people is a really, really great way to look like the type of piece of shit that nobody wants to give money or revenue to, ever again."
• Telling Reddit to either reconsider the decision or at the very least give it a damn good reason, otherwise users will outright refuse to use Reddit or do it with the most restricted ad blocking possible.

*personal note: Rossmann didn't mention it, but I will. Reddit is lying that it doesn't want to kill third party apps, and the lie itself makes everything worse.