Balto-Slavic accentual mobility: an innovation in contact with Balto-Finnic

Some very specific prosodic innovations affected the Balto-Slavic linguistic community, probably at a time when it already showed internal dialectal differences. Whether those innovations were related to archaic remnants stemming from the parent Proto-Indo-European language, and whether that disintegrating community included different dialects, remains an object of active debate.

“Archaic” Balto-Slavic?

The main question about Balto-Slavic is whether this concept represents a single community, or it was rather a continuum formed by two (Baltic and Slavic) or possibly three (East Baltic, West Baltic, Slavic) neighbouring communities, speaking closely related Northern European dialects, which just happened to evolve very close … Read the rest “Balto-Slavic accentual mobility: an innovation in contact with Balto-Finnic”

Improving environmental conditions favoured higher local population density, which favoured domestication

New paper (behind paywall) Hindcasting global population densities reveals forces enabling the origin of agriculture, by Kavanagh et al., Nature Human Behaviour (2018)

Abstract (emphasis mine):

The development and spread of agriculture changed fundamental characteristics of human societies^1,2,3. However, the degree to which environmental and social conditions enabled the origins of agriculture remains contested^4,5,6. We test three hypothesized links between the environment, population density and the origins of plant and animal domestication, a prerequisite for agriculture: (1) domestication arose as environmental conditions improved and population densities increased7 (surplus hypothesis); (2) populations needed domestication to

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Enigmatic -nt-Stems : an investigation of the secondary -t- of the Greek neuter nouns in -men- and *-r/n-

Interesting Master thesis Enigmatic *-nt-Stems: an investigation of the secondary -t- of the Greek neuter nouns in *-men- and *-r/n-, by Stephanie Stringer, Université de Montréal (2018).

Abstract:

This paper aims to provide an explanation of the secondary -t- found in the oblique stem of ancient Greek neuters such as πρᾶγμα, πράγματος and ἧπαρ, ἥπατος. After a brief overview of the Greek data, and a survey of the relevant nominal classes in Greek and Indo- European, previous hypotheses are evaluated. To this end, several problems of nominal morphology are discussed, including the existence of a PIE suffix *-m(e)ntom, the

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