Most of my dumb jokes don’t work in English, but here’s some that do:

• A Buddhist goes to the hot dog stall. What does he ask for? “Make me one with everything.”
• You heard about the claustrophobic astronaut? He just wanted some space!

Stop looking me weird when I eat banana with gorgonzola, folks! It’s actually tasty.

Also, at least in my chunk of South America, people look at the eggs+pork combo as something outright gross, but I got to admit that I love some pork sausages with fried eggs.

I drink half cola half wine. People scream bloody murder at me. I don’t care - it’s awesome. (If trying it do it with cheap wine, it’s a waste to do it with good wine.)

I’ve seen plenty people eating ham with melons, so this combo doesn’t look weird at all for me.

Portuguese is more conservative on analysis; like, the phonemic inventory doesn’t change that much from Continental Proto-Romance. But once you look at the surface, you find a bunch of weird stuff, like:

• a general tendency to convert /Cl/ clusters into /Cɾ/; see praia/playa, cravo/clavo, or dialectally *prástico (standard: “plástico”). You typically don’t see this much in Spanish, except in the Caribbean. It’s nowadays stigmatised but still an ongoing process in some dialects (like Caipira).
• even conservative Portuguese dialects have a tendency to shift to stress timing on quick speech, with vowel reduction and/or elision. On the other hand Spanish typically keeps itself syllable timed, even on quick speech.
• most intervocalic /l/ and /n/ are gone, except in reborrowings. Some /n/'s got regenerated as /ɲ/, but that’s from a nasal vowel splitting again into oral vowel + nasal consonant. See e.g. cor/color, coroa/corona, boa/buena.
• the nasal vowels are becoming phonemic, Lombard/French style; in some situations you can’t simply analyse, say, [ẽ] or [ə̃] as /eN/ and /aN/ any more.
• rhotics. Unlike Spanish, Portuguese never backed /ʃ/ into [x], so there was that “gap” in the phonology that got filled by /r/ instead: [r]→[ʀ ʁ ɦ x χ h], with all intermediate links popping up in some dialect. In the meantime /ɾ/ became [ɾ ɹ ɻ], with [ɻ] trying to split into a third phoneme.

There’s also a bunch of phenomena that appear in both, but got stigmatised in Portuguese and accepted in Spanish. A good example of that is yeísmo - it does pop up in Portuguese but it’s associated with rural people, and seen as “poor speech”.

Sorry for the wall of text.

Hey, I ain’t dissin’ Chilean varieties!

…plus my native language (Portuguese) is a lot like “Spã’ish but you’re too lazy to prõ’ounce a few softer cõsonants, so you simp’y skip them.”, accordingly to some folks.

I remember a fair bit of my early childhood:

• My older sister playing school with me. I was three or so. That’s how I learned to read.
• When my mum taught me about the “little dragons” in our bodies; basically a child-friendly way to teach how sickness works, and how our bodies deal with them.
• My 4yo birthday. It wasn’t anything special, but I remember jumping all happy across the kitchen.
• A few times that my father ruined family meal. Making my sister cry, making me cry, whining incessantly about the food, encouraging me to eat the cooked yolk that my mum would use in the dish, this kind of thing.
• My grandma pouring condensed milk over my chocolate milk, and saying “shh, don’t tell your mum”.
• Locking my grandpa’s dog inside the basement, and getting gently lectured by him, on how the dog would feel afraid and lonely.
• My ophthalmologist asking me if I wanted pineapple or strawberry-flavoured eye drops. I was six or so. (More than three decades later, he’s still the one taking care of my eyes.)

Thank you! Sadly, I don’t talk too much about PIE in Lemmy because… well, it’s kind of a niche subject that most users don’t care too much about.

Feel free to ask for further info on stuff, though. I do enjoy talking about it!

A few additional ones. I’ll list them in the nominative and then vocative (vocative makes more sense for insults).

• fungus putridus / funge putride - rotten mushroom. Something/someone worthless. Attested in Plautus.
• merda / merda - another word for shit. This one is still understood and used by Romance speakers, and depending on the language it’s pronounced almost the same, [mɛɾ.dɐ], so discretion is advised. You can also use it to refer to something that is crap, Martial did this for example.
• lupa / lupa - she-wolf; slang for prostitute.
• filius lupae / filī lupae - son of a she-wolf/bitch.
• uerpus / uerpe - of a penis, showing the glans. When used as a noun it typically refers to either someone who’s shameless / a horny dog or circumcised.
• stultus / stulte - dumb
• asinus / asine - donkey
• scelus / scelus - wicked, heinous
• luteus - [you’re] filthy. In 2025 that doesn’t seem like a big deal but you’d get yourself killed in Roman times for that.
• Iuppiter te perdat! - may Jupiter destroy you. Roughly “get damned”.

Biting to call attention
Lying on someone else’s belly
Neck scritches

…are those feathered cats or what? Awesome.

I hope your back gets better!

Thanks!

Ha, ha. Veeeeeeeeeerrry funny.

[Okay, that’s actually fun.]

I’ll be sure to drop some posts about Semitic languages and such later on :)

Please do it! I’d bet that a lot of members would love it. (I do, at least.)

how did we figure out they were there, and which PIE words had them and which ones didn’t?

Mostly by the effect in the nearby vowels - often, a sound triggers changes in nearby sounds, before being dropped.

Here’s an example. Greek often shows an initial vowel where other IE languages show none. Like this:

Disregard for a moment the last line, focus on the first four. Why is Greek showing “random” initial vowels where Sanskrit and Latin have none? There’s no underlying pattern; it’s probably inherited then.

However, you can’t simply claim that Greek inherited the vowel and the other two lost it, without causing a problem: why didn’t Sanskrit and Latin delete the initial vowel from अज्र / ájra and ager?

The solution that a linguist called Saussure found to oddities like this was to propose that PIE had three sounds, not directly inherited by the descendants. He called them *ə₁ ə₂ ə₃; nowadays we call them *h₁ h₂ h₃. In that specific environment (word start, before a consonant):

• Greek: h₁→e, h₂→a, h₃→o.
• Latin, Sanskrit: get rid of them

And the initial vowel in the fifth line (that pops up in all four) is actually inherited.

(The ancestors of those five words are nowadays reconstructed as *h₁lewdʰ-, *h₁régʷos, *h₂stḗr, *h₃dónts, *h₂éǵros. Sure, the fifth one has a laryngeal… but also a vowel, that’s the vowel being inherited by Sanskrit and Latin.)

That hypothesis also helps in quite a few other situations, like:

• Why do sometimes a long vowel pops up from nowhere? A: short vowel + laryngeal.
• If PIE loved triconsonantal roots so bloody much, why do some roots have less consonants than expected? A: a laryngeal got deleted.
• Where did Sanskrit get those aspirated consonants from? A: from a stop consonant followed by a laryngeal.

Also, note that, when Hittite was discovered, all that “laryngeals” talk stopped being just a conjecture - because Hittite did preserve at least *h₂ and *h₃, and probably also *h₁ (it depends on how you analyse the cuneiform spelling).

Welcome! I didn’t realize there were this many Latin hobbyists on Lemmy, either :)

I’ve studied it in my grad. Nowadays I’m a bit rusted in the language, so doing weird shit like translating Pulp Fiction excerpts into it, just to avoid the brain rot. (Or to deepen it.)

Those are placeholders. “We don’t know what this sound is supposed to be, so we plop h+number there and call it a day.” You’ll see some reconstructions using *ə₁ *ə₂ *ə₃ instead, same deal.

That said, the Anatolian languages (Hittite, Luwian etc. - the whole branch is extinct) preserved a few of those laryngeals; compare for example Latin ⟨ouis⟩ and Hittite ⟨𒇻𒅖⟩ ḫāwis, from PIE *h₂ówis (sheep). Since Anatolian split way before the other languages, this makes me wonder if they weren’t vocalised already in Late Proto-Indo-European.

Cross posted from: Latin@lemm.ee

…communitatem de linguā latinā habemus? Nesciebam! /me subscribit

Feel free to cross-post this stuff in !linguistics@mander.xyz by the way, it’s right into the comm’s alley.

There’s a bunch of guesses on how *h₁ *h₂ and *h₃ were pronounced in this Wikipedia page. They’re usually defined by their effect in child languages though, so it’s possible that some of those were actually multiple sounds.

For *h₃ you’ll often see values like [ɣʷ] or [ʁʷ]; a labialised consonant (to explain why it often turns nearby vowels into [o] ) and voiced (as there are some claims that it voices nearby consonants, mostly Cowgill’s Law)

My personal guess for *h₃ is completely heterodox, [ɸ]~[β]. I think that it’s directly associated with *b being so uncommon in PIE.

I think it’s Sunday.

I like to use “muppet”, since it’s less attached to disabilities. (Some able-minded people act irrationally and they do need to be called out on that, sometimes with insults, otherwise they’ll keep doing it and keep being a dead weight and a burden to the others.)

I’m not a big fan of “drunk” or “high”. It doesn’t deliver the point well, I think.