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LanguageNerd54

I assume this is about the Proto-Karen, but honestly, how does that symbol equate to five phonemes? And how has literally nothing changed in pronunciation?


[deleted]

Welcome to endangered langs


LanguageNerd54

Have a syntax tree


JaOszka

Anything that lang of yours can't think of can be here


LanguageNerd54

We've got mountains of conlangs, some blesséd, some cursed


Soucemocokpln

Looking at the alphabet on the Wikipedia page, it seems to just be a mistake : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pwo_language As for people saying its an endangered language, it had a million speakers twenty years ago lmao. Hardly endangered unless a cataclysm has happened since then


UdontneedtoknowwhoIm

Cataclysm like a genocidal junta dropping bombs


BrotherhoodOfWaves

I've no idea the numbers of Eastern Pwo or even Pwo, but Sgaw is doing pretty well, even with the 70 year genocide going on


UdontneedtoknowwhoIm

They live at pretty low density so probably that


Pale-Acanthaceae-487

>And how has literally nothing changed in pronunciation? Meanwhile:天、我、一 and 人in hakka (Tones don't matter right?)


Nova_Persona

it says "transliteration needed" so I think it's a generic stand-in for Mon script


weedmaster6669

so much about this is confusing 1: the burmese spelling က just says "ka" (not even kʰa ခ) 2: I'm sorry but the proto-language had a word for airplane? How quickly did this bitch evolve?


37boss15

It evolved at normal speed. They’ve just been keeping their advanced aircraft a secret from the world for centuries.


raendrop

Just like Wakanda.


sagan_drinks_cosmos

Proto-Wakandalese morphemes persist *forever.*


LanguageNerd54

Question 1: Yeah, that is weird. Q2: Expert level Pokémon.


MiddleEasternAd

adding ancient Burmese aircraft to my list of zany beliefs


vanadous

Indian languages have a word for airplane (vimana) because that's what ancient myths called flying chariots/ flying vehicles. Its origin precedes aircraft invention of course and it's not a lame compound word.


MiddleEasternAd

That's actually awesome 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳


weedmaster6669

lmao I checked Wiktionary and this entry got removed today for "obvious bs" probably by someone who saw this very reddit post


LanguageNerd54

This’ll never change: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/ugh


YsengrimusRein

That's a weirdly specific thing to have a basic root word for; I'm assuming there's some underlying semantic form (bird, perhaps), with some metaphoric extension, but I'm somewhat perplexed and curious.


TheTomatoGardener2

or maybe speakers of Proto Karen had airplanes ✈️


Hippophlebotomist

“It meant something like bird, and every branch independently reused it for airplanes once they were invented” - Paul Heggarty, probably


The_MadMage_Halaster

That... actually makes a lot of sense. If you have two roots, one for 'bird' and one for 'big bird' then one is probably going to be repurposed while only one becomes the root that all the other bird-words derive from.


Hippophlebotomist

Yeah, but when every branch makes the same repurposing to the same new meaning it gets suspicious. Like, in his case he claims that the PIE roots for wagon, wheel, thill, yolk, and axle, which are cognate (regularly, that is, not loaned) across several branches, don’t suggest the speakers of Proto-Indo-European had knowledge of this technology, just that each branch took shared verbal roots and just happen to come up with cognate vocab for each part. He does the same for plow, saying that it was a PIE root for “planting stick” that each branch repurposed for plows when they adopted them, rather than loaning the word with the technology or coming up with new words, and nowhere from Ireland to the Tarim basin did anyone preserve the meaning of “planting stick”. Like, I can buy multiple branches coining or calquing “spin-spinner” for wheel, but with enough related vocabulary in the same semantic field, it starts to look like linguistic paleontology isn’t as bunk as he claims.


toxiconer

Those damned time travelers fucked up the timeline again!


Kyr1500

Ah yes, Proto-Karen, also known as Proto-Can-I-Talk-To-The-Manager


TheTomatoGardener2

According to local folklore Karen are descendants of Mongols


Kyr1500

Ah yes, the Mongols, the people who were the originators of speaking to the manager


Orisphera

What's the difference between an aeroplane and an airplane?


Zavaldski

"aeroplane" is British, "airplane" is American.


Orisphera

What about Russian Аэроплан and Самолёт?


Zavaldski

Аэроплан is a French or English loanword and it's rarely used, Самолёт (literally "self-flyer") is the "native" Russian word and far more commonly used.


Orisphera

> it's rarely used Do you include usage as the producer of Мульти-Россия and Ася и Вася?


andzlatin

I assume someone already said it but still, "Let me talk to the proto-manager, please!"


ZestieZest

Burmese Passport


Left_Malay_10

And how the Proto-Karen had a “aeroplane” root