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Re:Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry acro... by MengerSponge on Friday January 07, 2022 @02:09PM (#29843358)
Reading about ultraconserved words really makes me hungry for lox.
Re:Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry acro... by mcguire on Friday January 07, 2022 @03:57PM (#29844704)
Why would you want to ingest liquid oxygen? :-)
Re:Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry acro... by ThomasWinwood on Friday January 07, 2022 @05:30PM (#29845763)
For the benefit of future readers who don't get it, if nothing else: the "salmon problem" (in German Lachsargument) is an old argument that the origin of the Indo-European language family should be in the Baltic region, because the word for "salmon" is found in both the Germanic and Balto-Slavic branches. Later research in the Caucasus found that the reflexes of the word referred to trout, which is found in rivers on the Eurasian steppe. (They're both species in the genus Salmo, so it makes sense that semantic drift would occur in populations moving to a new area.)