History, Politics And Current Affairs

I suppose the, linguistically, the "smoking gun" would be the identification of a (or better, several) non-Indoeuropean loans in Germanic that look relate to non-Finnougrian loans in Sami. Which might yet happen, but might not even if the theory is true: we're talking about tiny, minuscule...

I liked the quote from one of the scientists involved when this was reported in the "New York Times"-- along the lines of "I'm fascinated to find out about Neanderthal dentistry... and very glad I don't have to undergo it."

Thank you for posting that! I hadn't seen reports on this research. ((I'd be cautious about betting large sums of money on the results, though. DNA genealogies and language aren't quite as tightly connected as I'd want them to be before making big bets. English is a Germanic language, with only very...

STRONGLY recommended book on this topic: "The Invaders," by Pat Shipman (under $30.00 from Amazon, I think). Shipman is, I think, an anthropologist by training, and has written a number of enjoyable books on palaeontology-related topics (incl: "Taking Wing," on the original of bi...

From a linguistics blog: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=60750#more-60750 Doesn't tell us much more than Micael's first post, but (i) professionals in the field seem to be impressed (and inclined to trust the judgment of the person who identified it as Indo-European), (ii) they are hoping f...

Place names seem to be a standard sort of "linguistic fossil" preserving previous languages: apparently when speakers of something new move into a territory, they adopt very little of the "aborigines'" language, but find it convenient to continue to use the "aboriginal"...

Neat find indeed, and thank you for posting it: I hadn't heard about this. "Palaic," one of the other (Anatolian subfamily) Indo-European languages mentioned, is, I think, known ONLY from Hittite sources. I think the thinking behind the Hittite recording of other languages was that, when a...

Thanks for replies!

Re:
"Now there’s also a study out that says that Neanderthals made flour 43-41,000 years ago."
--Worth remembering next time somebody talks about the "Paleo" diet!

OSCSSW-- Thanks for giving us some Victorian prose to practice reading (grin!). (I tend to find English written between the early 1800s and, say, 1910, more difficult to understand than either more recent or slightly older prose. But this passage was certainly worth the effort to decode!) The proble...

Re: nuclear locomotives (post by rtoldman): the idea of a nuclear locomotive was investigated in the 1950s: I think Alco (American Locomotive Company, a steam locomotive manufacturer that made a fairly successful transition to diesels in a consortial arrangement with General Electric) was involved, ...

So, does E.E. Cummings's typewriter have a shift key?

Ummm... Why does the Baltic have exceptional preservation of wooden shipwrecks? The Black Sea I semi-understand: the (lighter) fresh water from the rivers feeding into it doesn't mix, but forms a top layer, so the deeper water never comes into contact with the air, so is de-oxygenated and there is n...