Mike Rieger, PhD

Super excited to take Beginner's Ancient Greek with the Ancient Language Institute this summer!

Hoping they reverse the ban soon, I have work to do!

I'd love $30!

I don't wanna fill out this NSF survey of PhDs because there is no promise of free shirt, mug, tote bag, or gift card!!

The fun part is I have nice quality imaging systems in my lab for the data analysis :)

An analogy using feathers to explain molarity to my 80 year old dad lol.

Welp guess I'm gonna be my kid sister's high school chemistry tutor during funemployment break haha!

I find the plosive makes the fricative part more explosive. But a fricative takes less effort. But effort doesn't equal volumetric saliva output lol

I'm new here love to see it lol

I dunno [kx] and [pf] feel more spitty to me than [x] and [f] when I do it but I'll need to measure the output with tools in the lab maybe I'm just being more forceful with affricates for funsies

I love that my silly take that when ph->pf and kh -> kx everyone is probably constantly spitting on each other has evolved into a lively discussion about phoneme change

Oh neat!

Is it dental too?

In this case what ties these two together is the form
[θ(a/ə/ɪ)mː] ثم which I believe occurs in a number of Bedouin and varieties in the Arabian peninsula(?). But still *p(?)m is likely ancestral because Hebrew has /pe/ פה, Aramaic has /pum/ פם, and Akkadian has /pu/ .

Here is a fun example of the opposite of lenition occurring, with a change in place of articulation! Classical Arabic for mouth فم [fam:] to dialectal تم [tʰəm:] or [tʰɪm:].

Modern Greek has [f] for ancestral pʰ. I can articulate p͡ɸ just fine though, seems straightforward from a strongly aspirated pʰ.

Is the Amazigh /t/ aspirated or unaspirated? I find an unaspirated t -> θ not surprising, especially if it is a dental consonant and not alveolar. But an aspirated tʰ straight to θ is interesting!

Yeah data is always spotty diachronically. People think Greek χ went through kh - kx - x but maybe k-x and k-kx happened independently in different places. Data where kx only existed but x did not yet exist would help support the intermediate phase.

Oh yeah I wasn't even thinking about a geminate sorry I think I was being biased in my mind based on how "apple" is spelled in English. Which when cognates like English have /p/ makes me think the German sound is an affricate resulting from an aspirate. I think /p/ is the ancestral sound

A brainstem circuit for phonation and volume control in mice - Nature Neuroscience The authors identify a cluster of ~160 peptidergic neurons in the mouse brainstem whose activity is necessary and sufficient for producing sound and controlling sound volume. These neurons form the fi...

Cool new paper on the nucleus retroambiguus and phonation control in mice. Authors ablate vocalization using Casp3, or use optogenetics to elicit vocalization, associated with projections to respiratory nuclei and correlated to laryngeal activity.
#neuroskyence
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So nothing to me is surprising about /pf/ in Apfel being stable. However if there were a dialect that had *Affel, I _would_ be surprised if it did not have *Apfel in a prior stage and proceeded directly from *Appel.

We can only hypothesize or find evidence of intermediates, but no sound is ever "destined" to become something. Anything can be an intermediate in a process to something else or it can be a stable end-point on its own.

I tend to think of all of these problems purely probabilistically. We should expect there are period in history when multiple allophones are all co-occurring. Some routes are more likely than others because of physiology. Some allophones pass away and others rise to prominence.

Consider voiced stops that become spirantized like in Spanish, Greek, Aramaic, others. b -> (β,β̞ ) or g -> (ɣ, ɣ̞) is quite natural. If you try the exercise with ph -> f directly it seems challenging, I can feel myself wanting to do [pf] first. But [pf] could of course be stable on its own.

So in other words, /ph/ -> /pf/ -> /f/ and /ph/->/pf/ are both quite reasonable. But physiologically /ph/ -> /f/ directly should be lower frequency of occurrence because you have to change multiple features in one shot.

Sure I don't think there is any reason to believe an affricate cannot be stable. Phonologically speaking it is a logical intermediate between a voiceless aspirated plosive and a later fricative. I think quite like biological evolution, sound change is not a goal-directed linear trajectory.

Are there any modern German dialects that have for example *f instead of /pf/, like *Affel for Apfel ?

It is of course equally possible that [kx] and [x] exist as regional variants of the same phoneme in parallel and then for sociocultural reasons [x] replaces [kx] everywhere.

I'm sure it doesn't always have to. Greek is my main focus rn; I believe there are graffiti that attest variant spellings κχ or πφ where χ or φ might be expected. The main work on this is Horrocks, Geoffrey, 2010. Anyway add needed "can"s and "might"s to my silly take if you like.

Lenition of aspirated stops to fricatives passes through an affricate intermediate kʰ → kx →x, pʰ →pɸ,pf →ɸ,f and that is so fun because there was this intermediate period where everyone in a language community was going around spitting on each other constantly via forceful aspiration. #langsky

And to level up gel extraction for yield and concentration, I use homemade buffers and have ditched columns in favor of Silane dynabeads. 🙃
www.thermofisher.com/order/catalo...