Some skeletal notes on how Georgian historical morphology may inform our understanding of that in Ossetic.
avzaagzonunaada.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/g...
The Human Diversity consortium at the Uni. Turku has organized an interesting workshop on measuring language contact and case studies involving Uralic. Topics cover e.g. borrowability and reconstruction of kinship terms and systems, applying Wanderwörter in triangulating prehistory etc.
I love the "yet" and "current" suggesting that a generally hold view has now been challenged by new data.
Sunwar Rai may have a few Newar loans:
Sunwar šaːr ‘horse’ | Newar Kath. sălă, Dol. sără
Sunwar gaːr ‘wound’ | Newar Kath. gʰaː (gʰală-), Dol. gar | Thangmi gare
For the latter, we also get Thulung, Kulung kʰer, Dumi kar, &c. The ‘wound’ word may be an old Indo-Aryan loan: Skt. gʰāta- > MIA gʰāða-
The most evil people in the world those that have compiled a PDF not pictures, i.e., you can select the text, but they have put a spell so that you can’t copy any of the text or search within the PDF.
There are ways to break the spell, but the point is that it’s extra work.
The word for ‘shit’ is surprisingly resilient in the central Himālayan Sino-Tibetan languages.
(I have only minimally checked in ST languages of Tibet, Burma or NE India; my comparative focus on Nepal and adjacent parts of India & Tibet.)
’Tis a shame Johanna Narten didn’t study the Nart Sagas. She was almost as meant for the task as Arsène Wenger was for coaching Arsenal.
Her palatalized /ɾʲ/ is usually a palatalized tap, at least sometimes devoiced, while velarized /ɾˠ/ is realized as in Irish English, [ɻ(ˠ)]. I like this!
youtube.com/shorts/W67gi...
‘horse’ is pretty isolated in Newar; so, the lookalike in Sunwar rather fishy indeed. Chepang si·raŋ ‘horned deer’ may be a distant cognate.
(Also, just learned that the rGyalrongic languages have some version of “bro” for ‘horse’, which is very apt.)
