The CBB

It is certainly an interesting construction. And you've got me thinking about it, though my conclusion is rather more prosaic than yours! Of course, loads of things can take cashier's place. Yes, of course - I thought that would be clear from context, and from my suggestion of 'page' as an equivale...

Even in English, the idea of fog "rising" is confusing. When mists begin, they rise, and so if a mist got thicker you could loosely say it was rising. However, fogs fall, or descend. If someone told me the fog was rising, I would probably assume they meant the fog was lifting (i.e. getting less thic...

On the contrary, gender-changing is very common. Well, it's "oh, it's that thing again" common, though it's not "oh not another culture with that thing" common. European cultural imperialism, however, has made it much less frequent. In a lot of cultures with (using the term for the sake of convenien...

* habukaz still has a fricative in Old English, Old Frisian, Old Irish, and Proto-Finnic (which we can tell from the Veps reflex) - it was already lost in Old Norse. Yet the fricative has been dropped in Modern English, Modern Frisian, Modern Irish**, and Modern Finnish. Interesting There is a famo...

Yes

And also in English (eg. "hawk", from Gmc habukaz * - see German "Habicht"). But that's an ordinary change, crosslinguistically: /w/ and /j/ frequently appear and disappear in hiatus adjacent to round and front vowels respectively. A change like /t/ > /0/ before front vowels or back vowels. wouldn't...

Is that true? Positive and negative commands are generally considered to have different modality. Is this not also the case for interogatives? EDIT: even if the two "moods" are analysed as polarity variants within a single mood, it would surely still make sense to refer to them as moods in the conte...

No.

Nope.

Nor, to be honest, is it from anything that you're likely to be able to guess at this stage, given what you do and don't know yet...

Spoiler alert: a Greek population HAS survived! (linguistically, if arguably not genetically). If you mean specifically in Western Europe: probably not, no, but theoretically maybe, but probably not, no. But I can't really answer questions properly, if you don't pause on one before moving to the nex...

Note: many of the letters in the second inscription appear to be mirrored from those in the first - see the 'K', for instance. However, some aren't - the 'H with diagonal midbar' has the midbar highest on the right in each case. The usual way to go about a decipherment of a substitution cipher is a ...

You're on an excellent and sensible track... which is unfortunately completely wrong. It's not related to angwijana, though I admit it looks like it should be. [without running it through the soundchange machine, my immediate thought is that there would be umlaut, but it wouldn't look like it to cas...

All of this is correct. The -ang- element (forgive my laziness with my own orthography!) is indeed descended from a PGmc verb root.

Well, I'm glad you've given it some thought! [it's better to be thoughtfully wrong than unthinkingly right...] I'll reply in a bit more detail tomorrow, but the key thing to say immediately is: urbanisation and population movement actually both tend to lead to more language change rather than less (...

How about, rather than us giving you a narrow answer, you show us some of your own thinking?

Why might you think that an enduring Empire would affect the linguistic development?
And what makes you think that your answer to that question may not be correct?

It is not.

Yes!

You know, there's actually a thread specifically for posting quick questions in. Obviously a key counterquestion here would be when this invasion happened. I think k123 interpreted you (as I initially did) as saying that there was a German invasion instead of ('replacing') the Norman one, which woul...

I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. Stop clusters are rare (compared to the total number of languages), but they're so widespread it's hard to really generalise about them. [one weird thing in PIE is the presence of "thorn clusters": an alveolar stop followed by a velar stop. The weird...

Correct.