This is for everyone: I've got something that's been on my mind for a while. Most odd language characteristics I can understand how they evolved, that is see the intermediate steps. Tones in Sinic languages come, probably, from the elimination of final consonants and glottal stops in either Old or Middle Chinese (Punjabi also apparently got tones from breathed voiced consonants). It's easy to imagine languages relexifying words and slowly becoming more agulative (like English's "unfuckingbelievable") or the opposite happening, and a language becoming more isolating. I imagine that the noun class prefixes in Bantu languages (Batswana is the place, Setswana is the language, etc) originate in relexification of once separate words, etc. I can imagine there are easily explainable origins of all sorts of weird tenses, and moods, and cases, and phonologies.

But where did the Semitic trilateral root system come from? What were the intermediate steps between what it was before and what it is now? I read recently that some three letter roots started off as two letter roots (and then a third letter, indicating causation or some similar idea, became the norm and the two letter root dropped out of usage), but that doesn't help explain how we end up with a root system that is very consistent (in that most words are from productive roots) but to my knowledge hasn't appeared in any other region. It's like a language a linguist would design (and many conlangers have glommed on to the idea of consonant roots), but where does it come from? How did we get it, what were the intermediate steps?

Also, is there any specific sequence for vowel harmony arising? Like trilateral roots, it's hard for me to understand how this trait can start somewhere and gradually become present in the whole language.

Also, are there any other language features that you yourselves wonder, "How the hell did this ever evolve? I understand how it's used now, but how did it ever arise?"

How reliably can we gender names in various languages? If we find a single mention of a name on a coin or a tomb or a list of rulers how reliably can we tell just from the name if a person was male or female?

The specific language I'm interested in is the language of southern Britain in about AD 15 and how sure are with that "Anarevito" is male?

For all the panelists:

In your opinion, what is the most interesting or promising research being tackled in the field at present? Either in historical linguistics generally or in your area specifically. In other words, what are the big debates or "hot" areas of research at the moment?

What do we k ow about proto-romance? For example, Did features in say Iberian Latin in late antiquity have features present in Spanish? What about other areas of the empire? Could there have been a North African Romance?

This is for all the panelists. Firstly though, thank you for doing this AMA! Even though I know absolutely nothing about it, I find linguistics in general, and especially historical linguistics, really fascinating.

For some context, this question arises out of my ability to read older texts in pre-modern forms of the languages I speak. For French or English, I can usually read stuff well enough to get the general gist of what's going on (by speaking words aloud etc.) back to the 14th century: so basically Chaucher and legal stuff in French in the British Isles. In French in fact, with more difficulty, I can go back to the late 1100s and still have some grasp of what's happening. But I can't read the Anglo-Saxon chronicle in the original (11th century, for later bits) nor Beowulf. I can however, get the same general understanding of Old Irish texts from much earlier, such as the 'Misse ocus Pangúr Bán' poem (9th cent.) posted in the trivia Tuesday thread. It's only when you go back to 7th/8th century legal texts that I get lost in Irish.

So my question (finally!) is why this happens? Why do some languages seemingly evolve faster than others? How much has to change before languages become unintelligible? How is language evolution paced i.e. is it pretty continuous or do you get periods of intense and radical change followed by eras with much less?

What's your favorite word, phrase, or grammatical thing in your languages of study? Why, what's interesting about it?

What is the current consensus on the origins and early development of Greek? Apparently, the Mycenaeans were Greek speakers but the Minoans weren't? Is that still current? An the Dorians showed up later?

How distinct, really, are Belorussian and Ukrainian from modern Russian? Were these differences larger in the past?

I don't speak any of these languages, and when I've asked native speakers I've gotten a range of answers that suggest the issue is rather politicized these days.

Also: What's up with the consonant clusters in Polish?

paging /u/rusoved

So... how many languages do you guys read and write? How well?

What general tips can you give for learning a historical language?

Question for /u/keyilan:

I was reading through Jerry Norman's "Chinese" the other day and was fascinated by a chapter discussing tonal development in Chinese historical phonology, and particularly how Old Chinese might not have been tonal, but varied instead by final consonant (like the ru "entering tone" ending in p, t, or k in modern Chinese dialects). The chapter discusses how modern Vietnamese, which is as tonally complex as any conservative Chinese dialect, can be shown to be derived from an atonal protolanguage (Haudricourt, and others).

Has your research on Sinotibetan languages shed any more light on the tonal development of Old Chinese?

Were there any known lingua francae in Mexico used between speakers of Nahuatl and Mayan? How close are those language groups anyway (like Romantic and Germanic, or like Romantic and Chinese?). What about between Mexican and now-US Indigenous languages?

What is the consensus on whether the quipu can be decoded into a writing system (I think this was mentioned as highly speculative in 1491)

For /u/l33t_sas: How has the specific human geography of the Pacific islands affected linguistic evolution in the region?

For /u/limetom: I asked this question on asklinguistics a few days ago but didn't get a satisfactory answer. In Japan the Tsugaru Dialect of Japanese is often considered very different from other dialects of the language. It's nearly unintelligible for native Japanese speakers who are not from the area. Is the Tsugaru Dialect actually linguistically distinct from the rest of Japanese, and why is it so difficult for non-tsugaru Japanese speakers to understand?

Why did English lose its genders, if anyone knows?

Were there an Indo European people with an indo European language?

For everyone: So, as far as I know, the rough consensus of archaeologists and people who study this sort of thing is that people first came from Asia to the Americas around 16,000 years ago. Every time I try to look up more information about this matter, however, I run into someone saying that linguists believe that it must have taken at least 40,000 years (or some other very large number) for the languages of the Americas to have developed the kind of diversity that existed before the arrival of Columbus. I've never heard this from an actual historical linguist, though. Is this something historical linguists actually assert, or are they being misrepresented? Is the linguistic evidence so strong that it would override the archaeological evidence? Does linguistic diversity really indicate the length of time people have been in a particular area? (That seems a little funny to me, at least from what I know about history and linguistic diversity. Wouldn't that suggest that humans evolved in the Caucasus, or New Guinea, or something like that?) What do you guys think about this?

For /u/rusoved: How come Czech and Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian and Belarusian (East Slavic) have H but no G, and all the others have G but no H? It seems quite unlikely to me that this is something that Czech/Slovak picked up from Ukrainian/Belarusian or the other way around. If I'm remembering correctly, the original sound was some sort of throaty voiced fricative (sorry, I'm not sure of the correct term). When did this sound shift occur? Why does it exist only in some branches of West Slavic and some of East Slavic? That's weird, right? Or is this just something that strikes me as weird because I don't know enough about linguistics?

A question for /u/rusoved: Are they any left over traces of Greek in the form of loanwords/roots in Ukrainian or other Eastern European languages that had a historical connection with Greek colonies on the northern shore of the Black Sea?

/u/CommodoreCoCo

How much Inca/Aztec/American writing in pre-Columbian script would you say remains unstudied or uncatalogued in Seville or in other archives?

Also, how much do you use online archives, especially of Seville, in your research? What do you think of online archives?

To /u/rusoved - why did the Slavic language take so long to break apart into distinct branches (in its case, South Slavic, West Slavic, and East Slavic) compared to other language groups? Besides for greater mutual intelligibility, how has this changed the Slavic languages?

What is a laboratory phonologist?

To all of them: In your research, how has culture influenced the development of language?

Often times the study of Spanish colonialism in the Americas means emphasis on the fact that they successfully spread their language among the local population, to the detriment of native languages (obviously learning Spanish within the context of the colonial era also promised benefits to those indigenous peoples who undertook it).

What do we know, however, about the incorporation of indigenous words into Spanish generally or regional dialect specifically? In Cuba the biggest indigenous influences seem to be in place names, like in the US, without many words in everyday Spanish being of indigenous roots, as far as I know.

Thanks!

Here's a question for /u/CommodoreCoCo.

Can you talk about the language politics that surround the Quechua language in South America? Wikipedia tells me that the language has official status in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.

Did Quechua's connection to the Inca past in any way help preserve the language? Were there efforts in the colonial and independence eras to suppress local languages in Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru?