Wiktionary talk:About Proto-Permic

Vowel system

absolutely needs an explanation what correspondences the chosen symbols stand for; there are e.g. about four different ones that have been by different authors reconstructed as "*ȯ". --Tropylium (talk) 18:53, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

Old Komi

Should be noted for the formatting of comparative Permic entries that Old Komi is not particularly close to Proto-Komi; it's squarely a Komi-Zyrian variety, just an early-attested one. The Komi dialect tree works something like as follows:

• Proto-Komi
  • Jazva
  • Permyak
  • Common Zyrian
    • South Zyrian
      • Luza-Letka
      • Lower Sysola
      • "Central-Eastern"
        • Syktyvkar ≈ literary Zyrian
        • Upper Vyčegda – Pechora
    • North Zyrian
      • Old Komi
      • Udora
      • Lower Vychegda
      • Vym – Izhma

For an easily available reference, see e.g. Partanen & Kellner 2021 with further lit. --Tropylium (talk) 19:14, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@Tropylium: Still, Old Komi is the literary standard of Komi lects at that time, which is pretty much the same as we handle other ancestral languages, like Old East Slavic; So I believe it's best to merge Old Komi and Proto-Komi and lemmatise at the Old Komi reflex - this would mean things like ď-jd shifts look a bit off for Permyak and Yazva, but adding a whole new code for Proto-Komi considering the very small corpus of Old Komi seems like a stretch to me. Thadh (talk) 19:26, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

No, this is more like equating Old East Slavic with Proto-Slavic instead of Proto-East Slavic (or Old English as Proto-Anglo-Frisian, etc). We don't have enough coverage of Zyrian dialects to really worry about details there, but it definitely has not been "a literary standard of" Permyak or Jazva.

It certainly doesn't seem necessary to try to maintain both Proto-Komi and Proto-Zyrian, and maybe not either — there are no detailed reconstructions of them anywhere anyway. It would be fine, I think, to list the various attested forms under a single ahistorical "Komi" node. --Tropylium (talk) 19:55, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

@Tropylium: That's not fair. Proto-Slavic encompasses a timespan of a millenium, Old East Slavic is a timespan of another millenium. Proto-Komi is a timespan of two hundred years, followed by Old Komi which was just another three hundred years later at most, which was still at the time when the Komi dialects were mutually intelligible to say the least (I must note they still are). Many common changes whithin Permyak and Zyrian happened after the Old Komi period (including mid-vowel merging and probably even /l/-resolution). Late Old East Slavic is much less an ancestor to modern East Slavic languages than Old Komi is to Permyak or Yazva, but we still handle it as one for practical reasons.

Also, Lytkin quite often does reconstruct Proto-Komi in his etymological dictionary (termed "общекоми" - common Komi), so it's not like we lack literature. Thadh (talk) 20:45, 16 February 2023 (UTC)