u/LittleDhole1

It frustrates me that virtually all major European languages (that I am aware of) call the North American bison some variation of "bison", and none of them use the word for the European bison for the American ones - i.e. by referring to Bison bison as "American Bison bonasus". (Apparently Greek does, but only because "bison" originally came from Greek.) TBF, "bison" originally referred to the European bison if you go back far enough.

The English/western European colonists and scientific writers at least had an excuse to call the North American animals "bison", taking the word from ancient Greek/Latin sources, since European bison had been extinct in western Europe for centuries to millennia by that point.

But Slavic/Baltic Europe (except maybe South Slavic) have coexisted with the European bison almost continuously, for goodness's sake! I know European bison became extinct in the wild, but this was in the late 19th/early 20th century, long after knowledge of North American bison had reached eastern Europe. Couldn't they have noticed the American animals the western zoologists/writers were writing about were very similar to the local ones? Why isn't the North American bison żubr amerykański in Polish (or cognates thereof in other Slavic languages)? Why is it not Amerikos stumbras in Lithuanian?

For example, Dravidian languages (or at least proto-Dravidian) are often compared to Indigenous Australian languages due to both groups of languages sharing a three-way dental/alveolar/retroflex articulation distinction, a lack of voicing distinction in plosives, and a lack/paucity of phonemic fricatives.

Mandarin and Polish are also said to have similar-ish consonant inventories, sharing retroflex fricatives/affricates (except Polish doesn't use aspiration as an articulation distinction) and a voiced/unvoiced distinction between the alveolar and palatal fricative/affricate series. But of course this pairing doesn't get a point for phonotactic similarity.

Yeah, I know it isn't humour, but we've all accepted that this sub has pretty much become "r/linguistics but more casual"...

I'm not aware of anyone composing running texts/narratives in proto-languages besides Schleicher's Fable ("The Sheep and the Horses", originally composed for Proto-Indo-European, also used for lower-order reconstructions within IE) and "The King and the God" (also for IE).

In a lot of reconstructions I've seen (e.g. Proto-Austroasiatic and the lower-order Proto-Vietic - of special interest to me since I'm Vietnamese), there are only vocabulary lists, not even short sentences. The YouTube channel ILoveLanguages! has a video on Proto-Austronesian which includes a running text - I suspect Andy (the creator) may have composed it himself. Andy is a native speaker of Tagalog (and may or may not have knowledge of other Filipino languages). I'm not sure how well the sample aligns with what is reconstructable about Proto-Austronesian grammar.

Interrupce.

You might have heard the popularised story that the prevalence of /θ/ in Castilian Spanish originated from a lisping king whom people imitated. Last year or longer ago when I posted this question under my previous account, then deleted the post, somebody informed me that there was a "theory" that *k shifted to *h from PIE to Proto-Germanic because the speakers were panting as they crossed the Alps.

I once made up, when I was a teen, an explanation for the general lack of phonemic fricatives in Indigenous Australian languages: that producing fricatives was seen as sacrilegious because it was a human attempt at imitating the hissing of the Rainbow Serpent. Then I learned that that's not how Indigenous Australian cosmology works. I figured that religion was the only factor that could convince a bunch of people over a large area to collectively agree not to do something.

[I've heard the theory that this is due to the prevalence of chronic otitis media in Aboriginal Australian populations, which acted as a sound filter, diminishing the ability to discern fricatives. But I don't buy it - I doubt the condition would have been as prevalence prior to the lifestyle changes brought on by colonialism. A hearing disorder affecting all ages would probably not be too prevalent in a hunter-gatherer population, which would be dependent on acute senses for survival.]

I've also heard "many Polynesian languages have small consonant inventories because it's hard to hear the distinction between consonants when people in boats yell over the sound of ocean waves".

Yup, LittleDhole is back!

By "stereotypical", stuff like e.g. the English word "sky" having come from the Old Norse word for "cloud". Or that Hebrew has a short, native, non-compound word meaning "to circumcise". Or that the German word for "border" (Grenze) is a loanword from Polish.