Balto-Slavic glottal stop

What symbol should be used for the glottal stop in *mouʔros? I got the reconstruction from Derksen.

I don't think the glottal stop is actually a phoneme in PBS although there is some disagreement on the exact interpretation. PIE laryngeals eventually led to the acute/circumflex distinction, so it's a matter of tone more than it is of actual phonemes. We don't normally include tones in entry names, mainly because there is still so much active research being done in that area. So I think the entry should be moved to *mauras and to indicate the tones in the entry itself.

Isn't it still appropriate to indicate the presence of the disputed phoneme using a capital H?

If it's a phoneme, yes. But even that is disputed. Certainly not everyone or even the majority would reconstruct a distinct phoneme in such words, and they would assume that laryngeals had already been converted to tonal distinctions.

Really? I didn't know that. I've only seen reconstructions giving *H rather than not on Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

We have *sūnus and *źirnan, both of which are sourced.

Is *mauras your original research? If so, I prefer to keep the entry at *mouʔros, because I strongly agree with what Ivan wrote at the References section of WT:ASLA.

So you oppose using a common representation of the phonemes of PBS, disregarding notational differences? We do that for PIE, PS and PG already, so why not here?

Is changing o to a a notational difference? I know almost nothing about PBS. Please move the page to a title whose notation is consistent with other PBS entries we have.

It is, because o and a merged in Balto-Slavic, and the "glottal stop" became a tonal feature. *mouʔros is a more "conservative" form, reflecting an earlier stage of PBS, but neither the Baltic nor the Slavic languages show any apparent distinction between o and a (the a in Slavic is in fact ā, and reflects a merger of earlier ō and ā, which did not happen in Baltic). Some reconstructions ascribe the merging of a and o to the individual dialects, but that doesn't explain why they merged in all the dialects; it's clearly either a common innovation of Balto-Slavic or a parallel innovation that happened in every Balto-Slavic dialect at the same time. If it's a parallel innovation, it could hardly have happened unless there was still a common dialect area among the various Balto-Slavic dialects, which implies they were still a common language. That in itself is not strange... the West Germanic languages show several parallel innovations that happened after they had become dialectally differentiated from Proto-Germanic.

I moved the entry to Appendix:Proto-Balto-Slavic/mauras.

I added an "alternative reconstructions" section. I don't think any other entries have it yet, but I think it can be useful to make clear that there are different possible ways to interpret it. I haven't turned it into a link because it's just a redirect anyway (as alternative reconstructions usually are, unlike alternative/inflected forms which get entries). Could you add a <ref> to it as well?

Even with the "Alternative reconstructions" section, isn't it still proper to denote the laryngeal with *H and to use *a instead of *o? (In other words, giving the listing under "Alternative reconstructions" as *mauHras)

We can list both if necessary. I'm pretty sure both symbols are used.

I like the ===Alternative reconstructions=== header. We should use it for PIE as well.

I think it would be good for disputed reconstructions and not notational differences.

Matasović says this about it:

The change *o > *a must be placed after Winter's law, because original *o lengthened as Lith. uo, and original *a (from *h₂e) is lenghtened as Lith. o, [...] Kortlandt (1985) thinks that the change of *o to *a and of *ō to *ā are parallel processes occurring in Proto-Slavic, which mean that the identical change of *o to *a in Baltic is an independent development. However, it is more economical to assume that the merger of short *a and *o was a common Balto-Slavic innovation.

Was there a Proto-Baltic language distinct from Proto-Balto-Slavic, or do the Baltic languages comprise a paraphyletic group?

In the past, research focused on East Baltic, mainly because it's widely attested in Latvian and Lithuanian. East Baltic does seem to have been a distinct group. But more research into Prussian (West Baltic) and its relationship with the other Balto-Slavic languages has cause linguists to realise that there probably was no Proto-Baltic after all, but that West Baltic and Slavic split off at more or less the same time. It's only really the radical changes that later applied to Slavic that make it stand out and makes Prussian seem much closer to Latvian and Lithuanian, but the reconstructable history seems to suggest otherwise. So Baltic is probably a paraphyletic group, consisting of the non-Slavic Balto-Slavic languages.

The tension between similarity vs common history can be seen in the life sciences, too: sharks split off from the vertebrates before the ancestors of the tetrapods did, so we're more closely related to trout than sharks are- but they're both fish, and we aren't.

Right, fish, reptiles, dinosaurs, etc. comprise paraphyletic groups, which are occasionally convenient classifications.

And of course the biggest paraphyletic grouping of all, "animals", at least in common speech.

Estonian is closer to Finnish genetically than it is to Võro (south Estonian), Norwegian closer to Icelandic than to Danish, Catalan closer to French than to Spanish... the list goes on.

Wait, how is "animals" used in common speech?

To include all of animalia except for humans.

Ah, okay. I was confused because I thought you were referring to the use of the word which only includes zoo animals, farm animals, etc. while excluding some animals like insects and arachnids. (If you've ever heard a child make a distinction between "animals" and "bugs")