In this paper, we deal with the presentation of the topics of the diversity, endangerment, extinction, documentation and preservation of the world’s languages to the primary and secondary school students via experiential education. We present an interactive exhibition titled “Linguistic biosphere” accompanied by an escape game “The last speaker”. The exhibition and the escape game were organized by the educational platform Library of Languages for the 2019 European Day of Languages festival in Kampus Hybernská. The paper describes how the current approaches to linguistic diversity and the principles of experiential learning theory and gamification were utilized in the design of the particular components of the exhibition and the escape game.

In recent Indo-Europeanist literature, it is common to encounter statements concerning phonological feature [voice] and PIE laryngeals in a wide spectrum from explicit commitment to specific feature-segment combinations to reserved observations on possibilities and probabilities. This article aims to consider some implications of these statements, the possibilities to prove or disprove any such claims through distributional patterns of the relevant segments. Namely, I consider their presence in consonant clusters that should show traces of voicing assimilations if laryngeals were phonologically +/-[voiced]. I will argue that the implications involved in a strong commitment to the [voice] as a phonological feature in PIE laryngeals is not warranted by data, which may either mean that the feature was not phonologically relevant, or cannot be shown with any certainty to be the property of any of the three segments in either of its values, +[voiced] or-[voiced]. This is in principle reconcilable with laryngeals-qua-fricatives in as much as they are reconstructed as having sonorant allophones in consonant clusters, for which there is typological support from Cairene Arabic.

Classification of related languages as to the level of mutual genetic proximity relies on a number of criteria, the principal one being the character and number of shared innovations. As singular innovations are likely to emerge in related languages independently, the risk of misinterpreting homology for homoplasy is high. In this respect, suppletion, as the extreme of morphological irregularity and therefore an innovation least likely to emerge independently in the semantically and etymologically identical paradigms, may help to support or invalidate hypotheses. In this article, I examine a number of shared suppletive paradigms to show how their distribution in the family may shed light on its bifurcation.

In numerous IE languages, either their synchronic fact or the diachronic processes reveal some level of asymmetry in the area of coronal obstruents, specifically the stops and the nasal, or their reflexes resulting from various phonetic processes as assibilation, palatalization, or lenition. Especially the evidence from Germanic, Greek, Italic, Tocharian, and Anatolian supports the hypothesis that such a symmetry is a shared and possibly inherited feature of their phonology. Data from Indic and Armenian may also provide further support, while the merger of the voiced stops and voiced aspirated stops in Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian and Celtic make their evidence less reliable. Overall, the evidence points toward the reflexes of PIE *d patterning with PIE *n, while the reflexes of *d h and *t often result in markedly different outcomes of the same individual changes which also at the same stage target *d. The apical character of *d is the best explanation of the frequent shift towards, on the one hand, rhotics and laterals, on the other, to sibilants realized at a different articulatory position than that of the other members of the same dental-alveolar series.

While the phonetic details of most PIE obstruents have been the topic of numerous studies, the coronal stops have attracted less attention, possibly as the result of their non-controversial status, vis-à-vis velars or laryngeals. Yet, several early Indo-European languages display asymmetries in the development of the coronal stop series, with the voiced member typically behaving differently from the voiceless and the aspirate. Such an asymmetry may thus well be of PIE origin and in the light of the recent arguments for PIE implosives, could result from the earlier implosive character of Pre-PIE mediae, which finds support in phonetic typology. This paper presents typological background for the phenomena and the situation regarding the reconstructed PIE phonology.