language enjoyer, he/him
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Just about ten years now in the making: The IE-CoR database paper has finally been published. C. Anderson, M. Scarborough, [ ... 96 further authors ... ], R. Gray & P. Heggarty. 2025. The Indo-European Cognate Relationships Dataset. Scientific Data 12:1541.
Among the other 96 authors on Bluesky that I know are here: @mjkue.bsky.social @mattboot.bsky.social @rhomboidgoatcabin.bsky.social @ibnkato.bsky.social @arashzeini.com I know I will likely have missed some because we are so many on this one.
it's cool how every single 19th-century european composer went through a "hungarian dances" phase
It's very funny to me that we had a really visceral Homeric phrase for death in "bite the dust", and we gradually leached every bit of intensity out of it
Every time someone says this, we add another language to the signs.
At least 88 Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours alone by the Israeli military in Gaza, from the bombing of a bakery, to shootings at Palestinians waiting for aid, to strikes on their residential tents and shelters – and the slow death of hunger. (2/3)
i will put it on the rewatch list!
i saw this many years ago and while i don't remember much else about the movie i remember the initial song was a real banger and i still hum/whistle it sometimes
find someone who loves you as much as Boethius loved forcing a short syllable to scan as long before a caesura
Every time I run into Christian Palestinian Aramaic
thanks! i almost texted you directly bc i figured you would find it
does this say Nebuchadnezzar? how is it vocalized, Baxtanṣar? it's not coming up in my dictionary..
And in other etymology/paleontology crossovers, I realized that in "mental eminence"—the protruding chin of H. sapiens (sapiens)—"mental" (the one from "mentum", not "mēns") is cognate to both "eminence" and "mouth"
This one is fun because of the the pun between incense (snṯr) and 'brother of god' (sn nṯr).
We have a cover for Ancient Egypt in Video Games! Out either late 2025 or early 2026 - will post a link with contents once it’s up on the DeGruyter website. I’m very excited that this is soon out in the world!
There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.
i'm so so sorry 😔
'Casina' by Plautus: An Annotated Latin Text, with a Prose Translation / Catherine Tracy #openaccess www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116... @openbookpublish.bsky.social
NEW: CNN's now publicly released video analysis shows Israel's 'double-tap' attack on Nasser Hospital was, in fact, actually a triple-tap. They bombed the hospital, and then fired upon the rescue team and journalists with not one but two more shells.
Impossible to put into writing what should happen to the agents whose job is taking fathers from daughters, but you can certainly think it.
Wow
we made the Aleph, from the famous Borges story Mostly They Will Use the Aleph to do Very Boring Things
i had forgotten about this, thanks!
ahh amazing, thank you. this will be next spring probably
😍
trying to plan a UK trip. what are some good things to see in the British Museum (besides the Rosetta Stone obviously)? and apparently the Beowulf MS is in the British Library? what else would you recommend be seen in the British Library if we make it there?
oh that's cool. I don't know anything about the history of the habitual+future in Telugu so can't say whether it evolved from one or the other originally, maybe @cobbaalt.bsky.social would know more about this
IMO this is similar to how we use the simple present (which also serves as habitual) in English to say what happens over the course of a story, e.g. "don't get attached to that character; he dies". i call it the canonical aspect
oh, i just found it, it's better than i remembered: ⲉⲧⲃⲉ-ⲡⲁⲓ ⲛ-ϯ-ⲛⲁ-ϣⲙϣⲉ ⲁⲛ ⲛ-ⲟⲩ-ⲣⲣⲟ ⲉ-ϣⲁ-ϥ-ⲙⲟⲩ because of this, I won't worship a king who will die (lit. a king who [habitually] dies)
when reading some Coptic with @lcbmphd.bsky.social's group a couple weeks ago we found an example of a habitual (wh is its own category in Coptic) that seemed to have future semantics ("Christ is the one who saves me", or sth like that, i'd have to look for it)
e.g. "boys will be boys" also interestingly Telugu has a single morphological category for habitual+future.
Wikipedia says (with no citations 😕) that in Biblical Hebrew, the perfective aspect is used for the gnomic. Has anyone come across this idea? Is this a known alternative explanation of the HB's so-called "prophetic perfect"? @olawikander.bsky.social @bnuyaminim.bsky.social
true statements although that might not be quite the same thing
i am more familiar w languages that use a particular aspect for this but also for other stuff. like ancient Greek uses the aorist (otherwise the simple, eventive past) for gnomic statements (cf. curiosity killed the cat). Turkish afaik uses the present -dir (also called "aorist") for universally
🤯👏
very nice!! now let's see it in بحر الطويل
if only there were like a thousand old Arabic poems to describe this scene
this looks like fun
every time i pull up a page on the Coptic Scriptorium site my browser asks me Do you want to translate this page from Marathi?
There can’t be any gun restrictions because we have to protect against federal government tyranny, and if kids get shot we just have to live with it. Also the President can send troops to cities because the federal government can do whatever it wants. These two ideas are consistent and reasonable.
wow thank you!!
I don’t ask this often and rarely get more than around $25 when I do, but I’m actually open to MA at the moment. If I don’t find an at-least-temporary place to stay by Friday, the weekend will suck. And if I want to stay alive, I don’t need that. PayPal: paypal.me/WynnThornton CashApp: $WynnThornton
he's got a whole poem of just these guys. could be good metal lyrics
the second half sounds like the σύμμαχος ἔσσο that occurs in i want to say Sapphic stanzas but i don't think ive seen it start out with the other part like this
anybody know what this meter is called? it's essentially dactylic hexameter up to where the caesura would go ( – uu – uu – ) and then – uu – u after that. does it have a name or did Boethius just make it up? i see there are some other interesting meters in following sections
This from Riley Gaines is why trans people freak out when Democrats try to carve out some compromise over sports. The politicians and activists attacking trans people are not interested in compromise! They're interested in our eradication from public life and are exploiting sports to that end
Hero jury saves hoagie hurler from legal grinder www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...
children in minneapolis shot while praying, children in DC passing armed military when they take the metro to school, this country is so sick
A devastating new milestone: key indicators confirm that conditions have officially reached famine levels in the #GazaStrip. Our colleagues are on the ground doing everything possible to deliver for children in #Gaza, despite the immense challenges. Follow us for humanitarian updates. #promoted
NEW: Read in Coptic: The Tower of Babel Read the story of The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), which might be titled ⲡⲓⲡⲩⲣⲅⲟⲥ ⲛ̀ⲧⲉⲃⲁⲃⲩⲗⲟⲛ, in Coptic with translation, grammatical notes and discussion.
The young people who would have been most likely to lead the domestic anti-fascist fight in 2025 were repeatedly arrested, beat, jailed, mocked by elites and non-elites over the past 5 years. This was bipartisan. I find it interesting whenever some people ask 'where the young people are' now.
"rot bedeutet heiß und stopp!" some toddler semiotics to start your day
my daughter (almost 3) loves the alphabet too, and any writing she just calls "ABCs". a shirt with a word written on it is her "ABCs shirt". if she wants to know what something says she asks "what are those ABCs?"
‘We like lists because we don’t want to die’, said Umberto Eco. What drives our deep fascination with lists? PhD researcher Michael Hensley explores the meaning of Ethiopian and Eritrean book lists, offering glimpses into communities that would otherwise be lost: uhh.de/csmc-hensley
For my birthday, please consider supporting the children and families of Gaza, such as Mohammed and his baby girl.
Balto-Slavic r-stems seem to lost the final *r in the nominative singular exactly like Indo-Iranic. E.g., Lth. duktė̃, sesuõ. If so, how does one explain Baltic loans in Finnic with final r in tact like Finnish sisar, tytär?
Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.
maybe it's related to this thing too. multiple stops with different places of articulation in the same word trip her up bsky.app/profile/matt...
cupcake > cupcape could also be dissimilation depending on how you look at it
toddler says "cupcapes", exhibiting a nice distance assimilation that counterbalances Semitic *kabkab "star" > كوكب kawkab
chuffed.org/project/1230...
this is pretty interesting
Mariam Dagga, an AP freelancer and mother, was among the journalists killed in Israel's "double-tap" strikes on the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza. In a "double-tap" strike, Israel bombs a facility once and then strikes again... after rescuers and journalists have raced in.
Journalists who worked for Reuters, the Associated Press and Al Jazeera were killed.
This fall check out the Virtual Moby Dick Book Club hosted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum once a month. I just registered! www.whalingmuseum.org/program/moby...
i have an old tweet somewhere where i suggested that we use "galactica" (neut. pl.) as a learnèd word for dairy products
shi
toddler has backformed Kiss from das Kissen (pillow - as though it were an n-stem i guess) and it also happens to be one of the few german words she has loaned into eng and span (i.e. it's her only word for pillow in any language). so you get things like "you go sit on this kiss"
that's really awesome, hope you have fun
there should be a third installment that goes through Agnarr's subsequent cover-up of his father's whole dam thing. a neo-noir centuring Olaf snooping through the gritty alleys of Arendelle in search of answers
i can't get over "eme, lege, fruere" (buy! read! enjoy!) at the end of the cover blurb of Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
looking through some old posts and stumbled on this. the other day chris murphy said the military occupation of dc was a distraction from epstein. a month ago, they were calling epstein a distraction.
*tearing up* I should call her
"Trump officials asked for an end to Harvard’s partnership with Birzeit University, a top Palestinian college in the West Bank. Harvard said it had suspended the relationship and had struck up new ones with institutions in Israel."
What’s better than a metal band named after an episode from Greek mythology? The fact that the band adopt the man-eating mares of Diomedes being fed their own master as a symbol of “eating” the patriarchy.
Friends outside the US, please, PLEASE start contacting your government officials regularly to ask if they will be offering asylum/refugee status or special immigration programs for anyone coming from the US who is being targeted by the US government.
i have the same edition of Dune 👍
oh yeah makes sense
how does *h₁epi > op? seems kind of weird with that vowel and that laryngeal doesn't it
this is how i found out that Germanic prefix is related to those other ones 🤯
A friend asked me on Facebook, has this kind of work been done for Arabic and/or Semitic languages? I'm guessing someone has, and I haven't seen it yet ...
is he thinking of the Anunnaki
nvm just found footnote 6 😄 this is going to be interesting
just read the abstract, looks really cool. so the Telugu instance of this is cēy-a-nu "I don't/won't do", right? Krishnamurti & Gwynn 1985 (the only T grammar i have read in depth) do call this -a- a "negative suffix" (p. 160); do others analyze it like cēy-Ø-anu?
degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/jsall-2025-2001/html Really cool new paper: "I can’t say ‘no’ to you – On the origin of zero negation in Dravidian" I just discovered this while checking out JSAL's recent issue.
toddler just did v2 in english: "yesterday was mommy sad."
The hits keep coming. “The departments that won’t be accepting Ph.D. students now include art history, cinema and media studies, classics, comparative literature, East Asian languages and civilizations, English language and literature, Germanic studies, linguistics, Middle Eastern studies…”
A long farewell benjamins.com/catalog/dia....
woke up too early this morning on account of allergies and went on a wikipedia spiral. did you know Johannes Kepler wrote a sci-fi story? and that his mother was accused of witchcraft??
but we do often talk about it that way (e.g. Germanic is defined by Grimm's law so everything chronologically following Grimm's law must be Germanic-internal)
the resolution to the paradox is probably that language is complex and just because one feature affects some subgroup it doesn't immediately sever that subgroup off so that it can't participate in other changes in other ways with its cousins.
that seems to have affected *only English* actually precedes it. so the rounding of a>o in *gans > *gons > gōs (goose) is paradoxically an English-specific sound change that by a strict interpretation of the data has to precede a pan-Ingvaeonic change
my favorite example of how wave can be better than clade is actually the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law (n is lost before fricatives) itself, which as you can see operates across English & Frisian & Low German (the "Ingvaeonic" langs) but ALSO we know that one change (a>o before nasals) ...
i think it's an important point to make because tbh the clade diagrams mess with people's thinking too
share 13 with North Germanic i meant to say
e.g. 14 where it applies is a general form of 13, e.g. no reason to think *gans > gōs in English is a separate sound change from *tanþ > tōþ, so while the coastal W Gmc langs technically share 13, implying they're the same thing is Making A Claim)
wow i did not notice that. i do like the visualization a lot though it's not so easy to read (and i'm not sure what it implies or tries to imply about the causal relationship of these things:
interesting that some of the terms use the nomenclature of the field where they avoid it for others ("n lost before voiceless fricatives" wh is much clearer than "Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law"; on the other hand, "sharpening"?? i assume this refers to the *ww > ggw thing)