The Biden administration was fully complicit in genocide, and anyone who served in it should be held accountable.

sociolinguistics / raciolinguistic ideologies / linguistic racism

Israel turns the violence up and down at will, maintaining full dominion over Gaza and the West Bank, then calls each pause a generous ‘ceasefire’

The Times interviewed dozens of migrant men sent to a prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration. Independent forensic analysts called the testimony credible and consistent and said the treatment met the U.N.’s definition of torture. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/w...

Another disaster in the UK: The Dept of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Nottingham is being closed. Here's a petition: www.change.org/p/stop-the-r...

for '9' in Spanish toddler has finally moved on from /meve/ to /mweve/

The federal government is putting its full weight behind purging Black people from public life and the press and opposition party is silent as it does so.

The most fun orthographical fact I know about Welsh is that the lack of a <k> is purely due to English printers not having enough of them for the Welsh Bible, so William Salesbury told them to use <c> instead.

The abundance of evidence of the Biden administration just looking the other way and being willing to supply arms to actions they knew violated international law will continue to grow

an unrelated question i have is why the spirantization situation for perfect verbs, as Thackston gives it, apparently differs from this paradigm in Greenspahn's Intro to Aramaic. specifically: why does the 3rd radical ב not have dagesh lene in 1cs kiθveθ & 3fs kiθvaθ? cf. Syriac keθ/b/eθ, keθ/b/aθ

The whole difference is how homogeneous your society is. Big social programs are easier when the majority population thinks "people like me" are benefiting, and harder when the majority population thinks "people like them" are benefiting.

taking Thackston's description of Syriac stress at face value, the 2mp & 2fp perfects are stressed differently: masc. /kə-ˈθav-ton/ vs. fem. /kə-θav-ˈteːn/ is this correct? and/or do the main Syriac traditions abide by this? why does f. *-tina yield long /eː/ but m. *-tunu yields short /o/?

! lingule.xyz

Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

i took Exactly One Quarter of irish in undergrad and one of the more enduring impacts it has had on me is the urge to do the irish vocative prefix + initial consonant mutation when i address a friend by name

elegant erratum, page 31

He keeps doing it. Every time somebody gets beheaded in this text, the word "head" is replaced with a little hand-drawn emoticon. And considering how many people get beheaded in this story, that's a lot of lil face drawings.

The thing I find weird about all this is that Trump invited Fuentes to dinner at Mar-a-Lago a while back, but I haven't seen anyone on the right bring that up. This sudden realization that people shouldn't be associating with NF is curiously selective.

also the e- in "enough"! from Old English <genōg> (which sounds like "y'know" with a [x] at the end)

TIL that Swedish ‘tung’ (‘heavy’), source of the ‘tung-’ in ‘tungsten’ is cognate with the root of Polish ciężki (‘heavy’) Very neat parallel to English tongue being cognate to Polish język.

Re-upping the dedication of Mahmood Mamdani's 2020 book, 'Neither Settler nor Native': "For Zohran, You teach us how to engage the world in difficult times. May you inspire many and blaze a trail!"

A couple of weeks ago (10/20) at The Pearlsong book launch the amazing Jane Sheldon performed the piece she composed based on the text. She shares some of how it came to be here:

ok so: i realized i need to work on different skills from different languages, which translates into multiple concurrent learning tracks. so for example for the languages where i really just need to listen to a podcast to keep up with them ("active listening", ideally, 1/9

drafting a new plan whereby i can work on most (not all) of my target languages over the course of a week, and it might be the best idea i've ever had or it might be a shortcut to losing my mind

I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this video. I don’t know how we’ve gotten to the point where men in full balaclavas can abduct daycare teachers while they’re watching children. But I do know that this isn’t sustainable. Abolish ICE. There is no way to reform this.

"What is troubling to me as we look into the possibilities of the Zohran mayorship, is not just these old white men’s sense of entitlement to power; but that their open racism, like that of the president’s, is not disqualifying." 🙏🏼

#OtD 5 Nov 1921 German Jewish communist resistance fighter and nurse Marianne Prager-Joachim was born. A slave labourer for Siemens, she and others at the plant formed the Baum resistance group. She was executed in 1943 stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/1056...

i am slowly coming to the realization that i'd like to work through Thackston's Syriac book again (last time was 3 yrs ago and alas i haven't kept up with it but i assume much will come back quickly) i will inevitably live-tweet my way through it

Cambridge University theological exam from 1884 includes questions on (1) the textual problems of 1-2 Samuel; (2) text from the hexapla, Aquila, and Symmachus; and (3) the translation "revised [!] in 1611" (i.e., the King James Version), and the Complutensian Polyglot.

Whenever you find yourself annoyed at someone spelling إن شاء الله as إنشاء الله, just remember people have been doing that at least since 1156 AH/1753 CE (the date of this manuscript of the al-Dani's Taysir).

The #1 lesson from yesterday’s blowout: Humanities majors killed on the job market 1) Mamdani- Africana Studies 2) Spanberger -French 3) Sherill - Global History

good morning specifically to the FBI agent who introduced Mamdani’s dad to Marx

türkçe speakirken cheatmek için onu yapacağım

For the Ea-nasir fans, Assyriology podcast 'Thin End of the Wedge' just released a special episode about everyone's favorite copper merchant, featuring @gvkonsta.bsky.social, @gabemoshenska.bsky.social, and Steven Garfinkle, and yours truly. Listen here: www.buzzsprout.com/1338718/epis...

Pleased that the @irishtimes.com has published this co-authored piece with a number of Palestinian academic colleagues on the destruction of higher education in Gaza. And the fears that the same will happen in the West Bank. www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

I love that Zohran did not praise Cuomo in his speech. You absolutely do not have to say nice things about bad people. We should normalize that in “polite” politics: Praising bad people is not actually “civility.”

There’s no reason ever again for any Democrat to suggest moderating on trans rights. There was never a moral reason but now there’s no political reason either. Somebody tell Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg. it’s joe-ver.

As many have pointed out, Mamdani didn't stand apart from our trans brothers and sisters. He didn't play the "Gee, gosh, it sure is complicated," milquetoast moderate card. And he crushed. The way forward is together, not over the bodies of our own.

Zohran at the rally for trans youth on february 8 ❣️ he was polling single digits.

NEW: A federal judge said the decision by Trump WH to end sign language interpretation at briefings by Trump and Leavitt likely violated the Rehabilitation Act and harmed deaf people who communicate in ASL. www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

Major win in Arlington County Public Schools, with pro-trans Moe Bryant dominating the election. Arlington County Public Schools has made headlines for defying the Trump admin on trans kids in bathrooms.

gutter racism aside, it should pretty clearly be *New Yorkistan*

I think it's a fair trade

I am not surprised by it but am always viscerally disgusted by how normalized and accepted islamophobia is in the US. The attacks against Mamdani during his campaign have really highlighted the ugliness of this bigotry in our society, and the worst part is that no one of standing is condemning it.

I saw a kindergartener do the 6-7 in Assyrian (“ishta showa”) complete with hand gestures. This is getting out of control

The German word ‘Pferd’ and its Dutch cognate ‘paard’ are horses of mixed breed parentage. Their common ancestor came from Latin ‘paraverēdus’ (substitute post-horse), a word composed of an Ancient Greek element and a Gaulish one. Zoom in on my new infographic to learn everything about it:

The failure of the “blue no matter who” crowd to rally behind Mamdani really just lays the reality of that position bare, doesn’t it?

Hey linguists! What's the best introductory books on linguistics nowadays? I haven't used one since 2010 and have been asked for recs.