fun fact Neogrammarian in Finnish is nuorgrammaatikko

why is it the neogrammarians and not the neovocabularians? serious question actually

English language intuition needed: Research into Semitic, Algonquian, and Eskimo-Aleut [has?/have?] a longstanding history.

Movie idea: set in the soaring twenties, band reunion of Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff as "The gerontogrammarians"

Does anyone here know what's the deal why Osthoff&Brugmann™ didn't capitalize any German nouns?

who put the OG into Neogrammarians?

tHe so-cAllEd NeOgRammaRiAns

the Neogrammarians actually got pilled by the Morpheusgrammarians, that's why they knew about PIE

my fave LLM task so far: converting text with random Greek characters to latex input 😎

that moment when you realize that you can hook up your ideas and implementations to an idea formulated in 1799

serious business idea behind this. oh wait.

im so bad ass im using an offline opensource LaTeX editor and am pushing my progress to a private GitHub repo. And there's nothing you can do about this Overleaf, do you hear me

Today's read: Abraham Mylius: Lingua Belgica. Apparently he knew the difference between linguistic inheritance and borrowing already back in 1612 🤷🏼‍♂️

Never could I have imagined that I'll have to read old sources in Latin because there's no translation. Today's read: De origine Ungorum (1770). It's fun, like, confusing, but I probably must understand something or why else would the text keep me engaged?

writing is actually fucking fun

Latin nerds and AI nerds should get together and bang out a translation

Today I'm trying to read Johan Ihre's 1769 glossarium but it exists only in Latin. Challenge accepted.

Like, sure, LLMs as induction machines are by definition bound to hover around 90% accuracy whatever they do and I certainly wouldn't like to live in a house with a 90% chance of not collapsing, BUT if I have a 10% noisy input it's neat to work with

One cool use case for an LLM is translating old latin manuscripts to English where the OCR fuckf up moft characterf

Conclusion: "the Hindus had an immemorial affinity with the old Persians, Ethiopians and Egyptians, the Phenicians, Greeks, and Tuscans, the Scythians or Goths, and Celts, the Chinese, Japanese, and Peruvians"

Just reading Sir Jones' third speech and omg... why does he keep calling Indians primitive, degenerate and abased... wtf

worse than hallucinating, ChatGPT has a tendency to cite crack pot linguists and conspiracy theorists when asked for references in Finno-Ugric studies. Maybe worth a study.

guess the only indian food i should be making is pāṇini

I tried to cook Indian today for the first time in my life. I couldn't find any paneer in the supermarket though, so I picked peynir because of their clear etymological connection (like a true fucking historical linguist) and now I think I cooked something entirely wrong.

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Germany too has begun to return looted "antiquities". It's nice to see progress. But we still have museum collections filled with the remains of people the German empire murdered and collected as scientific specimens. And some of my colleagues have used those collections to do research. It's grim.

Wait WHAT? Sir William Jones never proposed any PIE etymologies? Can someone in my bubble please confirm or comment on this? I am perplexed. Surely I must overlook something

Kőrösi Csoma Sándor and Sir William Jones' graves are only 600km apart: Darjeeling and Kolkata. But they are separated by almost a century and certainly never met.

Sir William Jones spoke 99 languages and none of them was Hungarian

Finnish <Venäjä> "Russia" and German <windisch> "Slovenian" are both from Proto-Germanic <windaz>. Also Tacitus <Veneti> belongs to this group, who he says are neighbours of the Fenni.

ok so Tacitus Germania is really just 30 pages... that was a quick read

ooh, so there's been a German tribe called Nemetes in the Rhine area and Proto-Slavic němьcь "German" ( -> Hungarian német) could be from that, with a folk etymology "the mute ones" on top :o

wow Tacitus so on point "The Germans must be indigenous because who in their right mind would leave Africa, Asia, or Italy to move to a place so ugly, cold, rough, and depressing to look at, unless they're native?" i feel u bro

bsky is awesome

I'll go for karaoke now

I'll try to post one mammoth fact a day but its very likely that I will fail before I even start lol

Also my Artturi Kannisto has arrived and I'm currently just binging on Mansi mythology. Pretty mind expanding.

Last week I went to the Paleontological museum in Munich and it was really worth the visit. Not only is the entry for free but also you get to see the (copy of a) skeleton of a Gomphotherium they found near the city in the 70s

sorry I disappeared I got eaten by a mammoth

I will see a mammoth today. Follow quietly.

So Munich has a district called Lehel [lɛçl̩] and this is from "auf den lehen" (Lohe, lichter Wald), not from the 10th century Magyar chieftain of the Árpád dynasty (who died in Bavria)

Wow ask ChatGPT for latest paper on Uralic phylogeny & get a 2025 article by a crack pot linguist who says the main problem with the family tree is that the Minoan civilisation (!) from Crete was not included in the language (!) family tree. wtf

I'm a surprise guest in Munich, attending a presentation called Indigenous Languages at the Intersection of Society, Identity and Journalism: Komi in Contemporary Russia exciting!

Just ordered "Materialien zur Mythologie der Wogulen" by Artturi Kannisto at an online antiquarian bookshop. It's on the way to Germany all the way from Helsinki now 🤩 I'm super excited. Brace yourself for more mammoth content 🦣

today was a mammoth heavy day, maybe tomorrow I could read some Mansi folk tales about Mammoths 🦣

What a sight! The #NorthernLights were clearly visible in the skies above #Goettingen last night. Here are some shots captured by #mpsgoettingen employees. Enjoy! And thanks to everyone for sharing! #aurora

a german and a british walk into a bar. The German takes off his coat. The German takes off his other coat. Says the Brit woah thats mäntel

speaking of mammoths, in 1443 Vienna they found mammoth bones at the main Cathedral (St. Stephen) but they assumed it belonged to a giant human lol bibliothek.univie.ac.at/sammlungen/o...

LLMs are so neurotypical