Some thoughts on NM•NH, a Libyco-Berber ethnonym that everybody on Bluesky has been wondering about for ages. In the eastern script, the dot symbol can be used to substitute for a letter. Which letters are involved is not entirely clear - Y, Z and Z² are pretty certain, but there may be more hiding

Transitional tifinagh inscriptions from the Sahara

New article about Whistled language from the Canary Islands by Acosta-Armas and Marrero Aguiar! @phono-logical.bsky.social papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

It's finally out! My chapter, "The diachronic stability of uninflectability in Berber", makes the point that uninflectability can be stable over longer periods: about a third of nouns in most Berber varieties are uninflectable, and a lot of them were already uninflectable 1000 years ago.

#OldNubian ⲡⲉⲛⲧⲓ, ⲡⲉⲧⲧⲓ, ⲁⲡⲉⲛⲧⲓ: Date palm tree/fruit From Egyptian: bnr/bny (Copt. ⲃⲛⲛⲉ, ⲃⲉⲛⲓ, ⲃⲏⲛⲓ), possibly via Meroitic w/ proto-Nubian singulative suffix *-ti ON ↓ • Nobiin: féntí, féttí • Andaandi/Matokki: benti, betti • Midob: péendí • Nyima > Afitti: fɛ́nd̪a > Nyimang: fɛ̍nd̪i̍

It was a great honor to be part of the defence by Ahmed Sosal of his PhD Thesis "A Lexical and Phonological Reconstruction of Highland East Cushitic. Many congratulations to Doctor Sosal! The book csn be downloaded for free through the following link: www.lotpublications.nl/a-lexical-an...

Here's his comparative Cushitic database: ahmedsosal.github.io/CLD/#/lexicon

It's interesting to read how astonished explorers were to find that the Africans they encountered were equally well-travelled Barth in 1850 met Africans in Bagirmi (Chad) who had visited Basra (Iraq), kept the works of Plato, and were as inquisitive about Europe as he was about Africa

Today is apparently ʕanṣṛa العنصرة - that is to say, 24 Yunyu, Midsummer's Day in the Julian/Amazigh calendar traditionally used throughout North Africa. (pic from Asla, Algeria) www.facebook.com/reel/1690455...

I have no idea what's going on in this Sumerian quote, but it looks suspiciously like a Mubi folk tale recorded in Jungraithmayr's book - which I don't understand either. "Elephant & Hen talked from morning on while eating. They'd met up. While together, they ate so much, until after noon.

Notes on Mubi syntax - rereading Jungraithmayr. (In brief: Mubi's multiple subject agreement series don't just index the subject - they also change the voice of the verb, in ways that reminded me oddly of Shilluk, and the positions of arguments.) lughat.blogspot.com/2026/07/note...

reminds me of "urwala" in kabyle qqareɣ-ak ay ul-inu, urwala qebbeṛ am (u)ḍiḥan urwala ttfax a tin iwumi ssudunen afus a win iqqazen tasraft, urwala deg-s ssimɣur... interesting is this variant doesn't cause the verb to be in the intensive aspect cf. ur ttqebṛiṛ to urwala qebbeṛ (qqebṛeṛ)

One plural type in the East Chadic language Bidiya (Alio 1986, Alio & Jungraithmayr 1989) takes sg: BvCVD- to: pl: BvCvDCiDe Partial reduplication, but with a different vowel.

I understand the excitement about technology “rediscovering lost texts.” I do, & I get the media hype. But I wish people knew that there are hundreds of thousands of “lost” texts just sitting in manuscripts in libraries, which have never been published outside of those single manuscripts. 1/n

My first proper foray into Afroasiatic-level reconstruction just came out in BJALL: "Disentangling Afroasiatic *t-morphemes: No path from middle to imperfective" brill.com/view/journal... Sadly not open access, but I'd be delighted to send a copy to anyone who asks me for one (myfirstname@gmail)

Men, you know your duty (as specified in Fédry's dictionary of West Dangla, an East Chadic language spoken in Chad): "mítírà - model husband (goes hunting frequently and finds game, gathers sauce leaves for his wife, hard worker, does not beat his wife, welcomes people.)"

“The Secret History of Language: Language Change Unraveled” by Lyle Campbell (May ’26) www.cambridge.org/core/books/s...

Of interest for Sahel comparative linguistics: a new publication by Fabian Zuk on "Dogon personal pronouns: reconstruction and internal phylogeny" www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

3,500‐year‐old hieratic copy of the ‘Sayings of Khakheperraseneb’, a 12th-dynasty Egyptian scribe who laments the increasing chaos in his country, the breakdown of societal norms and decadence, his lack of original words to describe what he sees, and wishes he had a heart that could endure it all.

Pozdniakov & Vydrin make a forceful case for the inclusion of Mande within “Niger-Congo”: iling-ran.ru/web/ru/publications/journals/languageinafrica/7-1 What do we think? @maartenkossmann.bsky.social @lameensouag.bsky.social

I charmed (pẖr=y) the sky (tꜣ pt), the earth (pꜣ tꜣ), Duat (tꜣ dwꜣt), the mountains (nꜣ tww.w), the seas (nꜣ ym.w). I found (gmỉ=y) what the birds in the sky (nꜣ ntỉ.ỉw nꜣ ꜣpd.w n tꜣ pt), the fish in the water (nꜣ rym.w n pꜣ mty) and the beasts say (ỉrm nꜣ tp-n-ỉꜣw.wt ḏd), all of them (n.ỉm=w ḏr=w)

RDV samedi pour l’événement ✨Mots et choses✨ sur les cultures et langues amazighes ! Inscription en envoyant un mail à ➡️[email protected] facebook.com/events/s/mot...

I tried to design this infographic mapping out cognates of "wind" across the Indo-European family! #linguistics

The sacred beliefs at work here are very much not what you were probably expecting from the blurb.

الأيادي الخارجية

Jupiter and Venus together! Even my little phone camera can catch that one. ولقد علمت بأنّني بدر السما لَكن دهيت لشقوتي بالمشتري

A former Luxembourg civil servant has just sent me postage with a new stamp that commemorates the first printed book of Mi’kmaq hieroglyphic writing (printed by a Luxembourger catholic missionary 160 years ago). No doubt the first stamp ever to include this script!

Found a complete recording of the entire Samaritan Torah on YouTube by a man named מאיר ששון from Holon. Been listening and following along with Ze'ev ben-Hayyim's transcriptions from 1975. They're virtually identical down to the smallest details. Chills. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek3q...

I did not find this article persuasive, but I love the idea that Egyptian ḥfn "100,000" (written with a picture of a tadpole) is the source of Arabic حفلة ḥaflah "party". Whether the etymology pans out or not, at least it's a good mnemonic! www.academia.edu/76440955/Anc...

Linguists: I recommend this great (if also discouraging) data collection and analysis by Amy Rose Deal and Barak Krakauer! profling.beehiiv.com/p/the-academ...

Songhay has a word for "camel" with no apparent relationship to any other language family, reconstructible as: *yòó This is somewhat puzzling, since camels are not native to Africa. Perhaps it originally referred to a different animal?

Stunningly beautiful new popularizing book by Irma Mora Aguiar about Libyco-Berber inscriptions in Gran Canaria! @izmarasan.bsky.social @tagwrsanyils.eurosky.social @lameensouag.bsky.social

Israel has ordered all Lebanese civilians to move north of the Zahrani River or be considered fair game for bombardment. I sit here wondering, if Lebanon ordered all Israeli civilians to move south of Haifa, or Egypt ordered them to move north of Ashkelon, who on earth would expect them to comply?

A Goth in Timbuktu !

Eid Mubarak! عيد مبارك! Ṣeḥḥa lɛid nwen! Wa kay yeesi!

For those who do not want to go on X: Just out: Massinissa Garaoun: Amazigh et arabe dans le massif des Babors (Kabylie orientale, Algérie). Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad. A detailed and very thorough study of mutual linguistic contact, incl. a high degree of "substrate" influence on Arabic

"The Malian army and Wagner blame us for hosting armed groups, and when they leave, the armed groups come and blame us." interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2026/liv...

Apparently, the "Sons of Caesar" (Banū Qayṣar) had become an Arab tribe by 1245! (What's the etymology of "Munkanīt", I wonder? Coptic?)

Rapoport doesn't treat the west, but this analysis would put the arrival of the Banu Hilal in a rather different perspective...

Just published "Directional extensions in Chadic languages" by Joseph Lovestrand #cal #openaccess langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

Chaining with Tamazight: ur da llint wallǝn g talat-a n yitran ixsin

Receiving a peer review written by an LLM, including a reference to a hallucinated non-canonical variant reading was not on my "things that can happen during peer review" bingo card, yet here we are.

Anyone who cites papers without reading them on the basis that you "need a lot of citations to look credible": please stop. It makes you and your whole field (economics, in this case) lose credibility. If you have a good reason to cite an unread work, try adding "(Not consulted.)" to the reference.

The University of Nairobi Journal of Language and Linguistics Vol. 12 (2026): Special Issue on the 16th Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium - including articles on deictic tone in Nuer, a former antipassive in Bari, verb tone in Beria, ... uonjournals.uonbi.ac.ke/index.php/un...

I very much like CheckIfExists by Diletta Abbonato zabbonat.github.io/References-V... arxiv.org/abs/2602.15871 But I'd love to have a tool that can batch check a reference list straight from docx or pdf, or even batch-process multiple documents that include reference lists!

An excellent Songhay website got updated recently: www.songhay.org/en/

Being in a field where co-authorship is not a big thing, I fully agree. But I have once or twice been co-author in a multidisciplinary context with 25 STEM people per paper. I am not sure that tracing every single citation of a moleculary genetics paper is the best way to spend my time.

Here's an example of a linguistic fact that I think should be straightforward and obvious when pointed out, but which a lot of people seem surprisingly resistant to: Colloquial Latin never died. In fact it's spoken extremely widely across the world. 🧵

@phdnix.bsky.social @maartenkossmann.bsky.social @lameensouag.bsky.social this is above my paygrade!

If you couldn’t sleep for wondering about the Garamantes, the perfect solution airs in five minutes on Radio 4! www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...