New Article: When did Faṣīḥ become Qabīḥ? Rehabilitating Classical phonological and morphological features And it's Open Access!: doi.org/10.1093/jss/... A short summary of the contents of this article 🧵

Anyone who's read (or, these days, watched) Dune will remember the scene when Stilgar first meets the Duke. Think I just found where Frank Herbert took it from - an alleged Nuer practice: www.google.co.uk/books/editio...

Barhebraeus in the 13th century on Uyghur script being adapted for Mongolian:

Question to ponder: should a policy of "your report would be due within 10 days" be viewed automatically as a sign of a journal where peer review is likely to be inadequate, or are there circumstances where this could be reasonable?

The 12th World Congress of African Linguistics (WOCAL12) will be held at the University of Vienna, 7th - 10th July 2027. Abstracts due 30 May 2026 univie.eventsair.com/wocal2027/ #WOCAL12 #WOCAL2027 #linguistics

Tickled to see the eminent Malawian-American linguist Sam Mchombo accidentally cited as McHombo. Parochial assumptions about how to parse names can be misleading! africam.berkeley.edu/people/sam-a...

And adults their work...

The funny thing is, this also seems to be true of Mauritanians ("Moors", "Bidan" - not sure what the best term is.) Religious specialisation as a niche for non-conformity?

Palestinian Uncles doing freestyle poetry battles coming with some of the hardest lines I’ve heard in a long time.

One lesson of the Chomsky situation: watch out for "cancel culture" narratives. They're appealing to people who experienced social exclusion for no good reason long before the term was coined - but they're far more useful to the kind of predators who actually should be ostracised. (أوصيكم ونفسي)

aðbir Tawjjut

The medieval theory that Berber comes from South Arabia (popular in more recent decades with Arab nationalists) is in the Epstein Files, courtesy of a rather messed-up Yemeni billionaire who liked to call Epstein his "cousin brother"

Just saw on the other platform that Jonas Sibony has published his online dictionary of the Arabic Varieties of the Jews of Morocco www.jonas-sibony.com/djm/

Correspondence #Tamajeq : - təhult - ahulaɣin #Tadaksahak : - tǝškǝnt - aɣabšiškǝnan #Tetserret : - tǝškǝnt - ǝšiškanǝkan Meaning : - Greeting - I greet

A funny deontological question: A journal that recently published some word salad, then retracted it, just asked me to review a linguistics article for them. Should I: A. Do my part to help them raise standards? B. Refuse on the grounds that an expensive, broken system should not be propped up?

🗣️ La collection #Pangloss offre, en libre accès, des documents linguistiques sonores, avec une spécialité de langues rares ou peu étudiées. 🎙️Explications avec Alexis Michaud, directeur de recherche CNRS au LACITO, qui assure la gestion de la collection Pangloss ⤵️ www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

“The phonetics of Tarifit: variation and change in a Moroccan Amazigh language” by Mohamed Afkir and Georgia Zellou (Feb. ’26) [free until Feb. 18] www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Education rate by country and gender: a key graph Note that women overtake men in Algeria and Tunisia about the same time (~1997); in Morocco, not until ~2015

Uploaded:

Today my translation of al-Dani's Taysir has come out! I hope to write a little bit more about this later, but for now here is a link. And it's Open Access! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Mabaan domestic animal loanwords - some preliminary thoughts on etymology lughat.blogspot.com/2026/02/maba...

New paper by project member Tatiana Reid in SAL: "The Nuer vowel grade system" This paper focuses on the interrelated alternations in vowel quality and voice quality, showing how these two parameters are used to encode inflection and derivation journals.flvc.org/sal/article/...

New paper out 🥳 Joint work with @danielaltshuler.bsky.social on monosyndetic and bisyndetic conjunction in Gizey. I keep coming back to this reviewer’s comment: “Absolutely publishable as is… no suggestions for improvement (first time in 20+ years!)” 🤣🤣. It's here: journals.flvc.org/sal/article/...

Note that all three of these feature the itive/centripetal marker -in/-an (~"away")

Any serious person who knew anything about Gaza knew that the official Gaza Health Ministry death toll was an undercount. We also know (beyond doubt) that the overwhelming majority were civilians. Common sense, a bit of knowledge+analytical skills, and not being racist, get you there.

سيسنو

Any statistician willing to team up so we can show that lemurs and Malagasy show unexploited correlations in their geography?

A Berber manuscript written in 1764 turned up in the Berber-speaking town of Tiout in Algeria. But it wasn't in the local language at all - it was a copy of Al-Ḥawḍ, the keystone of the Tashlhiyt ms tradition in Morocco, described in Meziani's recent thesis. dspace.univ-batna.dz/server/api/c...

English proverb: "More haste, less speed" Algerian proverb: اغضب تعطل ʊγṣeb taʕṭəl ambiguous between: = hurry and you get delayed = force it and you'll break it (The list is about 40% good, 40% indifferent - but 9-9-6 is such bad advice that it makes the rest irrelevant. Esp if you marry early!)

"Ground squirrel" is a crazily pan-African (or at least Sahelo-Sudanic̱) root, from South Sudan to Mali: - Mabaan: kúurʌ̂n - Masalit: kûre - Hausa: kùrējē - Tamasheq: ăkolăn - Bambara: nkɛ̀lɛn Must reflect some interesting history of borrowings across family lines, but don't ask me how...

Was asked to include local names where possible, and I'm like, do you even know the names of the ants in your yard? Why would you expect other cultures with historically even less access to microscopes to have named every 2mm long yellow thing that lives under rocks?

hey nerds, mohamed is practicing a type of farming that was invented in this area over 1,000 years ago. al mawasi gets its name from this type of farming. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20581831.2025.2475263 (the article is open-access, go learn something, then bit.ly/help-mohamed)

In this stirring expression of the current US government's commitment to freedom of speech, note that the speaker has final devoicing in "raise", so it ends up rhyming perfectly with "erase". Is this a remnant of L1 Spanish, or are there L1 American English out there that do that?

LLMs being used to generate papers is familiar enough at this stage, but I don't recall coming across LLMs being used to automate the process of defending them on social media before; is this already common in some disciplines?

الشتاء الأمريكي الشعب يريد ذوبان الجليد

A while ago, I put together an article on a funny little chain tale about a cat's big long-term plans, only attested in NW Africa, which I call “What Do You Want Money For?” Just before publication, I finally came across a parallel - a Yiddish nursery rhyme. journal.oraltradition.org/postscript/

Animal sound verbs in Kabyle, from FB Note how all but one are formed with the causative/verbalising prefix s- (The exception is an Arabic loan)

I'm surprised how often people say things like "peer review is a core foundation of science." This doesn't seem obviously true at all! Consensus and truth seems mostly ascertained by mechanisms that operate outside of it.

more news soon, apparently something will happen that rhymes with [redacted] apparently you can be a @springernature.com branded journal, charge hefty APCs, and just outsource quality control to observant folks on BlueSky? amazing

‘Bizarre’ linguistics paper on water retracted by Springer Nature www.timeshighereducation.com/news/bizarre... @lameensouag.bsky.social @dingemansemark.bsky.social @verbingnouns.bsky.social

How do African languages close off their stories? A simple ‘the story has ended’, or do we find more elaborate formulas? (I’m thinking about Grimm’s ‘My tale is done, there runs a mouse, whosoever catches it, may make himself a big fur hat out of it.’) #langsky

Fellawsen, Guermassa. #Tataouine #Tunisia

Tamasheq / Tamajeq / Tetserret : Ǧed = Təge = Tigat = You did Toyyed = Toyye = Tiggat = You abandoned Led = Təle = Tilat = You have Təlled = Təlle = Tillat = You are ( in a place)

Salishan linguist Sarah Thomason has updated her site with online publications after twelve years (life as a tenured research academic is WEIRD) https://websites.umich.edu/~thomason/papers/papers.html #linguistics #philology #firstnations

In Vevcani, North Macedonia, the Julian New Year is celebrated with a masked carnival www.theguardian.com/culture/gall...

This is awesome! I have been curating a list of #linguistics journals, with information on their publishing model (and also on whether they admit submissions created by LaTeX, a high-quality, professional Open Source way to produce scientific documents). uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/s/BvRY0u3rDY...

In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...

Fron Djanet another celebration of the drowning of Pharaoh: ǝssǝbbiba. Pharaoh's drowning is reinterpreted in the context internal historical conflict... The documentary is mainly in Tamahaq (w/ subs in Ar) m.youtube.com/watch?v=ozaK...