There is a whole series of stelae elsewhere which carry the one-word inscription WRMZ (RIL 286, 318, 319, 397, 942). What to think about this? In principle, names with WR- are well-known, and live on in modern ethnic names like Ayt Wertilan or Ayt Waryaghel. Moreover:

Akkat teɣare dəffərəs takkim ehare Omǝlet tǝɣari ḍaraš tomǝlǝm eri

🗿NABATAEAN NEWS🗿 Recently (2024), Laïla Nehmé published four #Nabataean texts from a burial site in north-western Saudi Arabia. Three are very fragmentary, but the fourth is the longest Nabataean text on stone found so far! Two things that stood out to me: 1/6

To properly reconstruct a new language family, you have to accept taking on masses of absolute drudgery, and spend years focusing on particulars before you get to make elegant generalizations. Hence the temptation to find shortcuts even if they don't actually work.

Correspondence Meaning : i have #Tamajeq : ǝleɣ #Tetserret : ilak #Zenaga : iyag In some Tamahaq dialect and also in many Amazigh language we can say /ɣuri/ ( with me) to mean 'i have'

'Nous appelons le Collège de France à revenir sur sa décision et à garantir la tenue de ce colloque dans le respect de la liberté intellectuelle. Nous appelons le ministère à honorer son devoir de protection de la recherche, non à en devenir le censeur' 🤔 Römer et Baptiste doivent surtout se barrer

Postdoctoral Researcher in Linguistics at the Center for the Human Past, "historical linguistics pertaining to one or more language families of Africa, Oceania, and Eurasia" desired: www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Non-trivial West Nilotic cognate of the day: "five" -Mabaan: d̪ʌʌy-ʌ -Dholuo: a-biic

A short thread on onomastics in Numidian inscriptions (eastern script). Indexes of names in eastern Numidian inscriptions (Chabot 1940, Rebuffat 2018) provide us with an almost ridiculous number of different names. I wondered if this is correct, or if this is due to the messiness of the corpus.

This article contains the longest consonant cluster I've ever come across in a Semitic language other than Moroccan Arabic, from a Hebrew article written in 1897: hit-ašknz-u "they Germanised", a denominal verb from Ashkenaz (which, in this context, meant "Germany")

Some years ago, I started compiling all the ancient inscriptions from Minorca to publish a corpus with archaeologist Joan C de Nicolás. I couldn’t imagine the surprises it would bring me. In the top, the Paleo-Amazigh personal names we published with Carles Múrcia: www.academia.edu/50839352/Lep...

Another reason to study Sībawayh: Not only are his linguistic descriptions completely alien to a western paradigm, but *also* what he actually describes as Arabic is extremely worth actually studying. It's much broader than the strict norms of Classical Arabic western scholars usually assume.

From a Songhay cultural group on Facebook: "Today, Friday, let us put our siblings who are in Sudan, and all the land of Sudan - especially Al Fashir, in Darfur - in our prayers: may God hold their hand in the situation they are in..."

📢📢 APPEL À PROJETS 2025/2026 📢📢 ✨AZUL!✨ Vous avez un projet de documentation ou de numérisation de connaissances ou pratiques ancestrales #amazighes et vous avez besoin de soutien financier et logistique ? L’appel EMKP vient d’être lancé. ➡️ tr.ee/aY2MqPXMZW Suivez les RS de l’EMKP pour +d’infos

Apparently our collective capabilities are so amazing that we can see spilled blood from space now, but still can't lift a hand to stop the killers. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10...

Kinship terminology rarely perfectly reflects biological kinship. The root meaning of the Indo-European word "mother" isn't even "biological mother". The ancestral Indo-European system, the patrilineal Omaha system, calls your mother's sister and all women on mother's side "mother" (B in diagram).

Some further thought about BNS in Numidian inscriptions The term is mostly interpreted as “his stone”, but Rössler suggests that “his wife” would be better (unbeknownst to him, it even could make sense etymologically) Personally, I find this unexpected for a grave stone, but that is irrelevant.

So apparently some idiot decided that what Wikipedia really needed more of was Nazi-positive LLM output. Had a look... "Dholuo" - copied from WP. "Dellys" - doesn't exist (!) "Al-Busiri" - copied from WP, with two paragraphs added. "Siwi language" - _not_ copied from WP, and a big mess...

From a Dholuo dictionary. The only place I can actually think of where this principle doesn't hold is some contemporary Anglo communities (going back at least to C. S. Lewis' time); any other candidates?

There are plenty of obstacles universities face, but "closed for lack of fuel because of a rebel blockade" is one you don't hear every day. Best wishes to our colleagues in Mali, and to everyone else caught up in this civil war.

Today in Chintabaraden there was a ceremony for the new chief of the Ibarkorayan Acharifan. In Tamajeq this kind of ceremony is called tangaṭ (the veiling) .

Profile of Nick Evans, who just won the British Academy's Neil and Saras Smith medal for lifetime achievement in linguistics @theobserveruk.bsky.social @britishacademy.bsky.social observer.co.uk/news/science...

Been reading some of Leo Frobenius' _Voice of Africa_ (1913). Wow, this guy was racist even by early 20th c. standards - his WP entry is very sanitized, and I suspect it's lucky for his reputation that he died before WWII. But he was racist in a curiously flattering way...

Thz name of Jujube fruit #Tamacheq : abaka #Tamajeq : azəggar #Tetserret : ažwar #Tadaksahak : ažwar #Tagdalt : ažwar

An Ayt Hdiddu Text (Bynon) Maš da ttinin mddn adday da tsawal tslmya ž tmẓy ns ž wr ssin mddn mayd ttini: hat aynnaɣ ayd yžan da tsawal d lmalayša "But people say when a baby is speaking in its early days and people do not know what it is saying: "Look at what it's doing, it's speaking with Angels!"

The name of some groups in Tamajeq / Tetserret : kǝl ǝɣlal = id baba n eɣlel attawari = daktawari The name of idaksahak is probably from a language closer to Tetserret and it's equivalent in tamajeq is dawsahak .

New #OpenAccess paper on what 'first', 'second', 'third' tell us about the #Semitic family tree, including new evidence for Aramaeo-Canaanite! Note that unfortunately, the names of Ethiopian scholars have been metathesized, something that will hopefully be remedied before the final print version. 🐦🐦

evidence of much older gene flow from Africa to Iberia from four human remains from northern Portugal and southern Spain, dated around 4000 years BP 3600 yBP individual from Córdoba was assigned to L2a1 l royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Alur is the first language I've looked at seriously which has an inherited word for "gorilla": bím "gorilla" bím mɪ́lùl "forest gorilla" bím mɪ́gɔ̀t "mountain gorilla" It didn't always mean this, though; proto-Lwoo was spoken much further north, and its Anywa cognate, bīm, means "baboon". (img: WP)

A Syrian immigrant to Algeria switching dialects. "ʔaṛʊḥ ʕala sūriya ʔaṛūḥ abā ṛažaʕ? ʕābak ṛānī nʔīmāžīnīha fī moxxī mahīš tətʔīmīžīna mʕāya." "Me, go to Syria and not come back? Y'know, I'm imagining it in my mind and it's not getting imagined with me." www.instagram.com/reel/DLiPPyC...

A 3,300 year-old Egyptian-Akkadian vocabulary from Amarna, with Egyptian words written in cuneiform ši-na-aḫ=šnꜥ (unit of weight) ši-na-aḫ-wu₄=šnꜥwj (dual of šnꜥ) ḫa-am-tu₄ šu-nu-uḫ=ḫmtw šnꜥw (three šnꜥ) … na-ab-na-su=nꜣ bnšw (the doorposts) DU-as-bu=tꜣ jsbt (the chair) pa-ḫa-tu₄=pꜣ ḥꜥtj (the bed)

Amusing Southern Lwoo cognate set of the day: Dholuo: akara (n.) "trousers", (adv.) "spread apart" Acholi: àkárákárà yòò (n.) "junction" Alur: ákárà (n.) "fork, forking", àkárákárà (n.) "trident" (images: WP)

#Tetserret : omǝkǝkak = i thank you (m) omǝkǝkam = i thank you (f) omǝkǝkaš = i thank him/her

A shallow language family scattered across widely separated language islands due to medieval expansions, where most lexical correspondences are trivial, yet somehow the basic word order and much of the core morphology vary wildly from one variety to the next? Luo is basically Songhay, I guess.

Watch the full interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB5T...

"One could say that cows derive their names from creatures in the world, but the reverse would be just as accurate: cows provide the patterns according to which the world is comprehensible." mouse-magazine.com/issue-4/2022...

Labiodental borrowed as interdental: Taino > Spanish guayaba > English guava > Arabic juwāfa > Anywa (South Sudan/Ethiopia):

B. Herin and E. Al-Wer, A Grammar of Jordanian Arabic, 2025 (Open Access). www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Just because you and your spouse have come up with a home language policy doesn't mean your kids will agree to it! (Melgani 2025, "Bilingual development, translanguaging practices, and discursive co-construction of ethnic identity in Algerian Chaoui families" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... )

Looking through grammars of Bari (South Sudan), and disappointed to realise that Owen 1908 ("Bari Grammar and Vocabulary") is almost entirely plagiarised without acknowledgement from Mitteruntzner 1867 ("Die Sprache der Bari in Central-Afrika"). At least Owen calls himself "editor", not "author"...

According to a specialist consulted in 1915, the letters are largely Etruscan, but the language is not. M.J. Martha gave the following transcription of the text:

Strange to think that I've reviewed a grammar of the language spoken there - Lopit.

Old Kanembu word of the day, from Dmitry Bondarev's draft dictionary: krtsāk كْرْتْسَاكْه "revelation" Let's break it down... www.researchgate.net/profile/Dmit...

"bUt ThE GrEaT EsKiMo VoCaBuLaRy HoAx!"

To answer my own question - at least two others do: - Murle (Surmic) - Gaahmg (Eastern Jebel) You may notice that all three cases are both probably distantly related and located in roughly the same area. But surely there must be some language in the rest of the world that does this?

Some beautiful shared colexification in the Sahara... (The verbal noun, tara / baaɣa / anara, means "to want"; the construction might be rendered literally as "I fix wanting")

Now available on Wordpress! phdnix.wordpress.com

Correspondence Meaning : Bad person , offender #Tamajeq : Arkawedan #Tadaksahak : Agarbora #Tetserret : Agarfagan Interesting that tadaksahak and tetserret have the same element Agar for 'bad'. Agar is also the most common form in other Amazigh languages. The Tamajeq form is mysterious

Taunting reduplication in Dholuo, according to Gregersen 1971

Correspondence Meaning : How are you ? Literally : What are your informations #Tamajeq : Məni isalan-nawan #Tadaksahak : Mana andin-isalan #Tetserret : Mənkat nəšfaš-ənnetən