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

some incoherent thoughts about Numidian BNS. in funerary inscriptions in the eastern script (the one we can read), the term BNS appears about 228 times, making it the most frequent word in the corpus. The literature normally interprets it as BN-S "his/her stone" with the Amazigh 3S suffix -s.

Siwi vocab for the day: əlbuṛj "pigeon tower" (pictured below) abdir "male pigeon" tabdərt "female pigeon" ṭaʕṭaʕ "pigeon (in baby talk)" arraf "nest"

So Dinka has possessed-possessor word order for everything EXCEPT body parts; if the possessed is a body part (literal or metaphorical), the order is normally possessor-possessed. I.e.: "father-my", "cow of John" vs. "my hand", "John's head" Does any language outside West Nilotic do this?

a beautiful case, where calqueing plurale tantum by Tadaksahak shows that the source was likely Tetserrét and not Tamaj/šeq

Marking case only on the first conjunct... very familiar from Berber, but in Dinka the case marker isn't even initial (below: Nebel 1948)

💥 Congratulations to Dr @carolinebarron.bsky.social , who has a new publication in the journal 'Libyan Studies'! 👉 Dr Barron reassess 53 Latin, Greek and Latino-Punic inscriptions from a late-antique tomb excavated in 1926 at Sirte, Libya 🔗 Read here for free, open-access: doi.org/10.1017/lis....

We accepted "Directional extensions in Chadic languages" by Joseph Lovestrand langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

The ridiculous pop-Whorfian Orientalist "no word for it" phrasing deserves mockery, but he's not talking about linguistics. In context, what he's saying is roughly "Palestinians don't want to submit and probably never will (even though, in their place, 'we' totally would)."

Think I've just had my first encounter with LLM-fabricated language data. Some Indonesian paper mill journal just published a paper containing completely fabricated Siwi data, citing me as the source. (It could have been made up by a human, but it looks like what you get when you ask ChatGPT.)

Have you ever heard a tale / nursery rhyme / whatever along similar lines to this Galician Yiddish one? (Several of its details remind me very much of one I've discussed in Korandje, but there must be similar forms somewhere in between...)

Just read Polshin's "Cushitic-Omotic: genetic and areal relations". Based mainly on distributional arguments: - Cushitic has massively influenced "Omotic", but is not related to it - North Omotic is not related to South Omotic; the matches between them are mostly shared early loans from Cushitic

I guess that makes Dhofari an Ancient Modern South Arabian language. (Seriously, the label "Modern South Arabian" was always ill-chosen, but if this reading holds up, it really needs to be retired.)

Correspondence 'Ten camels and six goats' #Tamajeq : Marawat toḷamen ǝd sǝḍisat wǝlli #Tetserret : Mara tilǝmin akat šadiš wǝll

Just came across the Tamasheq word for what I guess could be called a "diapausal embryo"? And now I'm wondering whether e-CeCəC is/was a productive deverbal template.

Lots of new grammar in the #Dhofari inscriptions, suggesting further links with the Modern South Arabian languages. The verb yġfrm 'may they pardon' shows the plural ending -m. See these two new texts just uploaded to #OCIANA ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions... ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Very much like how you would form a polite request in Algeria: Ḷḷa ysəjjik matdəxxənš = May God protect you, don't smoke! (=Please, don't smoke). From the Atlantic to Central Asia, politeness rests on blessings. I wonder whether you can still say that in Kashgar without ending up in a camp...

If you want a funny little Algerian and Moroccan folk tale of an ambitious cat - along with a perhaps too lengthy analysis - my article is finally out in Oral Tradition 37: “What Do You Want Money for?”: A Chain Tale between Berber and Songhay oraltradition.org/wp-content/u...

In the ms below, a 17th c. racist poet says: If I were in Paradise with Berber neighbours I'd move from bliss to the depths of Hell. They call the Merciful "Baba", as they claim - And whoever does that is an infidel! (In Tamazight, baba = "father", bab = "master") Al-Yūsī refutes this in kind:

Aqjaj n ifer uɛinṣul 🌿💧✨ Vient de sortir, une vidéo sur la confection traditionnelle d’un récipient à boire en feuille de scille maritime : Aqjaj n ifer uɛinṣul. ▶️ youtu.be/QZhLctknI8o Vous aussi, transmettez-nous vos vidéos, nous les diffuserons sur la chaîne @AmazighLanguages ! ⵣ🌟 tinemmirin ☀️ⵣ

This is an amazing piece of journalism. Between them, they managed to interview not only the family of the victims of a war crime, but also the specific sniper who murdered them. (It would be nice to think that that might lead to real-world consequences.)

I say again. Unilaterally deciding to bomb any random country in the Middle East isn't regional hegemony. It's a hostage situation until someone can get the gun away from the hijacked.

Correspondence Meaning : the fact of digging a well #Tamajeq : Eɣez n aṇu #Tetserret : Tawwǝžu n omǝž #Zenaga : To'žih n amuž

Gender assignment in one of the southernmost Chadic languages - both lexical and semantic

Word of the day: 'labor' In Tamazight (SE Morocco): - tawuri , tiwiri - a few from Ar : ššġʷl, lxdəmt, lhəmm (the latter oft used to refer to women's work) - (go into labor) : aẓbaṛ A saying: yan mi ur tmmiġ tadawt, ur ičči tiġṛad n təġʷrdin (a dry back will never earn a shoulder's wages)

Back when I was a teenager in England, flying flags on your house was generally understood to be something real English people Do Not Do, for fear of being mistaken for Americans or chavs. It would be as weird as knowing all the words to the national anthem.

One more book about Figuig and its wider region (it is a bit less general than the title suggests). By the infatigable Hassane Benamara! @hamidouyachi.bsky.social @lameensouag.bsky.social

Amazigh word Meaning : wood, tree #Tachelhit : asɣar #Taqbaylit : asɣar #Tarifit : asɣar #Tamacheq : esaɣer #Tamajeq : ašaɣer #Tetserret : ašaṛ #Old-Libyan : šqrh It's interesting that the old Libyan has /š/ and /q/ here

There will be many casualties from UChicago ending ('pausing') PhD admissions in Humantities, but one which I am keenly aware of: this is close to a death sentence for teaching cuneiform in the United States (esp. Sumerian, Hittite, Elamite, Eblaite, Luwian) and it will affect the whole world.

This one Dril tweet in December 2023 was a more accurate depiction of actual events than anything you’d have got off newsstands, from broadcast media or out of the mouths of politicians. It hasn’t got much better since.

Oh look, a book! global.oup.com/academic/pro...

NEW: The first evidence of a solar take-off in Africa☀️✈️ x33 rise in Algeria solar panel imports in the 12 mths to June 2025, compared to previous 12 mths. x8 in Zambia x7 in Botswana x6 in Sudan x3 in each of Liberia, DRC, Benin, Angola, Ethiopia 🧵

#Tifinagh inscriptions We can read the names ⵎⵎⵡ (MMD) and ⴳⴹⵎⵜ (FḌMT) which seem to be variants of the names Muhamad and Fatima * In this kind of inscription the sign ⴳ still appears to have the value F as in Dugga script

A few years ago, Mansour Ghaki published a new Libyco-Berber text from Dougga, which consists of 7 lines of Libyan text, 1 line of (unrelated) Punic text, and two lines that are unreadable. In line 2, he reads SYN GLDT W MQLZ GLDT WTQN MWSNT "ŠYN the gld, son of MQLZ(?) the gld, son of ṬQN the mwsn"

40. The only word in Ancient Greek that we know (in my opinion) that we can be *absolutely* certain to have been borrowed from a language related to the one the Minoans spoke is νικύλεον, a kind of Cretan fig according to Hermonax in Athenaeus's Deipnosophists 76e.

The core role of the university in society is the generational transmission of knowledge and rare skills. This has been already long forgotten by administrators who have prioritised rebranding universities as publicly-funded job-training centres in recent decades.

ⴰⵎⴷⵗ Amdǝɣ

Long read on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, who we had the honor of interviewing on the History of Africana Philosophy podcast a while back: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

Pages of a Quranic manuscript of the Attawari Tuaregs from Niger The representation of dromedary and horse are not common in this type of manuscript

Devasting news about Anas.. A paragon of his profession, abandoned by his peers abroad after being openly targeted for his journalism by this cowardly, genocidal army desperate to ensure no one documents its horrific crimes to come. إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون , الله يرحمك يا غالي

Yaḥyā is the name of John the Baptist in Islam. (Yes, The Telegraph is basically saying that naming your son John makes you a terrorist.) But it also has a literal meaning in Arabic: "he lives" or "may he live". In Berber, the literal equivalent is common: Yidir. (It seems to predate Islam.)

I couple of weeks ago I gave a talk about the differences between 17th century and contemporary Ternate, based on the van Diemen contract. You can now find it for free on my Zenodo zenodo.org/records/1668...

Any student heading out to do fieldwork on an endangered language should read this first (by Lise M. Dobrin and Don Kulick) - a good vaccination against saviour complexes. linguisticanthropology.org/blog/2025/08...

How did a sailors’ pidgin from the Mediterranean end up in the commands of Senegal’s colonial troops? This study follows the unexpected journey from sea jargon to Français Tirailleur. doi.org/10.25189/267... #langsky #linguistics

I'm in Oxford = I'm located there. I'm at Oxford = I study there. Never noticed this particular nuance of English locative prepositions before.

Jacques needs you to understand that Acholi tense and aspect has both segmental and tonal inflection, pay attention! #elsea field school

There is a new Chotiner interview that really underscores what is unique about Israel's genocide in Gaza: it would be very easy for the world to stop it if only a few countries wanted to.

Darja miscellaneous notes, 2025 lughat.blogspot.com/2025/08/darj...