C. Hutton 2025 The People that Never Were OUP: "The proposition that the German word Hund and the English word hound are cognate or related etymologically or, to use William Jones’s words, “sprung from some common source,” is difficult to sustain on close examination." So no cognates. Got it.

The program for the Leiden Summer School has been announced! Hope to see some of you there. www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/education...

Semiticists, is there a more recent treatment of the "middle affricate hypothesis" than Kogan's discussion in Weninger 2011? Is it now communis opinio that "zayin" was an affricate in PS or in Canaanite? I'd be grateful for any pointers. @phdnix.bsky.social ky.social, @bnuyaminim.bsky.social

Α linguistic joke from Maximus Planudes (1260 – c. 1305). The joke is that the 10 highlighted words are all pronounced /erimin/!

If any recently Ph.D.-ed Indo-Europeanist is interested in applying for this, please get in touch with me. Fair warning: it is super-competitive. as.cornell.edu/research/kla...

An oft-repeated argument in favor of a fronted value for υ in Attic and East Ionic is the “fact” that the letter κ, not ϙ, is used before υ, since it no longer symbolized a back vowel— Qoppa supposedly was only used before back vowels or l plus a back vowel. So Allen Vox Graeca p. 67, n. 11.

Amazon review of Kuśiññe Kantwo by Skid Kid: "If you have studies Sanskrit and Buddhism, these would work well. For someone just wanting an elementary book of Tocharian, it is terrible."

packhum.org is down. Does anybody know anything about this?

Here are the criteria I use when reviewing Voynich decipherment articles, developed as part of teaching about the Voynich manuscript in linguistics classes. They are independent of any particular language, person, or approach, except that it's for solutions that claim there's underlying meaning

You should go!

A Summer school in Philosophical #Sanskrit: The 4th edition of the Vienna Summer School on the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia will take place in Vienna, Austria, from July 7 to July 12 2025. (Fees are ridiculously low: 100 E w/o accommodation or 400 w accommodation & breakfast) 1/

Tracing the Spread of Celtic Languages using Ancient Genomics https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.28.640770v1

Michiel de Vaan, Cantonophonie. Sur l’origine des noms des cantons suisses, Prilly, Les Presses Inverses, 2025. wp.unil.ch/labelettres/...

Professorship of Latin at Uppsala. N.B. "Research is conducted both at the department and at the university library in areas such as textual criticism, epigraphy, syntax, historical linguistics, metrics and poetry." www.uu.se/en/about-uu/...

Job: Postdoctoral Researcher in Indo-European Studies 70 - 80 % (Universität Zürich) jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... #linguistics #pie #indoeuropean #anatolian #historicallinguistics #langsky

Nice to see this!

Great opportunity for students of #Sanskrit who want to reach the next level.

@olawikander.bsky.social @bnuyaminim.bsky.social Can you point me towards recent lit. about the vocalization of ancient Phoenician name of Byblos (Akk. Gubla)? I am interested in whether the Greek rendering really implies that they heard it as *gwubl-

Lu 62, Roccagloriosa, has the protasis σϝαι ειοκ νειπ fακτιεδ[….. "if x does not do these things" with the incomprehensible form fακτιεδ. This may be an inverse spelling for /fakset/ = Lat. faxit. We have evidence that tiV became s at least at Bantia (Bansae = Bantiae) and final -d was devoiced.

Sometimes working with manuscripts gets us really, really close to the people from the past allowing us to hear their voices. This is a story of a letter from a schoolgirl to her teacher, written probably sometime at the end of the 9th or the beginning of the 10th century. A thread 🧵 #medievalsky /1

🏺 The personal name ⟨koma⟩ (less likely ⟨koiśa⟩) is inscribed – not particularly neatly – on the bottom of a ceramic cup from the Giubiasco necropolis in Ticino (CH), dated to the late 1st c. BC. Komā or Kommā is most likely a hypocoristic name formed from a compound with preverb kom- 'with' ...

Someone found me 🙂 Just talked to @bartfun.bsky.social about the "Ten Commandments Tablet" being auctioned by Sotheby's tomorrow. Here's some things I learned while reading up on this case... 1/12

Vote on the TLL Latin Word of the Year 2024! Until Dec. 19. The five finalists were published this year in the TLL and don't appear in another standard dictionary of ancient Latin. ⭐️reteiaclor ⭐️retotatototato ⭐️retroactim⭐️revaleo⭐️revolumen parerga.hypotheses.org/3516

Very sad to hear about the passing of Prof. Sharon L. James. She was a great colleague at UNC and a kind and funny person.

Schedule for Pavia summer school. Looking forward to teaching here and hearing the other courses (Sept. 2-7)! github.com/unipv-larl/6...

With the author's permission I've posted an English version of Susanne Zeilfelder's 2012, Übungsheft zur indogermanischen Lautlehre as Exercises for Indo-European Phonology at my Academia page www.academia.edu/109794237/Ex.... I hope students will find these useful!