These activities celebrating Nigeria’s diverse culture and languages have led to the creation of more than 450 new Wikipedia articles and the addition of over 600 culturally-relevant photos to Wikimedia Commons. diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/11/h...

I have a forthcoming publication on Chadic that briefly goes over some of the descriptive coverage if you're interested -- there's a proofreading version online (Section 1.1 and 3.4) paperhive.org/documents/it...

Few extra thoughts - Always feel weird using terms like "data" to describe endangered indigenous languages but that's just the nature of the game I guess - Cynically, I can't help but wonder if the same explosion of research in the 60s and 70s would have occurred even if Greenberg & Newman hadn't

Tarifit words for "child" have interesting etymologies: aḥenjir < Ar. خنزير (xanzīr, "pig") aḥermuc < Ar. حرام (ḥarām, "forbidden, haram") aḥḥram < Ar. حرام (ḥarām, "forbidden, haram") afrux < Ar. فرخ (farx, "young of an animal") aniybu < inherited arba < inherited Plural only: řbeẓẓ < ?

And Central Chadic is the best described of the Chadic branches... we know even less about West and East Chadic languages

Ndokobai too, in the same year! (not at Yaoundé though)

The first paperback copy of my book Flooded Pasts: UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology just arrived! Available on the 15th March from @cornellupress.bsky.social: www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501...

13,000 ostraca! "Demotic script [is] roughly 60-75% of the material, while between 15 and 30% are in Greek. Smaller numbers appear in Hieratic script (about 1.5%), Hieroglyphic script (0.25%), Coptic (0.2%), and Arabic (0.1%)..." #Egyptology #ClassicsBlueSky english.ahram.org.eg/News/563811....

Btw that Nazi, Johannes Lukas, is arguably the founder of modern Chadic linguistics. His advisor and mentor was Carl Meinhof, another Nazi linguist and foundational figure to African linguistics as a discipline. Lukas's job was to use African linguistics as a vehicle for Nazi Kolonialrevisionismus.

Been diving into the Glottolog data for Central Chadic languages: - 32/80 (40%) are considered vulnerable, threatened, endangered, moribund, or extinct. (4 are confirmed extinct.) - 21/80 (31.25%) are known only from wordlists. - 4/80 (5%) are virtually undocumented (not even a wordlist).

look what i'm about to buy and look whose it used to be!

Fun Tarifit toponyms/demonyms: Antwerp: Anbias (< Anbirs), from French Anvers Germany: Aliman, from French Allemagne, with the initial a reinterpreted as the voyelle consonante a-. An older toponym that once also included the Netherlands the French (collective): afransis BUT Frenchman: afransawi

I can't believe my timeline

Feel like I'm just gonna be posting fun Central Chadic facts for the next week or so so here's another. In Moloko, the tonal melody for the "possible" verbal mood, in one verb class, is HLM, similar to the English "I'unno" melody. nɔ̀-zʊ̄m 'I ate' nɔ́ɔ̀-zʊ̄m 'maybe I'll eat'

There are bigger problems in the world, but the similarity between tone-marked [+ATR] /i/ and [-ATR] /ɪ/ in standard typefaces is very unfortunate

🤖 A reader wants to build a chatbot for an endangered language. What are some ethical considerations they should keep in mind? In this installment of "Ask ELP", Anna, ELP's Executive Director, offers her thoughts.⁠ Read the response at: www.endangeredlanguages.com/story/ask-el...

tl;dr version is the opening quote from @danielleboyer.bsky.social : “Should AI be used with Indigenous languages at all? And the answer is only with great care. And if it can't be done right it shouldn't be done at all.” endangeredlanguages.com/story/ask-el...

Made a little Spotify playlist of traditional music in Central Chadic languages to listen to while I'm reading through & digesting Wolff's Proto-Central Chadic open.spotify.com/playlist/2SU...

Re: Tifinagh -- I recall reading of the Tarifit Neo-Tifinagh literary movement a sardonic quip, "more people write Tarifit than read it". How fair a characterization is this today for overall literary production in Neo-Tifinagh?

Boredom and the invention of the alphabet, a modest proposal: boredom and the desire for novelty are powerful factors in modern media, but they equally animate not only the history of ancient media but the way modern scholars have told its story. For example what the hell is going on here? ↓

I was in middle school at like 12 years old and I get obnoxiously obsessed with Sigur Rós's music and sign up for IcelandicOnline to learn the lyrics. Then went down a Wiki rabbit hole of what "cases" are. I asked for a linguistics textbook for my birthday that year lol

🐤 Baby chicks know their kikis from the boubas! New research shows that newly-hatched chicks perform almost exactly the same as humans on the bouba-kiki test (It’s almost like if wugs took the bouba-kiki test 😀)

Also, just because I mentioned Sukur: its most pragmatically unmarked word order is VOS! Don't know any other Afroasiatic language like that.

Wondering how many "fossilized root augments" of Proto-Central-Chadic are truly "fossilized", and not morphologically complex forms making their way unanlyzed into wordlists of CCh languages with obscure morphologies. Very many apparent examples of this when comparing different wordlists of Sukur.

In Muyang (Central Chadic), you can apparently use word-level palatalization to create diminutives and labialization to create augmentatives. The morphologization of kiki-bouba.

Finally got my mitts on Ekkehard Wolff's "A Historical Phonology of Central Chadic" and I have so many thoughts, most of them positive. Does anyone here have access to a scan of Gravina's CC classification papers from 2007 and 2011 in "Topics in Chadic Linguistics" they might send my way?

I've started private tutoring Biblical Hebrew on the side, and it's been so fun. Got called a "born teacher" and I feel like this 🥰

Was the sound shift *w > /v/ in postvernacular Hebrew precipitated by a corresponding shift in vernacular Aramaic? Or does it represent an independent development?

Is Robert Alter the only English translator to render תֹּהוּ as 'waste' in Gen 1:2? (correctly imo)

The more Sumerian I learn the more I wonder if they really were aliens after all...I'm going to find the Martian who invented the /ba-/ prefix and give him a piece of my mind

I got my first real linguistics research job this week :D (it's a pretty junior role but even so!! I'm being paid money?? to do research??)

My Sumerian teacher told me I have to learn German, sink or swim. I'm sinking about it...

Now that this got a solid 4 likes, I think I’ll follow the trend and offer *1 opinion about Libyco-Berber for 1 like*

Recently learned that Gilgamesh's name 𒀭𒄑𒉋𒂵𒎌 is supposed to be read "Bilgamesh" and I'll never recover

Peeping out my cave to tell you all that I have overcome my fear of the evil little triangles. 𒋗𒌌𒈬𒌝!

Bad Semitic linguistics from the 1940s: "Gesture Origin of Semitic Languages" by Alexander Jóhannesson in 1944. Made the argument that the Semitic and Indo-European languages derive from the "imitation by the organs of speech of the movements of the hands". www.nature.com/articles/154...

Fascinated by the numbers for Maimonides here.

I was recently reminded that it is not good form in certain Jewish study circles to publicly declare that you have quote "mad beef with Maimonides"

Seeing the LibGen / Meta news is so surreal, I literally had a nightmare a few weeks ago that Amazon announced that it had bought LibGen (somehow)

Phoenician q: On the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II, what does the curse "let [my defilers] have no root below nor fruit above nor form in the life under the sun" (ʔl ykn lm šrš lmṭ w pr lmʕl w tʔr b ḥym tḥt šmš) refer to in terms of Phoenician conceptions of the afterlife?

Movies you've watched more than six times, gifs only

Bummed. The popular young nephew I've been preparing to rule after me has died under mysterious circumstances. Gonna cry on the shoulder of his charmless but ambitious brother, who was first to offer condolences to me

Music is keeping my mind off of...all this. Terry Riley & Don Cherry in Köln in 1975, absolutely beautiful youtu.be/i6449e2LsUI?...

Therapy today was about actionable steps to preserve digital knowledge ahead of looming Christofascist censorship. What I learned: 1) implore archives to back up their servers out of the US, 2) digitize your physical media that hasn't already been digitized, 3) print stuff out on acid-free paper.

Shame!

I made it up to Gen 5 last night...slow going but I am learning!

Okay so. This is terrifying.

Open access!! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Coptic ⲃⲣϭⲟⲟⲩⲧ βrkʲɔ́wt "chariot" a loan from Semitic *markab(a)t- (lit. "riding-place"; cf. Arabic rakiba "ride"). in the Akkadian cognate, the m..b dissimilate; so it's narkabtu(m) it's one of my favorite wanderwörter; i have a pet theory that it somehow underlies Celtic *karbanto- "chariot"

I'm at the point where I can, armed with enough time and a dictionary, chip away at Koine Greek texts on my own, and I'm proud of myself hehe :^)