Found a complete recording of the entire Samaritan Torah on YouTube by a man named מאיר ששון from Holon. Been listening and following along with Ze'ev ben-Hayyim's transcriptions from 1975. They're virtually identical down to the smallest details. Chills. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek3q...

A hidden Ea-Nasir joke in the game Dune Awakening

Deleted last post because idk how the surviving families would feel, so I'll anonymize. But I've been doing family research and discovered that my great-uncle was involved with the Nimes Committee in 1941, helping some figures knoen to me escape internment camps in unoccupied Southern France. 😲

Now published online... langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

Hot take I didn't know I had until recently is that Daniel 10-12 might be the worst reading experience in the whole Tanakh for a Hebrew reader

pe'al, pa'el, af'el, itpe'el, itpa'al, ittaf'al

The wording of this is so broad that it is not just a threat against trans people, it is threatening to bring the full force of state violence down against allies.

Me making mistakes and flying up in the air like a balloon

love when I get to blow my linguist friends' minds by pointing out that it's [grilled [cheese sandwich]], not [[grilled cheese] sandwich]

The Pearlsong made an appearance on the Agade list yesterday, so I'll take it as an excuse to say that you can find hard copies here and elsewhere www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067... And you'll find the open-access pdf here cswr.hds.harvard.edu/publications...

My personal guess for an IPA rendering of the below: [yusab:ir ħo:ra:nu ya bini: yusab:ir ħo:ra:nu raʔʃaka ʕastartu ʃumu baʕli q'adq'udaka]

If I had a nickel for every philosopher named John Scotus who are remembered for their strange and heterodox theologies, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

May I introduce to you some really impressive Libyco-Berber monuments? In Bordj Hajar, close to Chemtou in Tunisia, three fragments of massive obelisks have been found. They have been reconstructed in the Chemtou museum (thanks, wikipedia!). Their original height was probably around 3.5 meters 🤯

"The hallmark impact of imperialist archaeologies was the appropriation of the other’s historical arc and its incorporation into the western one as antecedent [e.g.] ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia constructed as the cradle of (western) civilization"

1,000,000 people displaced, about 20% of Lebanon's entire population.

Hot new historical sociolinguistics of Persian out from Cambridge Core. Seems like a good time for it probably. Kairotic even. 🐦🐦

This isn't even a joke, this is quite literally how Aramaic education works in traditional Jewish settings for those unaware. One day someone just puts the Talmud in front of you and says "You'll figure it out if you stare at it long enough". And it...kinda works.

like generations of Hebrew learners before me, i will throw myself at an Aramaic text with reckless abandon, double-fisting a dictionary and some notes on morphology, and pray that the rest isn’t too different

This is a fun feature of the Targums, which render these infinitives verbatim, even though it's unidiomatic. Onqelos: ביומא דתיכול מניה ממת תמות bəyomā dətekol minneh məmāt təmut "On the day you eat of it, die you will die." It's as odd in JPA as in English, but the Targums are fond of it!

www.sefaria.org/sheets/379057 A while back I compiled a sheet on Sefaria of all the places in Kaufman’s manuscript of the Mishnah where Aramaic is used. I want to someday make a critical edition version where I compare different manuscript vocalizations

Blau's Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic Texts online 👀

One of the only Aramaic sentences in the Mishnah, attributed to Hillel (M Avot 6:2) beholding a skull floating in water, contemplating the cycle of violence: על דאטפת אטפוך וסוף מטיפיך יטופון "Because you drowned [people], they drowned you; and in the end, the ones who drowned you shall drown."

A nice Punic coin from Sicily: b-ʔrṣt (*b-ʔarṣūt?) = "in the lands" A bit like Devanagari, Punic tended to hang letters from the top of the line, rather than build them up from the bottom; only a couple, like lamed, went over the top. Modern Phoenician fonts rarely convey this feel.

Visited a love one in with cancer in the ER today. The hospitalist told us that just a few days ago he had to deal with a family on the oncology floor who insisted the doctors follow directions they got from ChatGPT, which "led to catastrophe". People are following oncological advice from ChatGPT...

I promise this is going to be about Targum Onqelos

Was asked to fill in today to give a brief intro to Gnosticism & the Apocryphon of John Apologies in advance to students

Strange paragraphs to write: "In JRL Syr. 10, in the left margin of fol. 304r, aligned to the top of the column, there is a transfer-sticker representing an anthropomorphic green frog dressed as a medieval soldier with breastplate, sword, and chainmail head protection, topped by a feathered hat. 1/

אָתָא עוֹג דְאִישְׁתֵּזֵיב מִן גוּבְרַיָא דְמִיתוּ בְּטוּבְעָנָא וּרְכַב עִילוֹי תֵיבוּתָא (!!) www.sefaria.org/Targum_Jonat...

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Genesis 14:13. It just adds an entire extra paragraph ranting about the antedeluvian giant Og in the middle of the Battle of Siddim

The American Philosophical Society in 1888 going off against Germans for introducing German terminology into the sciences. From the "Reportof the Committee (D.G. Brinton, Henry Phillips, jr., Monroe B. Snyder) appointed October 21, 1887, to examine into the scientific value of Volapük".

The séance was a success

Liberated this one as well. Academia 👇, HCommons here: works.hcommons.org/records/b11j...

A super obvious one that I somehow never noticed, גלף from Gr. glýphō. I'm so used to seeing it in the Zohar (esp in phrases like שמא קדישא גליפא 'the holy inscribed name') that I just never stopped to think about it

We therefore learn from this learned commentary made by a Babylonian scribe over 2000 years ago, that in the Akkadian language, the word shitti means "shit"

Researching loanwords in Onqelos in preparation for teaching JPA for the first time (😵‍💫) and I never knew that זין 'weapon' is from Middle Persian zên? So what was the original name of the letter ז if not *zayn?

I was at a great talk on this exact question this week at Evolang by @thomaspellard.bsky.social & @robinryder.bsky.social! with quantitative simulations they show that it’s true that it’s very hard to reconstruct the deepest split in a tree when older than +-8k years. paper’s not out yet though

Does anyone know any good research papers on the phenomenon of folk linguistics and the way it intersects with ethnonationalism and ethnic writing? You know, the type that claims language X is the oldest language & the origin of all world languages?

Zoharic Aramaic and I share a mutual uncertainty on how all the different JPA and JBA demonstratives work. Just use דא for everything and hope no one notices

The virgin Semitic triliteral root vs the Chad Central Chadic Root Tesseract

Imagine a world where, when a state openly tried to do ethnic cleansing - on land that it doesn't even pretend to own, to boot - the rest of the world actually tried to prevent it. Crazy utopianism, I know.

Just going to use these as prompts to occasionally spam some of my publications here

It’s wild how much power language affiliation narratives can have—and how many afterlives they can live!

This has also been me recently (definitely wasting my time) trying to track down the origins of some Egypto-Bantu crankery

Unpopular opinion but there should only be eight Nvidia chips total, and seven of them should be employed folding proteins to cure diseases and stuff and the eighth you have to check out from the library

No one I have ever asked knows where the "historical linguistics can only go back 10,000 years" thing comes from. I've heard it from professors, I've read it in papers. Sometimes the number is 10,000 or 7,000 or 12,000 but the core idea is that the comparative method has a specific time limit.

Just saw one of my translations being quoted out in the wild for the first time :D it's some racist conspiracy nutjob on Reddit :(

OK, so from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud, a northern-Israelite-associated site in Sinai(!), we've got some Yahwistic plaster inscriptions in Phoenician(!) script in what looks like good Judahite(!) Hebrew… how are we supposed to classify this stuff??

Important new publication of historical Berber lingusitics, esp. onomastics. Edited and organized by the brilliant Carles Múrcia (not on here, I think), with, among many others, articles by @lameensouag.bsky.social and myself.