Technologically advance a band: Dogstone The Tannahill Power Loom Operators RV Beethoven

Working with Hanzi, seeing 㐬. "Oh, I know that one, it's three skins tied together and represents birth. No, wait. Dammit, that's the hieroglyph 𓄟." Looking it up "㐬 is ... an upside down baby. And represents birth."

Sino-Tibetan <*(kV-)nis>: "two" -> Mandarin 二 <èr>: "two" vs. Proto-Indo-European <*dwóh₁>: "two" -> Armenian երկու <erku>: "two" 🧐

Not you, Greek

This evening, working on a word family Reading a wikipedia article, "oh hey they're quoting @bnuyaminim.bsky.social" later, reading a different wikipedia article, "oh hey, I wrote this." 🙃

PIE: "what makes blowing?" Albanian: "weather" English: "weather" Russian: "weather" Greek: "foot races"

GOAT song

The Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "fetch" (<jnj>) is a little bowl with legs: 𓏎 😄

Does anyone have a satisfactory explanation for the /k/ in ἕλιξ? I really _want_ "helicopter" to be from *wel(H)-, but most -ιξ nouns seem to be very strong candidates for substrate borrowings, unless there is a clear -K in the PIE root.

A colonnade has columns An arcade has arches A palisade has pales/pali (which something could be impaled on) An alameda has elms (really poplars, but cognate to "elm") A lemonade has lemons (A gatorade has gators?)

drove by *h₁elmeh₂teh₂ déh₁ h₂l̥néh₂es plúsekeyes yesterday

New version of the Ogham in 3D website! 3d digitization is really essential for reading ogham in particular. For the post I made a few months ago, every available photo of this stone was large illegible, only the DIAS site made it possible for me to read it!

Been stuck here for an hour now

New podcast! @dannybate.bsky.social and I chat about Scottish Gaelic, mediaeval sea kingdoms, the spread and retreat of Gaelic in Scotland, influence from Pictish, sounds borrowed from Old Norse, and much more 🐦🐦 podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a... or wherever you get your podcasts :)

My friend @ameliahogan.bsky.social just released a music video of her singing The Twa Corbies, which has been a favorite of mine for ... well, more than one decade, we'll just leave it at that 😆 www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-d... A border ballad with Scots language and ravens. What's not to love?

Quenya dual etymologies #1: Eärendil

Quenya dual etymologies #4: Fëa circumvent bsky image compression: pdf: www.aidanem.com/images/word_... png www.aidanem.com/images/word_...

English has two words "fey": 1. "doomed to die" 2. "fairy, fairylike" One of them is closely related to the word "fate". Guess which one 🙃

English has two words "fey": 1. "doomed to die" 2. "fairy, fairylike" One of them is closely related to the word "fate". Guess which one 🙃

Bannaną phone

Three different patterns of merger in Korean vs Japanese vs Vietnamese Sino-Xenic vocabularies

There are a small number of compound words that do something completely different. A ‘cutthroat’ is not a type of throat OR a type of cut. So what gives? Editor and historical linguist Brianne Hughes calls these types of words ‘cutthroat compounds.’

Oh damn. I knew 사자 <saja>: "lion, lion cub" (www.aidanem.com/word-family-...) but in fact there are THREE different Sino-Xenic borrowings that get collapsed as Hangul 사자 <saja>/<sāja>, every one of which has an application to the Saja Boys: (🧵1/3)

PIE: "what do you use to speak with?" Old Irish: "...words?" Sanskrit: "...my mouth?"

Proto-Indo-European *wokʷtlóm would mean "thing for speaking with", equivalent to "voice-tron". Celtic and Indo-Iranian have two different interpretations of "thing for speaking with" 😄 Old Irish focul: "word" Sanskrit vaktra: "mouth"

And in other etymology/paleontology crossovers, I realized that in "mental eminence"—the protruding chin of H. sapiens (sapiens)—"mental" (the one from "mentum", not "mēns") is cognate to both "eminence" and "mouth"

So disappointed there's no ancient group of animals called "pro-ungulates", à la "prosimians", "profelids", "prosauropods", etc. so that I could derive it and Naglfar (The Ship of Dead Man's Nails) from the same two roots. 😄

Does anyone know _why_ Egyptian "nfr" is depicted as a heart and windpipe? Homophony?? Symbolism??

Most LLM products’ most fundamental purpose is to lie. This is the thing they are actually optimized for. Which is why I’m sitting out of employment in the computational linguistics industry for the time being.

popping this out of thread, cause it's so fun French "avec": "with" is ultimately made from Proto-Indo-European *h₁pi-h₂éd-gʰe-ke-kʷe: "on-at-indeed-this-and" 😂 ("on-at-indeed-this-follows"?, "on-at-indeed-this-which"?)

Hah. The Old Armenian word for "cavalry" is այրուձի ⟨ayr-u-ji⟩: "man-and-horse". Equivalent to e.g. Sanskrit ⟨nara-api-haya⟩

Ooh, the "ma" in Gwi-Ma (KPop Demon Hunters) is from Sanskrit <mara> 😁 (And thus cognate to "nightmare", etc.)

"occupy"/"behave" are such a weird double-double Not a single shared letter, not a lot of meaning overlap. Both from *h₁epi + *kap- Old English "behabban": "to surround, to contain, to understand, to restrain" does make it easier to see the semantic chain

I did a big change on my scripts this week that made them much stricter when reading my markup. I got it reading words through about "auto". Then I decided I needed to loosen up the restrictions on unrecognized characters while I keep working on the character database.

Well, now the lab.aidanem.com server is completely unresponsive 😕

ամէն is everything կ is just ken

Distracted installing python3.13 on all my machines so that unicodedata can handle unicode 15.0.0 so I can process Kawi text. Do I really need to process Kawi text? Probably not, but

I was helping out at my 11yo's school and he stopped me to show me how he had written his answer to how many pets he has 😂

Awkward gap in my schedule today, so sitting in a park listening to ALILI 😁

@adapalmer.bsky.social talking about the problems that come up when, if trying to write something historically set with accurate period language, people still might not believe it.

I'd never thought about it quite this way before: The entirety of Old Kingdom Egypt and the First Intermediate Period happened before the ancestor of Greek even arrived in Greece.

From Discord: "The culmination of The Final Problem is a colophon to a column about the excellence of Sherlock Holmes." 😄

Oh, and (Sherlock) Holmes! I missed that!

Word Family: column, excel, hill, Celsius, Stockholm www.aidanem.com/word-family-...

Woke up to a nice surprise—the wait in the US for Between Two Rivers is now over!

😢😠

Not shown in the original: Malagasy (out of frame. insanely out of frame.)

Three Austronesian etymons for “snake” overlaid with boundary of land-snake range

Two people named Anthemius (Ανθέμιος) in portraits contemporary with their lives: 😁

Oh, despite the fact that "Anthemius" is from Greek <ánthos>, the English word "anthem" is not. "anthem" is the result of "antíphōna" (lit. "return-sounding"; "concordant, responsive") have been passed through the double meat grinder of Old French and Middle English.