It really should be. There is such a disconnect between how we think students experience the transition to HE and what actually happens. (I say this as someone teaching first-years *and* as a parent awaiting S6 results…)

Perhaps ironically, if you are in Edinburgh you can get a wide variety of excellent herbal teas and other such products from Bulgaria at Balkan in Goldenacre

A wonderful piece by the great Kapka Kassabova in @europeanreview.bsky.social about wild plant gathering in the Bulgarian Rodhope montains. It reminds me of so many fieldwork sessions with Breton speakers begging them for information. europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-plant-wh...

One of the most crazy-making aspects of this saga, captured well in this report by @joshpizpom.bsky.social, is how a year on from the Gillies report at Dundee and the Aberdeen revelations, Edinburgh’s senior management is openly, and presumably deliberately, just railroading their agenda over Senate

Homer's Odyssey has nothing to do with the Bronze Age. It's jam-packed with 8th-7th century BCE material; it has no Bronze Age material at all. This view is fairly standard among Homer scholars, but it's usually expressed cautiously. Sometimes it's a good idea to make it a bit more forceful.

Apparently this morning’s discourse is the ‘autodidact tradition’. If the question is ‘who’s to say this isn’t just as good as university’, maybe start here before you then ask ‘what were the upsides and downsides’, ‘what infrastructure supported this tradition’, and ‘where did it go’?

Woodwind loot from Budapest (a Transylvanian flute in A and a book of Hungarian tunes mostly for the C flute)

that was… quite something

Doesn’t look like like there are many posts from #imm22 in Budapest, but here’s my handout, where I suggest that Slavic is just like Gurage and Low German is just like Western Nilotic www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8vrp1...

FWIW I see this bleed into students at uni. The anxiety levels are through the roof because they feel if they put a foot wrong they'll get chucked out of uni or not get a good degree therefore job. Then they do it all right & hit the job market & it might not matter anyway. Not a good recipe.

I get endless cold-emails selling me something. Was wondering how many of them are human. The answer turns out to be: none. Updated my LinkedIn profile yesterday. 10 monastic messages today, of which this was the best.

Where will these best and brightest scientists work Wesley? In the shrinking higher education sector? The one your pro-growth plan mentions once, as a source of student loan debt? www.ft.com/content/83d1...

getting rid of grades entirely would be much more effective at curbing surreptitious use of genAI than any amount of surveillance, would do vastly less harm to the pedagogical relationship at the heart of education, and wouldn't be another massive economic windfall for the creepiest people you know

NEW TOLKIEN JUST OUT: delighted to see “JRR #Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward: A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde” edited by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering: academic.oup.com/res/advance-... Chuffed to have played a minor role in this 1/3

Every "World Languages" dept. that they cut anywhere leads us to a world in which our educated middle class is a little meaner, more nationalist, and less capable of dealing with complexity.

The ÈIST speech recognition system is now publicly available. This web app lets anyone submit a video or audio file with Scottish Gaelic speech and receive back a transcript. A hugely useful tool - congratulations to Prof Will Lamb and the rest of the team! huggingface.co/spaces/eist-...

That worked out really well for Scottish Labour! Keep at it lads.

This morning’s annoyance. Even when being nicely positive about language diversity, why forget basic fact checks? Just counting national languages, we easily get four *families* in Indo-European, Uralic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, plus Sámi), Semitic (Maltese), plus Basque.

Just misheard a colleague saying ‘I haven’t got any mail for months’ as ‘…an email’. Fabulously curséd syllabification (near-)minimal pair. (No email for months! What a notion.)

Fun thought: has any senior university leader actually acknowledged this? Either externally or in ‘we recognise how this is a difficult time’ staff comms? Because otherwise it’s all ‘the weak must suffer what they must’ rhetoric that just serves to divide.

Actually, SHAPE subjects cross-subsidise STEM subjects in most comprehensive UK universities annually through differential central charge or 'contribution' models. It's another reason we're all in the current HE crisis together, whether our own particular discipline is 'at risk' at present or not.

Christian Aid week. We are so back lads.

A depressing aspect of our present condition is that it is pretty directly downstream of a visceral, everything-is-gender rejection of correct but unpalatable solutions as ‘unserious’, which led to potential vehicles for them pivoting to something else when staying the course would’ve been right.

I guess it’s time for media and politics people to start learning how to pronounce his name! (I know how to pronounce his name and I’m a fellow sufferer of Io-, so I’m allowed to joke about it.)

I think a very large missing piece in so many of these discussions is the tension between distinct understandings of the social utility of universities. There is a general agreement that teaching is ultimately the biggest component of that, but what kind of teaching?

The time my friend lent me a copy of the Lord of the Rings; of the several translations available, the one they had was the one with in-depth footnotes (largely lifted from Shippey’s Road to Middle-Earth), giving me the full nerd experience from the jump.

New open-access historical sociolinguistics of Persian from the Achæmenid period onward. www.cambridge.org/core/books/a...

Bit of a gratuitous drive-by shooting in the @resprofnews.bsky.social morning email!

Thinking of my brilliant ex colleagues and students at UU. For so many students in NI the only real choice is between Ulster and no HE at all, and I guess the governments, through their neglect, are picking ‘no HE at all’ for them.

Curious to see a version of this for academic books — especially not the predatory ‘library only’ hardbacks and not the academic/trade crossover that just falls under the blog post, but normal academic books that sell a dozen library copies (most libraries just buy the ebook) and then you wait

Hashtag #linguistics

A largely welcome endorsement from a newspaper that has historically been more than happy to publish jibes about Welsh-speaking cows and uncritically platform opponents of important policies like Welsh-medium education www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Reposting with the hashtag #linguistics

We have a fully funded PhD scholarship for students working in the area of English Language! We’re a big and friendly bunch working in all sorts of areas ppls.ed.ac.uk/linguistics-...

‘His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed. For morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed’

What a gorgeous day in Inverness — perfect for some suffering!

I’m giving a talk on how the study of Slavic phonology relates to the history of generative phonology, on Zoom next Tuesday (10th March), noon CST/6pm GMT. Abstract in alt text.

Very glad that the volume ‘The Reconstruction of Indo-European Stop Systems: From the Traditional Model to Glottalic Theories’ (edited by Tijmen Pronk and myself) has now appeared. brill.com/display/titl... Looking forward to hearing reactions to it!

On my way to Cambridge for #ocp23. Nice day for it!

Three short paragraphs, and you've got the whole mind-bending mess that is #UKHE finance & governance neatly laid out. This is why it's all so exhausting: our managers declare there's only one static frame, while we know their framing is part of the issue. 💡 www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...

This man is obsessed with fees! It’s stupid because the ask to the government should be about how much funding the sector gets, not how it is funded. If they introduce fees and cut the funding, well, that went so well in England. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Hey, did you know that Greek lost the phoneme /h/ because of secularism? You see, /h/ intrinsically symbolises the Creator. And hydrogen. This journal is published by @springernature.com , and is hosted by @nature.com. How did this incoherent nonsense make it into print?

Stupendous stuff from @samleggs22.bsky.social - meta analysis of human strontium and oxygen stable isotope data from southern Britain in 2nd half of 1st Millennium AD. Too rich to summarise but if your are into complex early medieval mobility, this one’s for you. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

And we go again: the treatment of ‘immigrants’ is how all sort of noxious shit gets into the bloodstream of the body politic. What they justify doing to foreigners now is what’s coming for ‘us’ in what, ten years on past form, but probably sooner with Farage.

Except of course the self-interest for a lot of these voters would be in relaxing rules around family migration, adult dependent relatives and that kind of thing. Now to take a sip of coffee and check on how that’s been going.

This. ‘The problem is not solely the LLMs, but scholars not checking footnotes and authors not reading the material they are citing. These behaviours… are more about the current crisis in universities worldwide, spurred on by governments who do not wish for an educated population’

This is it, isn’t it. This is the central problem. And no-one cares. ‘The present crisis is some evidence of an overstretched state that simply cannot or will not uphold both massification and quality’

oh no. oh no no no

This is one of my favourite clips because he really does pronounce English words like they were the local Irish, listen to how his ‘lamb’ is exactly how someone from there would say an Irish _leam_ [l’aum]

Also a wonderful piece on how AI is laying bare the structural problems in science, not primarily fixing or causing them. Much the same applies in teaching, I think. open.substack.com/pub/artifici...