Do u ever just miss the world without ai images

You gotta love how Caucasians literally undo centuries of sound changes to pronounce Arabic (voiceless) emphatics as ejectives. Listen to this Chechen woman’s طيف as тӀойф. youtube.com/shorts/dicGm...

Writing that paper on Yidgha and properly calling an important areal contrast in the subcontinent “lamino-coronal” v. “apico-coronal” instead of “dental” v. “retroflex”, which is what it truly is.

The central implication of this tweet stands, but I think I misunderstood his intonation (and missed the “?” on screen somehow). The first clause is a question, not a conditional. More like: Не ’мбарыс иронау? Уӕд дӕ Ирон нӕ дӕ! Don’t understand Ossetic? Then you are not an Ossete.

I think it is incredibly funny that in order to pitch a potential hire to a university now, one has to rope “AI” into every job, LOL.

Hardcore understanding of ethnicity. «не ’мбарыс иронау, уӕд дӕ ирон нӕ дӕ» NEG=understand-2SG Ossetic-EQU, then 2SG Ossetian NEG=COP.2SG “(if you) don’t understand Ossetic, then you are not an Ossete”

Throughout the Muslim world, using (some borrowed version of) Arabic كِتَاب /kitāb/ for ‘book’ is pretty common. I learned today that some languages of Daghestan, like Dargwa & Rutul, rather use the Arabic جُزْء /ĝuzʾ/ ‘1/30 of the Qurʾān’ as their word for ‘book’, e.g., Dargwa жуз /žuz/.

bsky.app/profile/itsm... Help me rent a safe shelter.

Cute pair of examples from Abdzakh Circassian (works in Temirgoy too) in Konuk (2023) of how ‘my son has fallen ill’ and ‘my pig has fallen ill’ are only distinguished by the possessive prefix, /qʷʰɜ/ ‘pig’ requiring the alienability prefix that /qʷʰɜ/ ‘son’ doesn’t. In Kabardian, the possessive ..

If les Anglais were still an oral culture with no (or class-restricted) writing, you think pterosaur would be reimagined as terror-saur?

Just learning that the “M” of M. Dale Kinkade (famous Salishanist) stands for “Marvin”.

New paper on back-formation and "forward-formation": If one takes the right view of the inventorium (or "extended lexicon"), there is no distinction between "potential words" and "existing words", and the problems with "back-formation" disappear. www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/...

Couldn’t remember the word ‘commence’ and so I wrote ‘inchoate’ somewhere, coining it out of the inchoative mood. Hope whoever is reading appreciates that.

This looks incredibly fun. Love spiders, but the ones I’ve met, sadly, don’t weave as bloop-bloopily.

I am noticing that a lot of authors who’re not specialists in Indo-European (or a branch thereof), or in one of Indo-Aryan & Iranic, use the term “Indo-Aryan” to mean Indo-Iranic much to my chagrin.¹ I am increasingly coming across statements like “Armenian is neighbored by Indo-Aryan languages”, >

Hi, I’m Ruaa, a translator and language student from Gaza Since the genocide began I’ve been trapped here unable to continue my master’s studies I’m simply asking for a chance to return and complete my education to use language to heal and inspire Please consider donating to help me reach this goal.

According to Sanskrit philosophers, children don't become proficient language users through individual words, but through sentences. Śālikanātha says that they have to extract the meaning of individual words through their presence or absence in the sentences they hear. #SanskritPhilosophy

Work in the California Language Archive to support language reclamation: news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/06/2...

Hearing Dutch now. First time hearing Dutch in Vancouver, though I have met Dutch tourists on the islands nearby. And the Dutch-named Canadians, of whom I have met plenty (big population in British Columbia), don’t speak any Dutch as far as I know.

Archaeologists discover how oldest American civilisation survived a climate catastrophe ⛏️🇵🇪 www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

One of the reasons I place greater faith in Indo-Iranic & Balto-Slavic forming a node (as argued by Palmér, e.g.) as opposed to Indo-Iranic and Græco-Phygian (+ Armenian?) is because Greek (and Indo-Iranic) is attested like 2 millennia before Balto-Slavic. The fact that BS has around as many ...

The Kartvelian for ‘twin’ looks a lot like the Circassian-Ubykh for ‘two’. Ƕuddup with that? Georgian tʼqʼupʼ- (Old Georgian tʼqʼub-) ‘twin’ Mingrelian-Laz tʼqʼub- Svan tʼqʼwib- Ubykh tʼqʷʼı ‘two’ Hakuchi tʼqʷʼı Shapsugh tʼʔʷʼı Temirgoy tʷʼı Kabardian tʼıw

Very cool stuff. I didn’t know click-loss has a consistent pattern attested. (From van der Vlugt & Gunnink (2024).)

There are quite a few instances of lateral > sibilant I can think of (Toda, Abkhaz-Abaza, Arabic, possibly Old Persian, possibly Nakh, etc.), but hardly any sibilant > lateral except Ishkashimi (and its closest relatives). Are there other examples?

This Aramaic dialect has údyu for ‘today’ & I know a few others (can’t recall which ones) have ádyu. What’s the etymology? False cognate with Sanskrit adyá id. :)

...guttural. This is nicely visible with the perfective prefix ge-, which in my dialect is usually syncopated g'. In front of verbal roots with h-, the two sounds merge in [kʰ], e.g. hean [ˈheɐn] "to hear" --> gheat [kʰeɐt] "heard". Interestingly, standard German beh-, when syncopated, becomes...

One category error (?) I see people sometimes make (and me too) is arguing that because English, Swedish, Danish, German etc. have a primarily aspiration contrast while Dutch has voicing, the Dutch system must be through influence of French(ic). German ⟨t, p⟩ aren’t historically the same as ...

just learned that it's the University AT Buffalo, not OF Buffalo

I can’t begin to express how much I hate “supplementary materials”, man. Put everything in a single godsdamn 80-page paper!! I don’t want to download three PDFs to read one article on phylogenetic trees.

English thousand, West Frisian tûzen, Dutch duizend, but High German tausend and not dausend?

Books: Common Slavic Into East Slavic: Feinberg (2025)

Join us Nov 14 at 3:30pm for a research talk about linguistics fieldwork on Indigenous languages. Harbour Centre, Room 2270. Email [email protected] for the Zoom link. Learn more: www.sfu.ca/linguistics/... @sfufass.bsky.social

Last Spring, in a stochastic processes class, I made a simple Markov chain out of this and gave it as a test problem to my class. (Without the cute hypercube, and a little bit simplified.) ’Twas fun and they liked it.

I can personally vouch for Akram sadly, we are so so so sorry but if you don’t donate and he doesn’t reach his goal tonight, he won’t be able to treat his mother, who depends on him after losing his father. Please, if you have any extra balance, help them. ❤️

Anybody seen the use of “chronolect” to describe dialectal variation along the historical trajectory of languages (e.g., Elder & Younger Avestan, all kinds of Sogdian, all kinds of Egyptian, etc.)? I can’t be the first one to want to use it. Or may be there’s some other term people use.

Cool, there’s a conference on calligraphy in Calgary this week: calligraphyconferences.com Fun fact: ‘Calligraphy’ is an anagram for ‘graphically’ and ‘Calgary Phil’ @calgaryphil.bsky.social

If you support Palestinian rights we are extremely close to our goal!! less than 5k to go. please pitch in, my family in Gaza is large and we all need to eat, get medicine and survive the genocide & starvation . Help us evacuate to safety we beg you donate 50 its mean a life to us 🙏🏽🙏🏽

UGent's copy of the Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages has finally arrived in the library - absolute unit of a book!

Cutthroat world. A man can’t even vacation in peace collecting Pali and Avestan manuscripts these days without his glory being usurped.

Please share, another 100€ just raised I’m so close 332 now away of 2000 so we can reach the goal today 💕 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺i have to keep my family m sheltered for almost a year nothing short of lifesaving. It still is, i have to rent a room befor the winter.

I'm on Danny's delightful podcast A Language I Love Is! I have so many thoughts and feelings!

#Circassian words that look menacingly Indo-European. ныбэ nıbă ‘belly’ ~ Skt. nā́bʰiḣ ‘navel’, Ltv. naba, Old High Grm. nabalo, Grk. ompʰalós нысэ nısă ‘son’s wife, bride’ ~ Skt. snuṣā́, Old Rus. snŭxá, Grk. nuós, Albanian nuse ибэ yıbă ‘orphan’ ~ Skt. árbʰaḣ, Arm. orb, Grk. orpʰanós, Ltn. orbus

I looked up where this Urmiya is. Right between the northern (Circassian-speaking) villages of Adygea and Armavir, where the (formerly?) Circassian-speaking Armenians live. So, these Aramæans almost certainly have had contact with Circassian-speakers. Wonder if loanwords and such exist.

#TIL there's a majority #Aramaic -speaking village in Southern Russia. First variety of Semitic to settle north of the Caucasus?

"While corporations urge us to embrace – and even celebrate – their imagined, supposedly inevitable tech-driven future, academics and their allies must take a principled stand and defend universities and scholarly institutions by barring toxic, addictive technologies from classrooms." 3/

Anyone who wants to hear nice American “r”s in a rural dialect of SE Germany, check out the recording from Wehrsdorf (Bautzen) on www.regionalsprache.de/Audio/Catalo...

(Seoul) Korean-speakers and (Viennese) German-speakers (possibly others, I dunno, but likely not in [ˈhämbʊɨ̯ç] or anywhere else in the North) have one thing in common and that’s they retroflex /l/ in auslaut to [ɭ].

The plot thickens. This screenshot is from 40 years before (published 1888). Here it says the reflex of *þ (in anlaut) was in Weesdring an interdental plosive, not quite still a fricative. I.e., at that stage Weesdring was Dinka-like, contrasting /t̪̻ʰ/ < *þ and /t̺ʰ/ < *t. (I’m assuming aspiration.)

Even till the 1920s & ’30s, Weesdring kept etymological /θ/ where in Aasdring it had merged with /tʰ/ & in Öömrang with /s/. The words here are (mod. Fering & Ööm.): F | Ö | E taarep | saarep | thorp tau | sau | OE þƿe͞an ‘wash’ tacht | sacht | *thight ‘tight’ tiarem | siarem | tharm ‘intestine’

Was ich in meiner Freizeit so mache ...