Subway Surfers: Oman Edition

I took an early hike this morning to explore the falaj and figure out the trail. I might try one more time tomorrow. I got another look at a star observation tower. (Not pictured; it is a pretty plain unhewn rock tower with mortar.) These were used for timing water shares for irrigation at night.

This is a big difference between Bahrain and Qatar that I did not know about

A question for #JewSky: How common or well-known is the custom of facing graves toward Jerusalem? (There are supposed "Jewish cemeteries" in my area 🇦🇪🇴🇲, and grave direction is apparently an important reason that they are considered Jewish. But I haven't gotten to see them in person, yet.)

>> Learns Emirati Arabic > Only has ability to practice with other dialect groups I might be doing language learning wrong

I have successfully travelled from كْهوة/گْهَوة country to قَهْوة country

It's as if these were translated by Indiana Jones himself

I was reminded yesterday of the "2-minute rule" from Getting Things Done: "If something can be done in two minutes, you should do it right away." If I lived by that, I would never eat, sleep, or go anywhere, I would slowly die while cleaning the house.

A map of Yemen's governorate names, "translated", is making the rounds on Reddit and Facebook. The author claims to be an Arabic native speaker, but a lot of it is copy/pasted from English Wikipedia. 🤨 I think it is roughly 25% correct.

*sees 20 notifications* "oh no, what tenured prof have i baited into putting me on blast this time"

Fantastic new resource on Amazigh (Berber) Toponymy in Latin and Greek Sources now available, compiled by Carles Múrcia Sànchez: agdal.es @izmarasan.bsky.social @phdnix.bsky.social

Wikipedia has a list of elephants who are also serial killers??? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

Kid English word of the day beed ≈ was, were ex "We beed careful."

One Tarifit word I use constantly with no English or Dutch equivalent is amessas "insufficiently salted". Any parallels of a word with this meaning in other languages?

FRESH COFFEE Woloomo You (a decoration seen at a cafe in Dubai)

Do people say بوحد in other dialects? I would say بوحدها or more formally وحيداً

I was not expecting an absolutely ripping Kenny G solo, themed around a Depression era composition, on a Charlie Brown album, but here we are. Great album! Drags much less than some of the soundtracky stuff.

brb I'm gonna try postposed negation with -š in deep rural Oman and see if any old-timers can keep up

Apple Music has no idea what to do with post-rock. It calls it "Metal", "Indie Rock", and "Alternative". 🤔 I miss the old days when we could just edit all the metadata.

I am reminded that the lynchpin of the Jane Austen Universe is that England consists of only 11 people your sister's charming fiancée in Devon, and the libertine who seduced that girl in Plymouth? ... what if I told you they're THE SAME GUY

Ever wondered how to control for the influence of family and linguistic area on language? This is the pernicious "Galton's problem" of multicollinearity in cultural evolution. In a new blog post I walk through an implementation using Python - link below.

I have a potty training joke, but it goes on and on.

Behold, Wikipedia's List of individual rocks en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

South Alabama: Saw Tuskegee, where George Washington Carver invented peanut butter North Alabama: Saw a missile launch

loud explosions included unfortunately (except they were not from an artillery simulator)

my brain after being woken up repeatedly like i was on special forces training

Don't most stone fruits need a good frost in the winter? I basically never ate any of these (except peaches) growing up. Alabama has peaches, but I didn't know what a plum looked like and never tasted a cherry until adulthood.

Discuss: "Now my dad's got the chicken pox. He's quite fed up."

What if instead of cop procedurals we had mailman procedurals like Postman Pat

My Apple Watch would be so impressed with me right now if I was wearing it

My personal favorite solution: "Applications Open for the Hormuz Trail Ultramarathon. $1,000 Race Fee." Racers must carry an oil barrel each. Problem solved!

well, I was going to pack tomorrow for a potential indefinite international move, maybe jog 5 miles, but instead it is 4:06am and I have been awake since 2:47am trying to get small kid back to sleep. I tried getting into the geopolitics with him but he is unconcerned

Nitpick of the day: Don't say "America is exporting blah blah blah" ... or "America invented the cotton gin" when you literally just mean one company or one dude. How hard is it to write "Americans ..." or "An American ..."?

The number is 857. It's on I-10, in Orange. Done the whole length of it numerous times, very pleasant and peaceful once you're past Kerrville. I miss El Paso.

Have I mentioned how ridiculous it is that Word does not display your search results if there are more than 100 hits?

Just paid hundreds and hundreds of US dollars in speeding tickets—no notification at the time of incident, no idea where I was speeding, location name are listed but are not googlable or shown on a map. In the biz, we call that "indirect taxation", and it is growing all the time.

Experiments with finding failed Siri prompts: (Prompt / Response) "Minute" / "For how long?" "Minute timer" / "For how long?" "A minute" / "One minute, counting down"

Ruus Al Jibal Arabic word of the day أيد eyd, pl. eyd or eydōt or eydeyn 'hand' n.b. 1. Other paired body parts likewise can be singular or plural, e.g. ɻǧūl is 'leg' or 'legs', dawēntī 'my ear' or 'my ears'. 2. eyd is more frequent as a plural than eydōt, which is more frequent than eydeyn.

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).

"How do you know who the baddie is?" "Because he has a green shirt. And it says 'BADDIE BADDIE BADDIE BADDIE' all over it."

In my mailbox today: Sub-Indo-European Europe, edited by Guus Kroonen. A volume of collected papers on current perspectives on loanwords and substratum phenomena in IE languages from contact with the pre-IE neolithic languages of Europe. Also digitally Open Access: www.degruyter.com/document/doi...

Ok but During the diplomatic blockade on Qatar (now fortunately resolved), there was a somewhat similar slogan WE ARE ALL QATAR كلنا قطر, but saying EVERYONE IS EMIRATI الكل إماراتي sounds more specific;

I'm gonna try not to overanalyze this one

I am planning a trip to Oman proper, for the first time in almost a decade, which means I am revisiting notes that I made years ago about Jewish graves 🪦 and dialect mysteries 👻

g > k by voicing assimilation? (1) ghawa > khawa ☕, which also seems to occur as kawa by coalescence of /k/ and /h/ (2) ǧɨtal > čɨtal ('he killed)', possibly by influence from the imperfect yɨǧtɨl > yɨčtɨl ('he kills') n.b. For the latter, most people here would rather say ḏɨbaḥ in any case.

Old jazz and Italian-American recipes are a pretty effective mode of transportation this evening

The smallest child is now "head bruise" years old and the largest child is now "knee scrape" years old, and they are singing the songs of their respective people

There is a Hot Wheels car named DRIFTSTA which I find about as bad as Oegstgeest hotwheels.fandom.com/wiki/Driftsta

Well ... I still can't figure out if [redacted] are making a statement or asking a question, and it is a frequent cause of confusion. I would say this happens to me multiple times a week.

Some things I have said recently: "Biscuit Scaturday" "Eggs and scrambled toast" "They big a dig hole"