Ooh, Latin "sēcula": "sickle" (mentioned as a synonym of "falx" in Varro) borrowed and re-worked in West Germanic as *sikulu (→sicol→sickle) Then! borrowed into Zulu (from either of the West Germanic languages in South Africa) as "(i)sikela", re-interpreted as a class 7 object noun with (i)si-

"The twenty-four modes of writing" (Diagonal βουστροφηδόν for the win! 🤓) < Hugo 1617 De prima scribendi origine @ www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb1...

This is awesome! I have been curating a list of #linguistics journals, with information on their publishing model (and also on whether they admit submissions created by LaTeX, a high-quality, professional Open Source way to produce scientific documents). uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/s/BvRY0u3rDY...

Die DFG fördert ein gemeinsames Projekt von Dr. Jan Hon (Lehrstuhl für Deutsche Philologie im Europäischen Kontext) und Dr. Uri Zvi Shachar (Universität Tel Aviv). Die „Cambridger Handschrift“, die älteste bekannte jiddische Sammelhandschrift, soll editiert werden. www.phil.fau.de/2025/12/18/d...

Die gotischen Wörter im Wörterbuch auf wulifla.be haben alle verknüpfbare IDs (ich wusste das bis neulich nicht); vom Wörterbuch aus gelangt man in die entsprechenden Textstellen - das ist sehr interessant.

read the manual of style if you have formatting or style questions. it's also a surprisingly fun stand-alone read but maybe that's just me en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...

Wikipedia turns 25 today! 🎂📚 To celebrate, we’re looking back at its baby pictures—some of the earliest captures of the site, preserved in the #WaybackMachine. Take a nostalgic peek at early Wikipedia ⤵️ web.archive.org/web/20030301... #WikipediaDay #Wikipedia25 @wikipedia.org

I started my seminar Ancient Celtic language two days ago with over 20 participants from literally around the world. If someone still wants to join, this is your chance: because some participants couldn't make it, I will repeat the first session in the coming days. More info below.

Twenty-five years ago, Wikipedia was an unlikely idea: a place where anyone could share free knowledge. Today, it’s one of the most visited sites on Earth, not powered by corporate ads, but by people.

We’re gearing up for a day full of #Yiddish learning, music, and cultural celebration. Join us Sunday, February 1, for a full day of programming including scholar discussions, interactive workshops, our annual Lorraine Buch Yiddish Concert, and a Yiddish Sing Along. Register now: shorturl.at/L7KNK

浅山佳郎 2025 漢文訓読体日本語における格の文法的記述 ["Grammatical Description of the Case in Kanbun-Kundoku Style of Japanese"] @ dokkyo.repo.nii.ac.jp/records/2000...

#Event | International conference on "Jewish Languages and Politics. Ideological Choices of Jews in the Modern Era" in Warsaw | Hosted by POLIN on June 1-3, 2026 | Details: www.jewishstudies.de/de/nachricht... Deadline for applications: February 15, 2026

Interested in reading Coptic with a wonderful group of global readers? Group meets Mondays at 11am Eastern (Atlanta, GA time zone). DM for a zoom link. Currently reading (pseudo)-Celestine's Encomium of Victor (tinyurl.com/ybdsjrpu).

Zisk 2025 "A comparison of morphogram-driven linguistic innovations throughout the Sinographic Cosmopolis and beyond" @ doi.org/10.3765/plsa... (OA 🙏)

Nice, lots of okototen-related stuff. 🤓

Never noticed before that Waseda's db of classics indicates file sizes below 1 MB as "xxx MB" instead of "xxx KB". (The one in question here is ~366 KB in size.) archive.wul.waseda.ac.jp/kosho/bunko0...

What makes a good Wikipedia article? When you land on a page, you’re seeing the result of ongoing evaluation. Volunteer editors rate articles from Stub to Featured Article based on accuracy, sourcing, structure, and clarity. 🧵⬇️ (1/5)

#Event | The National Library of Israel invites researchers to the first Annual Forum for Yiddish Studies | Jerusalem, May 26, 2026 | Details: www.jewishstudies.de/de/nachricht... #yiddish #press #yiddishculturalheritage Deadline for submissions: February 15, 2026

Let's focus on the detail of the text walking mesenger: first up, he is a "Postbott" (German for postal messenger). In short he is a "Bott" (or "Pott"), ein Bote. And the thing positioned before him is a German "S". So this reads as "S pott" meaning "Spott": mockery.

Neues Jahr, neue Umfrage für Karmapunkte 🌞https://survey.academiccloud.de/f/477614?lang=de

❤️ www.wosp.org.pl

Oh, the irony ... 🫣 Il[=r]oniaノ事 'On irony'

Chinese is written in columns R>L while Mongolian and Manchu are written in columns L>R -- unless they aren't! 🤓 Here's e.g. some Manchu text ("Dai Hiyo") in columns *from right to left* -- just like the Chinese text right below (Daxue 大學, The Great Learning), from which it was translated. 1/

"Die Daten wurden extrapoliert." vs. "Die Daten wurden extra poliert." (Data Enrichment?) 🤔

Samuel Robert Ramsey 2025 The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them (Sino-Platonic Papers 372) @ sino-platonic.org/complete/spp...

モライギキ（貰ひ聞き）ほかの人々が話したり、言い争ったりするのが聞こえてくること。（日葡辞書）

💡⛰️: "kein Brot. u. keine Ehre: Metaphysica, Logica, Critica" (Puh, da muss ich ja echt mal überlegen, wo "mein" Fach eigentlich hingehört ... 😆) < 1800 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's vermischte Schriften, Bd. 1, S. 266 @ www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/...

Are these by any chance ... Eleph🐘-🐜ants? 🤭 < 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili @ books.google.de/books?id=lJs...

This is so cool -- the 1715 catalogue of Dillingen-based printer & publisher Johann Caspar Bencard (1649-1720), providing the titlepage for each book, sorted by language (Latin > German) and format (folio > quarto > etc.)! 😻 Are there more examples like this? 🧐 < books.google.de/books?id=NYV...

🔓 Jaime González-Bolado, “Found in Transliteration: Japanese Names in Missionary Sources on Hideyoshi’s Invasions of Korea” doi.org/10.69307/jap...

Your annual reminder that if you get this cracker joke and are confused by it, it's apparently because "ffi" is a special character in some fonts and when the typeface is changed to one that doesn't have it, those letters disappear. It's supposed to be "coffin medicine".

Es geht doch wirklich nichts über eine "regelmäszige" und nicht "unregelmässige" Orthographie! 🤡 < Hoffmann 1877 Japanische Sprachlehre @ books.google.de/books?id=w-2...

国立国語研究所「日本語史研究用テキストデータ集」にて、日葡辞書，言海の見出し語データ（txt，xlsx）が公開（2025-10-30） www2.ninjal.ac.jp/textdb_datas...

דער קראָקעװער שמועסקרײַז װעט זיך טרעפֿן׃ דעם 17טן דעצעמבער 2025, 6 אַ זײגער אין אָװנט קראָקע, אסתּר־גאַס 5, קאַפֿע „אַלכעמיאַ“. אַלע זענען האַרציק פֿאַרבעטן, מיר װאַרטן אױף אײַך! #ייִדיש #קראָקע #שמועסקרײַז

Da etliche kleinere Fehler beseitigt wurden, dachte ich, dass es mal wieder Zeit für einen erneuten Upload wäre ...

"The existing language of Japan, taken as a whole, is neither Japanese nor Chinese, but a jargon made up of Japanese and mis-pronounced, and often mis-used, Chinese;" Quite a thing so say ... and of course in English. 😅 (Featuring also: ear- and eye-languages. 🤔) < books.google.de/books?id=RR3...

Die einzige Chance, in unserer heutigen Zeit nicht verrückt zu werden... ... besteht darin, es bereits zu sein.

NEW INTERVIEW 🦚 A Brief History of Yiddish Dictionaries: Ilan Stavans in Conversation with Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath ingeveb.org/blog/convers...

Some books really deserve a sticker or something on their cover saying: ⚠️ No primary sources were harmed* in the making of this book. ⚠️ (* Or even looked at for that matter.)

#Chancen | The Hebrew and Yiddish subdivision at John Hopkins University offers a PhD program in Jewish Languages and Literatures | Details: www.jewishstudies.de/de/nachricht... #yiddish #hebrew #phd Deadline for submission of all materials: January 15, 2026

I opened up my copy of Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pietilä's Notes from an Island to find the Politikens Boghal receipt with the tagline "It's not hoarding if it's books" on it, which I never noticed before. Having recently packed and shipped several crates of books overseas I feel a bit uncomfortable.

Become part of this movement to safeguard minoritised communities and their linguistic and cultural heritage - check out the website here. You can get in touch to join or come along to a meeting first to find out what it's all about. www.scriptkeepers.org

The next meetings of the Script Keepers Network will be next Sunday, 14th December, all very welcome. Here are the zoom registration links: 09:00 ET (14.00 GMT) - us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi... 16:00 ET (21.00 GMT) - us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Misprint of the day: 我ガ々 'I [am] gaga'? < 1888 論理学容易独修 @ dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/753145/1...

Today in 1983 I got my first email address.

The latest issue of #openaccess journal Bamboo and Silk is out: brill.com/bsms #manuscripts

Wayne P. Lawrence: 日本語起源論における諸問題―助詞をめぐって― [Problems in the study of the origin of the Japanese language – On particles], unpublished BA dissertation, 1982 Completely hand-written! www.academia.edu/145248374/%E...

The recording for this lecture is now available on our Vimeo! vimeo.com/1142407067

Seit heute ist die Verlängerung bis 2028 offiziell ...