but also there are like. eight of them. 90% of persian "verbs" are just maṣdar kardan/šudan

types of Persian word: very, very Indo-European (barādar, "brother"; sitāra, "star") inexplicable false cognate (bad, "bad"; mēz, "table") learnt it from an Indian takeout menu (murġ, "chicken"; gōšt, "meat")

Lo, Hrodulf the red-nosed reindeer – That beast didn’t have unshiny nostrils! Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in Anglo Saxon meter: allthingslinguistic.com/post/1359368...

Oh hell YES. I've long maintained that based on the result of ink recipes, the word "azraq" couldn't mean "blue" in early Arabic texts but seems instead to be yellowish. Now I have textual proof: "Take red arsenic [realgar] or if you wish, azraq"—no such thing as blue arsenic, this means yellow!

"actually there are only two words for horses and it's equus and morin"

(Repost) POV: you've just started reading Genesis 1:2

this was prompted by "Fishing Alone in the Freezing River for Snow," attr. Fan Kuan 范寬 (c. 960 - c.1030): I was planning to use it to illustrate something else, then realized I would have to translate the poem as the caption for it to make any sense

But anyway the thing that has stuck with me about "April is the cruelest month" was something Suzanne Stetkevych pointed out once, which is that in premodern agricultural societies, planting had begun in April but winter stores were running out. So you had to starve while you used seed you could eat

The winter wrote, with ink of rain and showers and shining lightning pen and hand of cloud, a blue and purple letter upon the garden no craftsman in his cunning could devise. So, when the earth desired the heavens’ face, it wrought stars in the linen of its beds. — Solomon ibn Gabirol, tr. mine

realizing that my fuṣḥà is a little all over the place phonologically. i think it's mostly Moroccan (ج [ʒ], a fairly back final /a/), but these days i've had a little Egyptian bleeding in (madrása-type stress).

thought Hebrew qinnāmōn, "cinnamon", was a recent internationalism, but it turns out it's in the Pentateuch! the borrowing's the other way around: Greek κιννάμωμον is a borrowing from Canaanite (Herodotus says Phoenician, Klein says Hebrew).

1 Dec: Lk 2:1: وكان فى تلك الايام خرج امر من قبل قيصر اغسطس ان يعدل الدنيا كلها wa-kāna fī tilka l-ʔayyām ḫaraǧa min qibali Qayṣar ʔAġusṭus ʔamr ʔan yuʕaddala d-dunyā kulluhā 'In these days, a decree was issued by Emperor Augustus that [the number of people of]* the entire world should be measured'

“The orthographic principles followed, in seemingly haphazard permutation, in the writing of Pahlavi, besides the ideographic, include the phonetic (within the limits of the alphabet), the historical, the pseudohistorical, and others so indeterminable as scarcely to merit the name.” - DN Mackenzie

after the de gruyter and brill merger they should combine de gruyter serif and brill to a new font

happy World Linguistics Day from Granada, Spain !!

My uncle's copy of Sefer Yetzirah, acquired so from his friend, has the best inscription of this sort I've ever seen It goes as follows אסור ליקח בלי רשות. ואם תקח, אהפוך אותך לצפרדע.

fun fact: Turkish hoca, "teacher", Arabic xawāǧa, "Westerner" are all borrowings of the Persian xwāja, "lord, gentleman; eunuch" the Persian, Hindustani ojhā, "shaman", and Chinese héshàng "Buddhist monk", all come from the Prakrit word uvajjhāa, "teacher" (← Sanskrit upādhyāya)

Thanks google very useful

is there any variety of Arabic that handles relative clauses ("the man who went to Damascus") and content clauses ("i thought he was drunk") the same way? iirc the division between the two is fuzzy in Hebrew and Aramaic

Classical Arabic is great because you look up some noun like "tomato" and it's like "here is a verb meaning to be or become red and squishy, to be or become ketchupable, to be or become ambiguously fruit and vegetable"

tracked it down! this is from Strich and Jochnowitz's chapter in Brill's "Handbook of Jewish Languages" (ed. Kahn and Rubin, 2016)

16) the best historical pronunciation of Hebrew is the Provençal one, for the sheer audacity of its consonant shifts. sorry, I mean: fe beff hiftorical pronunfiasing of Hebrew iv fe Provençal wung, fokh fe seekh audafity of iff confonanf siff.

For that first verb, cf. Al-Idrīsī describing Gafsa: wa-ahluhā mutabarbirūna wa-aktharuhum yatakallamu bi-l-lughati l-laṭīniyy il-ifrīqiyy "And its people are Berberised, and most of them speak the African Latin language" lughat.blogspot.com/2007/07/berb...

cf. Ibn Šuhayd's "Elegy for Córdoba" (ما في الطلول من الأحبة مخبر), which has the stunning hemistich "tabarbarū wa-taġarrabū wa-tamaṣṣarū" (v. 7), three denominal verbs roughly translating to "they went into exile on the Barbary Coast, in Morocco and in Egypt"

This article contains the longest consonant cluster I've ever come across in a Semitic language other than Moroccan Arabic, from a Hebrew article written in 1897: hit-ašknz-u "they Germanised", a denominal verb from Ashkenaz (which, in this context, meant "Germany")

in some alternate reality King Alfred overboiled his bīeġelas

Incidentally these hollow maqyûl forms are quite interesting. It's a place where the medieval grammarians also report some amount of variation, but in Quranic Arabic passive participles of hollow verbs have the shape maCîC/maCûC. Nice to see these non-quranic forms continue in modern dialects.

someone stopped me!! interesting to see Zohran managing Arabic diglossia. he’s definitely not speaking full fusha, but the vernacularisms are half egyptian, half levantine (!)

ܚܫ̇ܒ ܐ̄ܢܐ ܕܝܠܦ̇ܝܢ ܟܠܢ ܐܪܡܐܝܬ

Four different stress placements for كتبتا 'two women wrote' in Standard Arabic ˈka.ta.ba.taa (Upper Egypt) ka.ˈta.ba.taa (Jordan) ka.ta.ˈba.taa (Cairo) ka.ta. ba.ˈtaa (Lebanon)

does anybody have a favorite reference grammar of modern Cairene vernacular Arabic? i am currently looking through a glass darkly, and would love something voluminous to clear up some lingering doubts

not to be confused with quesadilla

this 900 page grammar of Persian was written by the snarkiest orientalist they could find in Cairo in 1918. apart from the chapter on rhetoric, it covers various systems of timekeeping, weights and measures, as well as "signs and signals" and "bibliomancy, divination, superstitions, etc."

New #OpenAccess paper on what 'first', 'second', 'third' tell us about the #Semitic family tree, including new evidence for Aramaeo-Canaanite! Note that unfortunately, the names of Ethiopian scholars have been metathesized, something that will hopefully be remedied before the final print version. 🐦🐦

another wonderful thing: some pronominal suffixes get an epenthetic vowel after a CC sequence; if i understand correctly it's: 1) harmonic with the vowel of the suffix and 2) stressed because of the CVCCVCV thing! e.g., ismáha, “her name”; bintúhum, “their daughter”

things that i like about Cairene after a month and a half of study: - no question-fronting! ⟨ʕamalti ē?⟩ "what did you do?" - the weird stress pattern on CVCCVCV words (tafaḍḍáli, madrása, il-Qāhíra) - plene spellings of etymologically short final vowels: كرسيكي,⟨kursīki⟩, “your (f.) chair”

an old joke: two brazilians are at a bar in argentina. the first says to the other, “cara, i don’t know any spanish, could you get me a soda?” “no problem, velho, i speak spanish just fine :)” the second man goes up to the bar and says, “che, me da una Cueca Cuela™?”

i wrote a paper senior year of high school on the Scyldings, the almost historical Danish royal family in the background of both Beowulf and the source materials for Hamlet (!) Osborn and Niles suggest that the Scylding legends might have been inspired by the burning of the 6th c. hall at Lejre

this structure (a content clause following an elided "I said") is common enough that it's used even when there is no explicit question, as anybody who's gotten into an argument in Spanish knows: te vi con tu amigo anoche no me viste, si anoche estaba en casa ¡que sí, que te vi!

Is this an abstract in Nahuatl

This chapter has now been out for more than six months and thus magically becomes #OpenAccess:

the early CA pronunciation of ض produces some genuinely cursed consonant clusters: /ʔaxɮˤaru, xaɮˤraːʔu/, “green”; /faɮˤlun/, “favor”; /waɮˤʕun/, “position, situation”.

i think i'm at 4 at the moment? my main focus right now is in reading fuṣḥà comfortably. taking a maṣrī 101 class, picking up some very basic persian, trying to maintain my classical hebrew (god willing).

Domestic dispute about whether the singular of magazine is migzane or igazine

apparently modern Persian still preserves PIE laryngeals as a consonant in a few words, even where Avestan doesn't: - خرس /xirs/ "bear" ← *h₂ŕ̥tḱos → Av. arša- - خایه /xaːja/ "testicles (vulgar); egg" ← *h₂ōwyóm → Av. āem

better yet, in the sound system described by the Andalusi Hebrew grammarians, a /ʃaˈna tˤuˈba umăθuˈqa/

cigarette girlie Ibn Ṭibbon wishes everybody a šānāh ṭōḇāh ūməṯūqāh!

22) The fact that the imperfect can be negated with mā but *only* when it is phrase-initial (lā needs to be used otherwise) is a beautiful leftover of the etymological origin of the negator mā as a question word mā "what?" (Arabic has wh-fronting).