‎מַה־שֶּֽׁהָיָה֙ ה֣וּא שֶׁיִּהְיֶ֔ה וּמַה־שֶּׁנַּֽעֲשָׂ֔ה ה֖וּא שֶׁיֵּעָשֶׂ֑ה וְאֵ֥ין כׇּל־חָדָ֖שׁ תַּ֥חַת הַשָּֽׁמֶשׁ׃ bsky.app/profile/bnuy...

another funny overlap between Biblical Hebrew and colloquial Spanish: in Spanish, the pragmatics of a bare subordinate clause (here introduced with כִּי) are usually exasperated repetition in an argument: ¡que nos volvemos contigo a tu pueblo! “we’re coming back with you to your people, damn it!”

Beiruti Jewish Arabic Hebrew word with Beiruti phonology ˀaṭān ءطان אטאן ‘young boy’ From Hebrew קטן ‘small’ dīri bāl-ik ˁa-l-ˀaṭān ‘take care of the young boy’ This is a sentence I heard a Beiruti Jewish woman cite as uniquely Jewish speech. Note also: lack of imala in bāl (not bēl)

i sound about a century out of date when i try to talk about doing groceries in Spain: - estanco ‘tobacconist’ - frutería ‘greengrocer’s’ - pescadería ‘fishmonger’ all of these pretty much died in the States and Puerto Rico with the advent of the supermarket

you’re all bound to have seen this, but i am very excited

monologo da molly bloom 2026

i’ve been trying to sketch what this might look like and you run into a wall quickly the basic vocabulary of Arabic has suffered lots more semantic drift than Hebrew has, which means the common vocabulary proper is actually rather limited. if you use Aramaic as a tiebreaker you get a serious 1/

i’d heard of the Graeco-Arabica but Graeco-Babylonian is absolutely wild work.

the idiom here in Andalucía is ’no sabe hacer la O con un canuto”, that is to say, ’he can’t draw an O with a tube’ i’ve heard the delightful versions ‘no sabe hacer la hāʔ con un canuto’ from an Arabist, and ’no sabe hacer la sāmeḵ’ from a Hebraist

Ever wondered how maghrebi vocalisation works, and while you learn, also learn how it's employed to write Berber in pre-modern script, here's a little thread for you. :-)

i low key think wider exposure to brazilian food could fix the united states of america

i thought i had a dead standard General American accent until i stopped and thought about it: my FOOT [ɘ], GOOSE [ʉː] and GOAT [ʌʊ] vowels are all centralized and various degrees of unrounded (except for /juː/, where i have [jʊw]), so i have a massive gap in the high back of my vowel space…

desejo um feliz dia da língua portuguesa a toda a minha galera lusófona (e aí pessoal!!) estava procurando se tinha foto da ultima feijoada que eu fiz, mas não tenho não :P. no seu lugar, aceitem esse vídeo clássico

and regarding the name: transcribing ב as ڤ, a letter only used in loanwords, to represent a distinction that isn’t graphically represented in the Hebrew, as well as using the specifically Hebrew version of the shared nisba suffix, rather than something like عربري/ערברי, feels like an imposition.

well this Aravrit is just Arabic written on top of Hebrew. i mean really. these are sister languages that have been in close contact for millennia, both of which have been frozen in time as languages of (an often shared!) high culture, which share a great deal of post–Proto-Semitic 1/2

i think Esperanto is one of the last relicts of that staunch, optimistic belief in Progress and the Brotherhood of Man that prevailed in Europe before the First World War. it’s very Stefan Zweig-ish, failings included.

youtu.be/TxxifHfCN8U?... i came across this defense of the (much maligned) Esperanto today and was terribly charmed by it.

I wrote up my personal philosophy on translating ancient texts, as informed by being raised in a religious environment that had a very unhealthy relationship to its texts. https://xn--hmr.net/classicalchinese/translationphilosophy/ #classicalchinese #translation #localization #philosophy

while not a lot of mudéjar material culture in the Caribbean has survived, a good deal of Andalusi foodways have apart from ingredients that have gone obsolete in the Peninsula (cumin, cilantro), the ones we share are often used in ways that would be heterodox in Spain…

the nuanced take is that a lot of mudéjar lifeways survived about as long in Lima as they did in Andalusia: covered balconies, artesonado ceilings, almalafa-like veils. the romantic in me likes to think of it as a piece of Andalusi life that took root on the Pacific coast of South America

what is going on with yop̄yāp̄īṯā ‘you are lovely’ in Ps. 45:3? it’s clearly built off of the root y-p-h (doubly defective, to add insult to injury), but I can’t find any mention anywhere of III-y verbs doing this kind of reduplication, and the vowels are a little all over the place

there's no money in this arabic shit im getting into punditry

“In the Qurʾān, you will find al-maṭar mentioned only in the spirit of retribution. And yet most speakers of Arabic, elite and commonfolk alike, observe no distinction between maṭar and ghayth." وَأَمْطَرْنَا عَلَيْهِم مَّطَرًا فَسَاءَ مَطَرُ الْمُنذَرِينَ wa-ʾamṭarnā ʿalayhim maṭaran fa-sāʾa maṭaru l-mundharīn

happy memorial feast of jūrjīs to all my sabians (from the Nabatean Agriculture, tr. Hämeen-Anttila)

older Aramaic occupies a rarefied place among reactions people might have to you knowing a historical language. any language less obscure is just another subject from school; any more so and you become unspeakably nerdy. but Aramaic is for suave exorcist- or Indiana Jones–adjacent types

like generations of Hebrew learners before me, i will throw myself at an Aramaic text with reckless abandon, double-fisting a dictionary and some notes on morphology, and pray that the rest isn’t too different

so Spanish also does the fronted infinitive + finite verb thing! it has roughly a nuance of “as far as x-ing is in question, x” it’s a markedly colloquial construction, which makes it very funny to me when the snake tells Eve “morir no morirás”

Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic wamma וַמְמַה وَمَّة ‘I swear to Gd!’ ‎׳באלוקים!׳ Used as a Jewish substitute for the more common walla וַלְלַה والله In Judaism, many avoid saying/writing the name of Gd (as I’m doing😎) outside of prayer, changing the sound of the word to avoid it.

Blau's Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic Texts online 👀

underrated pickup line

corvam.unizar.es/localidades/... longtime readers will know that this is not the first time i've been puzzled by stress/prosody in Arabic, but does northern Moroccan have a French-style prosody system?

Two features of note: المركان əl-marikan "America" - already in 1803, so not necessarily a French loan, though the absence of final -u suggests it might be راني مانقبلوش ṛani ma-nəqqəblu-š "then I won't accept him" - a usage of ṛani I wouldn't expect in modern Algiers (maybe in Tunis?)

Opening page of a gorgeous bilingual translation of the Gospels of St. Matthew & St. Mark (probably had the rest at some point, is now fragmentary), Ottoman Turkish in an elegant nastaʿliq hand on the left, in Latin on the right, copied in 1660 somewhere in the Ottoman world (SBB Ms. or. oct. 3960):

I'm trying to get a clearer picture of regional variation in the reflexes of Arabic ˣg. 📊 In the late 1950s, Johnstone wrote that the sound change ˣg > /y/ was more pervasive in the Emirates than in neighboring areas. I do not notice much difference between my Emirati data and other Gulf states.

loving the right-to-left Chinese and the Arabic-script Turkish—both handwritten!

How easy, to veil oneself so completely

yā zaydu* without tanwīn in fact! Descriptively, I think it would be better to think of this behaviour not as a bizarre application of nominative and accusative, but rather as a separate vocative case. like so.

here’s mine: the vocative particles يا yā and أيها ayyuhā are usually followed by a noun in the nominative, *except* when that noun is in construct state, in which case the noun goes in the accusative :( يا زيدٌ ⟨yā Zaydun⟩ but يا أبا بكرٍ ⟨yā ʔAbā Bakrin⟩

(It’s 負 as in 背負, “carrying on the back,” but I will never not find it funnier to read it as in 負數 and imagine some late Qing naturalist seeing their first possum and thinking yes, that is worse than zero rodents)

…really? there’s a couple other weird options—Sanskrit, both Interlingua and Interlingue—but machine translation into Church Slavonic really takes the cake makes me wonder what recension it is (no yers, no yus, no service)

btw I have a student who wants to build documentation and resources for cypriot arabic, she's very determined and has already started unearthing a lot of stuff but if anyone here has contacts in the remaining community or is interested in collaborating, please drop me a dm 🐦🐦

While Christian Palestinian Aramaic (CPA) looks sim. to Syriac, the script has its own non-Syriac ductus & characteristics, e.g. shape of <ḥ> <w> joins on left <p> not closed no dot on <d> big angles in <ʔ>, <g> big circle at base of <t> huge <y> (full transliteration in the next post)

No other ancient document holds my interest and affection quite like this one papyrus, written in Egypt in the Armenian alphabet. It's a goldmine of linguistic evidence not for the Egyptian or Armenian language, but for Greek! Here's my enthusiastic introduction to it: dannybate.com/2026/03/24/t...

currently translating a hadith where the word ʔuxt ‘sister’ is used to mean co-wife, a usage i cannot find anywhere, and ‘to take her share’ is rendered with the idiom ‘to empty her platter’ (li-tastafriġa ṣafḥatahā), found deep, deep in Lane’s Lexicon i agree with the sentiment.

Someone on Reddit asked me what the difference between "Quranic Arabic" and "Classical Arabic" is. It was fun to put my thoughts together on this (and the vexed question of what "Classical Arabic" even means. Perhaps others will find this of interest too.

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

There's a proverb, ḥaraka baraka (الحركة بركة), which is basically the opposite of this: "Movement is a blessing."

very proud to have become the go-to person for rhotics in Puerto Rican Spanish. the trajectory of my life has been hurtling towards this moment

Jar handle inscribed with the name Ahab, plausibly from the early- to mid-ninth century BCE (figure from www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...)