a New England IPA, if you will

Algerian word: يَتْشَنقْ /jatʃanəg/ In the west of the country, it means “to complain, to wine," and the east (Constantine) it is "to procrastinate; to drag one's feet.” Apparently, it is from Andalusi Arabic.

go gloss girl

today we get sapphic in Classical Arabic!! أيها الشرطي، كذلك النساء يحببن النساء وعليك ألا تفكر كثيرًا فيه فلنتابع. ʔayyuhā l-šurṭiyy, ka-ḏālika l-nisāʔu yuḥbibna l-nisāʔ, wa-ʕalayka ʔallā tufakkira kaṯīran fīh, fal-nutābiʕ

does anybody have opinions on the etymology of Classical Arabic اللهم ⟨aḷḷāhumma⟩ ‘O God’? i’m not terribly convinced by the arguments i’ve seen

In which the reviewer glosses a word with "to fuck" and writes a footnote to justify himself

Some scribes just couldn’t put enough dots on the page. Look at what's going on at the end of the word شفيعتي ("my intercesor") here: there are two dots for ت, two dots for ي, two dots (:) as a textual divider, two dots from السيدة in the line above, and two dots just for fun 😅 (MS Sin. ar. 428)

ari’s thread of threads!! (look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair) from time to time i post something long and potentially interesting. anything worth revisiting is linked to here :)

i didn’t actually mention why this was interesting!! Barranquenho is an Iberian Romance variety spoken in Barrancos, a Portuguese village on the border with Huelva, with a stable mixture of Spanish and Portuguese elements in its phonology, morphology and syntax

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRCs... @shjsat.bsky.social mentioned Barranquenho the other day, and while i was familiar with it from a handful of articles i’d never heard it spoken, and i have some notes (in thread form no less)! first, phonology:

Franco-Italian spotted in the wild!! the Visconti-Sforza Tarot (Milan, c. 1450) sports the motto ⟨a bon droyt⟩ ‘with all the right’; a reminder of a period where Old French, rather than Tuscan, was the literary language in Gallo-Italian–speaking Northern Italy

Stylistically and paleographically, this is a fascinating MS. Office for Killian aside, it was copied by a number of scribes, some of whom wrote Insular minuscule and some Caroline minuscule. Here are fol. 59r (Insular) and 59v (Caroline) — scribes not even waiting till the end of a quire to switch.

It's The Pearlsong's one-year anniversary today. If you haven't yet, tune in for a fun story in Syriac, Greek, and English, and lots more to spark your interest. Open-access here, with a link to purchase a(n inexpensive) hard copy with very nice paper: cswr.hds.harvard.edu/publications...

in Classical Arabic! قال الرعشة: في الصباح أجيء بغبار صناعي وأسقطه في أوراق الشجر فأنتفض الغبار من هذه الأوراق حتى يسقط في برنسك. QĀLA L-RAʕŠAH: FĪ L-ṢABĀḤI ʔAǦĪʔU BI-ĠURĀBIN ṢINĀʕIYYIN WA ʔUSQIṬUHU FĪ ʔAWRĀQI L-ŠAǦAR, FA-ʔANTAFIḌU L-ĠUBĀRA MIN HĀḎIHĪ L-ʔAWRĀQI ḤATTÀ YASQUṬA FĪ BURNUSIK.

It's interesting to read how astonished explorers were to find that the Africans they encountered were equally well-travelled Barth in 1850 met Africans in Bagirmi (Chad) who had visited Basra (Iraq), kept the works of Plato, and were as inquisitive about Europe as he was about Africa

well here goes an attempt at rendering this into classical-enough Arabic (transcription below): قال دماغ العظاءة القديم إن: تمر مدة زمان طويلة زيادة وهي خالية من الجهد خلاء تماما ولا تتضمن أية زوجة سابقة.

i adore the little Syriac translations that @acbm.bsky.social does of the Moby Dick bot and am tempted to do the same for Disco Elysium, but i don’t know that i speak any language interesting enough well enough (the options are Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew. maybe Persian if i get good)

Sources are telling me this name is Basque and does not mean anything like "aid of Baal" after all

absolutely no shade intended by this, but coming across a cot-caught merger this heavy in the wild feels like finding out one of your friends is colorblind

found this 1960 Persian-Urdu version of Saʕdī’s Gulistān on the Internet Archive. absolutely stunning and at the same time so, so cluttery

and even those differences are differences in common: Holm analyzes both basilectal Caribbean Spanish (my native language) and Brazilian Portuguese (the first foreign language i picked up) as “partially restructured vernaculars” or “semi-creoles”, again because of that shared trauma of slavery

some addenda: van Bladel argues that Persian lost its inflectional morphology through semi-creolization precisely by being acquired en masse by non-native speakers during the late Achaemenid period (!) it’s purpose-built for the job and has been for two millennia 1/

Thread with Celtiberian vocatives: ‘amante’ [ɑmɑ̃ːndːɪː~aˈmanteː] a calque of حبيبي used in the piedmont of the Moncayo Massif, where much of the Tagareno population lived, and where most of the aljamiado texts that you might read were written

this is now my single most-liked post on here. Persian will be made the global lingua franca effective immediately. ممنون از تعاون شما.

This explains an anecdote I had heard many years ago—that commencement addresses at Harvard were once done in Hebrew. It was not because the hearers understood it; rather, it was an "oration" given mainly as an exercise ... still cool, though.

Entry: תַּרְשִׁישׁ n.pr. loc. a distant port, site not certainly known m. - in Benjamin - Persian noble

i have a few hours to kill at the airport, so we’re playing one like = one opinion. (i expect to get like. four at most)

You can drill vocab like this all day but it won’t help you when you meet a native Punic speaker

i said i wouldn’t translate it, but i figured i should try: in spring, he who fears God takes up his cup; in fall, he downs the bottle in His name. so drink! the Lord of Heaven spins His spheres, and with that thought, each day He trawls His net.

this edition of the Rubaʕiyyāt of Sarmad Kāšānī—an Armenian Jew turned Sufi dervish and Mughal courtier (!)— is bilingual Persian–English that said, the Persian is in a buckwild English-influenced transcription of the Indo-Persian reading tradition 1/

epiousion is the new polytropos

Friends, Romans, fellow late antiquity fans! The first issue of Essays in Long Late Antiquity, a new journal published fully in open access by Liverpool University Press is out! We have a stunning volume for you to read with amazing contributions. 1/ liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/toc/ella/cur...

as an addendum European Spanish doesn’t have an umbrella term for ‘soup’: ⟨sopa⟩ here means specifically ‘broth with things floating in it’, while ⟨puré⟩ and ⟨crema⟩ are considered entirely different foods that cannot be lumped in with ⟨sopa⟩.

youtu.be/Zld5ohkAXBk?... here’s a (relatively little-known!) Puerto Rican seis, one of a few dozen stable melodies over which poetry is typically improvised. this one hails from the island of Vieques, just off the coast of Puerto Rico proper

this is one of those poems you read and immediately become part of your personal canon. thank you @martiana.bsky.social :)

i found an interesting slang term in Lenape (Unami) today

so there’s this memoir by a 19th c. Iraqi faqīh who was rounding Africa with the Ottoman navy and ended up in Brazil where he ended up bringing a whole community of formerly enslaved crypto-Muslims back to orthodoxy and i really, really want to read it in the original but it’s in freaking saǧʕ

So the correct answer is 6th-7th century Arabia. It's attributed to the pre-Islamic "wife of Abī al-ʿĀj al-Kalbī". Kalb pastured in and near Syria so I would have accepted Shām/Levant as well.

Carlo Ginzburg est mort, annonce la presse italienne. Immense historien, il a su construire une oeuvre originale entre micro-histoire et anthropologie historique qui a considérablement renouvelé la discipline. www.repubblica.it/cultura/2026...

Anthropeum.com · Jun 17 2026 🟩🟩🟦🟦🟩🟩🟩🟦🟨🟩 80,779 · top 1% of players today! let’s goooooo

(scene: front seat of a car, no prior context, à la Pulp Fiction) - imagine if the Brethren of Purity were just one guy - like Tame Impala? - like Tame Impala.

i used this in conversation today and was told that saying “having touched grass” in Latin is a sign of not having touched grass enough. sic transit gloria mundi

i play piano. been dragging this username around several platforms since i was like. 13 (also, i do actually write and perform music! it’s up in my bio if anybody wants to check it out)

Huh. That verse is a near-perfect etymological match for part of Ayat al-Kursi: لا تأخذه سنة ولا نوم "Neither slumber nor sleep seizes Him" quran.com/2/255

two things i love about this verb: - it’s rather rare/poetic, but has a very clear cognate in Arabic nāma, the normal word for ‘sleep’ - it’s in one of my favorite psalms! “look, the keeper of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers”

Preparation for ISBL going well, I see.

youtu.be/zpu_LSIY5JQ?... in effect, there’s a clear as day [y] in ⟨kyrie⟩ at 16:27, [ks] in ⟨excelsis⟩ at 21:30, and [ts] in ⟨crucifixus⟩ at 1:13:47 (also, boy sopranos! not a lot of those these days)

so German-speaking choirs *do* still use their own Latin pronunciation ! i didn’t catch all of these features (and I think in Austrian Standard German ⟨s⟩ is usually voiceless anyways) but i’ll have to go into some recordings and listen for them