Wow! 😮🤩 There's a new interactive map of Every Known Road in the Roman Empire!! 🤓 itiner-e.org We might have to have a lie-down.

‘The reality is that there have never been unqualifiedly bad or good cultures, anywhere, at any time. Human beings are too complex for that to be the case.’ open.substack.com/pub/figsinwi...

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.

Well this is awful news: tinyurl.com/yr65mjkx 'All modern language and music courses are being suspended for new students at the University of Nottingham.' Nottingham friends: please be assured that we will join you in protesting against this decision in the strongest possible terms. Solidarity.

Popularity of the 'spiderman pointing' meme correlates with Google searches for 'who is alexa' (r=0.968)

Looking forward to reading @rianthum.bsky.social ‘s important new book, Islamic China. Pre-order your copy today! www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

Sanskrit/Tibetan/Tangut quote of the day: Bodhicaryāvatāra 6.10 (ed. Solonin 2025 www.academia.edu/144598049/Bo...)

Das Wörterbuch zu den griechisch-arabischen Übersetzungen des 9. Jhs. stellt eine echte Rarität dar: Es wurde vollständig per Hand geschrieben. M. Ullmann ist damit einer der letzten seiner Art, die ihre Werke handschriftlich verfassen und publizieren. www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/isbn_9783447...

So interesting to learn about this: a manuscript bound in seal skin, with eight surviving pages, possibly among the earliest surviving books written in Norway. www.sciencenorway.no/cultural-his...

‘Minyag is more than a language. It carries our religion, our spirit, our dances, our songs, and the voices of those who live through it.’ www.nationalia.info/interview/11...

Breaking News: Radio Free Asia will shut down its operations for the first time since its founding in 1996, after being targeted by the Trump administration.

‘Across the region, similar scenes were unfolding. In city after city, the words for “Mongolian”, “Manchu”, “Hui”, “Korean” and “Nationality” were being replaced by numbers.’ soyonbo.substack.com/p/how-china-...

‘A few elderly people sit together in the sunlight. They sit there quietly, not speaking — just sitting. And the language their parents spoke? ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠤᠯ ᠬᠡᠯᠡ — Mongolian — where is it now? Where has it gone?’ soyonbo.substack.com/p/the-final-...

‘Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained Alexander Bolokhoev, an activist for the Buryat independence movement who has been living in the country since 2022 and seeking political asylum.’ therussianreader.com/2025/10/22/2... #mongolsky #tengri

The support of South 🇰🇷 & North 🇰🇵 Koreas for opposing sides in the Russian aggression in #Ukraine has effectively extended their inter-Korean rivalry to the opposite end of #Eurasia. ✍️ Lucas Pitaval (frontex.bsky.social, @collegeofeurope.bsky.social) Read more about it ➡️ ceias.eu/ukraine-as-a...

Antonio Manieri: Writing and Rewriting Wooden Tablets in Seventh- and Eighth-Century Japan: The Mokkan Used for Learning doi.org/10.1515/9783...

- I can’t believe I was hacked. - What was your password? - The year the Mongol Empire, with the help of the Southern Song dynasty, completed its conquest of the Jin dynasty after the final Jin stronghold of Caizhou fell. - And when was that? - 1234

Our librarian Mårten Söderblom Saarela will give three online talks for the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, on November 8, 2025, 9:00am-1:30pm Eastern time. The theme of the talks is "The Jesuit Mission to China." For details and registration, see ncta.princeton.edu.

We've just enjoyed the bright harvest moon of Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋, 추석 秋夕, 月見, Trung Thu, etc.), so how about a moon-related linguistics thread? We'll look at an unusual Chữ Nôm graph and recover some lost 17th-century Vietnamese sounds, among other things. 🌕 🇵🇹 🇻🇳 1/🧵

Vairāk par vārdu un tā izrunu meklējiet livonian.tech/meklesanas-r..., ierakstot vārdu “rōntõz”. To learn more about this word and hear its pronunciation go to livonian.tech/en/search-re... and search for “rōntõz”. #līvõkēļ

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

#mongolsky #tengri

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

If you are interested in punctuation and spacing in text, from any world writing traditions, please join us for @timbrookes.bsky.social's discussion event: Sunday 5th October, 12.00 ET / 17.00 BST Registration link in next comment.

And then I make a whole-ass career over that hashtag of Mistakes Were Made ;)

Think I've just had my first encounter with LLM-fabricated language data. Some Indonesian paper mill journal just published a paper containing completely fabricated Siwi data, citing me as the source. (It could have been made up by a human, but it looks like what you get when you ask ChatGPT.)

Major milestone! 121 million Chinese characters from 1,937 historial titles are now fully searchable thanks to OCR collaboration between @stabiberlin.bsky.social East Asia Department and Academia Sinica Taiwan. Read more: sbb.berlin/x05w2 #DigitalHumanities #OCR #OpenAcess #CrossAsia

Today, at long last, is publication day for @bloomsburybooksuk.bsky.social's Cultural History of Magic. I contributed a chapter to the volume on the Enlightenment, which features a case study on the prosecution and decriminalisation of magical acts in Lithuania www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-...

Did you know #PinkFloyd’s song ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’ has a connection with Chinese poetry? The line 'One inch of love is one inch of shadow' was inspired by a poem by Li Shangyin, translated into English by Welsh scholar Angus Charles Graham. (Archives ACG)

Ah oui j'oubliais: si vous publiez des articles disponibles uniquement derrière des paywalls, des bouquins à 140€, ne pleurez pas de ne pas être cité.

Estonian directness: ‘Kennedy withdrew after the country’s Minister for Social Affairs reportedly called him “cuckoo in the head.”’

Why is it always a children's book? When do we get a celebrity who decides to edit a Festschrift or prepare an annotated edition of a primary source text?

"Assimilation ou intégration ? La représentation de la #Mongolie, du #Tibet et du #Xinjiang dans les parlements de l'Empire Qing et de la République de Chine" 🖥️ Les vidéos des conférences de Egas Bender de Moniz Bandeira (@fau.de‬) sont disponibles.  👉 https://f.mtr.cool/yheoqqtceq

Newly digitized @gallicabnf.bsky.social: 🙏 [trilingual ms. dictionary French-Manchu-Chinese, ca. mid-18th c.] @ gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/b... (BnF, Mandchou 280)

Vairāk par vārdu un tā izrunu meklējiet livonian.tech/meklesanas-r..., iekrakstot vārdu “eņtšik”. To learn more about this word and hear its pronunciation go to livonian.tech/en/search-re... and search for “eņtšik”. #līvõkēļ

Now that it’s in Italian news, I can share: a new inscription has been found on Egadi Ram 25. It reads SER SOLPICIO C F QUAISTOR PROBAVE[T] — “Servius Sulpicius, son of Caius, Quaestor, approved (this).” This likely refers to the son of Caius Sulpicius Galus, Roman consul in 243 BCE.

Microsoft Word to begin saving people's documents in the cloud *by default* Reminder that LibreOffice is free and a good drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office software: www.libreoffice.org www.theverge.com/news/767522/...

The runic text is taken from the Konungs skuggsjá (The King's Mirror), advising one to "learn all tongues without forgetting your own". The original has "helzt latínu og völsku" 'but first Latin & French', 'völsku', cognate with Welsh, reflecting its use by Germanic speakers to refer to Romance ones

Tolkien language nerds, scans of the first five issues of Parma Eldalamberon, long only available as photocopies, are now available open access: dc.swosu.edu/parma/

Just about ten years now in the making: The IE-CoR database paper has finally been published. C. Anderson, M. Scarborough, [ ... 96 further authors ... ], R. Gray & P. Heggarty. 2025. The Indo-European Cognate Relationships Dataset. Scientific Data 12:1541.

Fun fact: the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Great (539 BCE) pretty much marks the halfway point of recorded history so far. Everything since—the Persian Empire, Alexander, Romans, Middle Ages of course—is closer to us than to the first invention of writing.

We are proud to announce that 1,000 manuscripts are now published on manuscripta.se, advancing our mission to make #medieval and #earlymodern manuscripts in Sweden accessible worldwide. #iiif #MedievalManuscripts #MedievalSky

Finally out now 🥳🎉 -- and in OA! 🙏 Katja Triplett / Yoshimi Orii / Pia Jolliffe (eds.) (2025): Japan in the Early Modern World: Religion, Translation, and Transnational Relations @ doi.org/10.1007/978-... Includes two contributions by yours truly on Jesuit prints from Japan. 1/

«Лылыӈ лāтыӈ: Mansi textbook for beginners», the first textbook for Mansi as a foreign language has just been published by the Finno-Ugric Society in Helsinki. A printed copy is availbale for 32€ from tiedekirja.fi, a PDF can be downloaded free of charge here: edition.fi/suomalaisugr...

New paper out in Science Advances! We studied language & genetic evolution using the GeLaTo database—focusing on burrowing and schismogenesis. Link: doi.org/10.1126/scia... Special thanks to @chiarabarbieri.bsky.social @annagraff.bsky.social @balthasarbickel.bsky.social @nccrlanguage.bsky.social

Der diesjährige Alexander-von-Humboldt-Tag rückt eines der komplexesten Manuskripte des Humboldt-Nachlasses ins Zentrum: die "Fragmente des Sibirischen Reise-Journals" von 1829. Jetzt anmelden! buff.ly/LzptX5Z

I can't believe I've never heard of this website, but you should check out Corpus Corporum, a Universität Zürich project: mlat.uzh.ch/browser?path=/

A new Cambridge Element volume on Linear A by Ester Salgarella, free to download for a limited window - grab it now! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

A new book from Stockholm University Press, 'Indo-European Ecologies', is now available to read and download for free, completely #OpenAccess, here: www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/books/e/10.1... @sproghistorie.dk olander.bsky.social