#OCIANA #Top_10_in_2025 : The #OCIANA team inserted more than 1500 new inscriptions into the database. Here are our top ten (with a three-way tie at #10) of the year, just in case you missed them! From Nabonidus to Dahr, let us known what you think! www.academia.edu/145461821/OC...

essential 🧵 for Quranic studies

“The phonetics of Tarifit: variation and change in a Moroccan Amazigh language” by Mohamed Afkir and Georgia Zellou (Feb. ’26) [free until Feb. 18] www.cambridge.org/core/element...

So my translations of al-Dani's Taysir is out! So what is this text about? It is a description of seven canonical reading traditions of the Quran authored by the Andalusi polymath ʾAbū ʿAmr ʿUṯmān b. Saʿīd al-Dānī (371/981–444/1053).

NEW BOOK: Our first title in February is an addition to the Cambridge Semitic Languages & Cultures series, al-Dānī's al-Taysīr fī al-qirāʾāt al-sabʿ: A Translation with Linguistic Commentary by Marijn van Putten! Read freely online or buy a copy: buff.ly/L2oMcBN #OAbooks #SemiticSeries #OpenAccess

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Today my translation of al-Dani's Taysir has come out! I hope to write a little bit more about this later, but for now here is a link. And it's Open Access! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Interesting secondary reading in Codex Amrensis 192 (Arabe 359c, 82v, Q14:17): mā huwa bi-māʾitin "he will not die" instead of standard bi-mayyitin. I havn't found such a reading in the literature, but especially with the future-tense verbal sense a participial form makes sense.

Dang, if I'd know this would be a hit I would have made a better post. You Are Reviewer 2 A solo d6-based "game" to discover why you're so bad at giving academic feedback and why none of your colleagues like you. midnitelibrary.itch.io/you-are-revi...

... next week's talk: krc.web.ox.ac.uk/event/the-hi... The KRC don't bother with blurbs but it's what it says on the tin and will be good! In my experience you can just turn up if interested. PS: Looks like I'm officially an independent scholar 😆

Once again, people, this is what you get if you do peer reviewing double-blind. However, it is utterly ridiculous that the editors communicated this feedback to the author.

Some things are truly bipartisan.

私've 決ed to 始t 書iting 私y 英語 with some 漢字 in it, just to 見ee 何 起ens. The 振ri仮名 will be a bit 恣意的 at 一st, but that's 大丈夫. Nothing 始ts 完璧. 個人的ly, I 思ink it's not too 悪, I 出来n 読ead 何 私've 書itten here without much 難ty, but some 人 might not 好e it.

Something else from the realm of "2-in-1(.5) texts" that is also pretty cool and deserves more attention. 🔽🤓 Attested throughout a couple of decades, but little noticed or even studied. (And yes, also works in the other direction!) Can you think of anything similar with other pairs of languages? 🧐

Dit lijkt mij echt interessant, voor een nerd als @richardkroes.bsky.social en ook voor een rare snijboon als ikzelf, maar eigenlijk voor iedereen met belangstelling voor de geschiedenis van de islam en/of middeleeuws Andalusië.

If all goes well, February 4th will be the day that my translation of al-Dani's Taysir comes out (and if not then, very very soon). It was a lot of work, but I'm very happy with the end result. And best of all: It'll be Open Access! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

Excited to finally have the official cover of my forthcoming book, which will be in Cambridge Semitic Languages and Cultures Series (Open Book Publishers). For a blurb, see link below. No official date for publication yet, but hopefully within a month or so!

Call me weird, but the fact that li-'an is spelled morphophonemically لان but the negative li-'an-lâ is spelled phonetically ليلا in Hijazi/Classical Arabic orthography is something that keeps me up at night. I would've been okay with لان and لان لا OR لين and ليلا, but this is killing me.

Have you ever noticed that ‘what’ rhymes with ‘lot’ but not with ‘that’? Likewise, ‘car’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘war’, and neither do ‘trash’ and ‘wash’, ‘catch’ and ‘watch’, and ‘camp’ and ‘swamp’. Why is that? It’s all because of the /w/ sound. Zoom in on my new graphic to learn more: 1/

Here's something pretty cool that deserves more attention. 🤓 What exactly is happening here? 🤔🧐 (And can you think of an appropriate term to describe this?)

In his Arabic, the Mabaan speaker I've been working with mostly uses the genitive particle taan تان "of" The final n is puzzling to me. Sudanese usually has bitaaʕ or ḥagg, Juba has ta/bitá. Has anyone seen this form before elsewhere?

WTF?! 🫣 Is this a joke? www.nature.com/articles/s41... A religious quote, "primitive languages", and nonsense everywhere. Is Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications a scam journal?

Re: the AI slop paper shared by @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @lameensouag.bsky.social, I wrote to the editors — will update when I get a reply, and will be following closely what they do. Key point is that we should hold the *journal* accountable for this mess I have a few predictions... 1/n

This paper is batshit insane. It also (of course) has A TON of bullshit references that do not exist. Hey @springernature.com retract this AI slop and fire the editor that let it pass. There is evidently no review or quality assurance process in place at this journal.

Hey, did you know that Greek lost the phoneme /h/ because of secularism? You see, /h/ intrinsically symbolises the Creator. And hydrogen. This journal is published by @springernature.com , and is hosted by @nature.com. How did this incoherent nonsense make it into print?

Of ik de geschiedenis van games in de eerste 25 jaar van de 21ste eeuw wilde beschrijven in een groot stuk. "Erm", zei ik, "Dat is zo'n beetje de helft van de hele levensspanne van m'n medium." Zoek maar wat hoofdlijnen en kies scherp, was het antwoord. Bij deze. www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/...

ADDENDUM: The odd correlation that nominal sentences where the subject is marked with la- being followed only by elative predicates seems to be a correlation that goes beyond the Quran. Fischer says this is "almost always" the case, and cites a non-Quranic example for it.

I've been interested recently by the question of where the asseverative particle la- in Quranic sentences is supposed to go. This is more complex than one would think.

A new article by Carles Murcia (in English, despite the title) about the etymology of the place name(s) Thagaste www.ifc-ojs.es/index.php/pa...

Quranic Arabic only identical to Classical Arabic if you consistently ignore places where it is different. In Thackston's "An Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic", the student is asked to translate the picture sentence. In *actual* Quranic grammar would be إن الحديقة الصغيرة قريب من ههنا

Latin had six noun cases, but in all Romance languages except Romanian, nouns and adjectives only have one singular form and one plural form left. What happened? This extra large infographic tells you how the Latin case system collapsed – and why it's the accusative case that lives on in Romance.

A neat bit of Japanese orthography. Japanese uses three scripts: 1. Kanji (chinese characters), basically for native roots and chinese loanwords. 2. Hiragana, mostly for case endings and verbal inflections 3. Katakana, mostly used for (English) loanwords. But katakana have other uses...

It was a productive Year in Books for me this year! Lots of excellent books, and a bunch of terrible ones. Let's do some quick mini-reviews of my year in books.

After the major technical difficulties last time, me and Gabriel Reynolds decided to do another Live Q&A. So, of course, the first thing that happened was that my WiFi died, and then we got audio issues. After some editing it is now put back online! www.youtube.com/live/vkiji1e...

My next in-person Manuscript Kufi course (early Arabic calligraphy) has already been announced for April over at the Arab British Centre, London: details at www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/courses/joum...

@yvanspijk.bsky.social kwam vandaag met het lezen van wat een woord dat ik niet kende "maint", uit de context was het wel duidelijk dat het "menig" betekende, maar ik vond het leuk dat het dus ook echt gewoon ontleent is uit menigte! Dat leek me er eentje voor jou :-) en.wiktionary.org/wiki/maint

After a brief detour to the Lord's Prayer in a bilingual manuscript, our Advent calendar continues today with the Christmas Gospel: The angel appears to the shepherds.

Libyco-Berber (LB) Tombstones - the Monday edition. Today, we will have a look at an inscription from Morocco. LB tombstones are written in two different scripts, commonly called "eastern" and "western". For the eastern script we have enough useful bilinguals to be certain about their reading. 🧵

#artcalendar day 1: Mudāwama مداومة Persistence, constancy through circumstances that may be less than easy. A piece from the archives (2012!) in acrylic, ink, and metal leaf on paper. shorturl.at/4drDH

#artcalendar Day 2: Rūḥ روح Meaning spirit, soul, breath. Watercolour and ink on paper, from 2011.

#artcalendar Day 3: Dream منام From 2013. Watercolor, iridescent medium, metal leaf on cut and layered paper.

#artcalendar Day 4: Majnoun Leila مجنون ليلى Egg tempera with mineral pigments, red gold 23 ct, hand-cut paper on mount board, from 2014. shorturl.at/63iHF

#artcalendar Day 4*: Perplexity حيرة Acrylic and gold leaf on hand-cut paper, from 2017. majnouna.com/portfolio/pe... *sshhh, don't know how I missed a day but I'll post #5 later today.

Oxford dating be like "We'd like to invite you to give a talk during Week -2 of Hogfather term."

"takubbanit n tukksa n lmelḥ i waman n yilel Bgayet" Interesting that they went for a puristic neologism for "sea" (ilel instead of lebḥeṛ), but not for "salt" (lmelḥ instead of tisent).

As a little treat for you, here's an #ArabicBible Advent calendar 🧵. Every day I'll post a verse from the Christmas story from one of the oldest Arabic Gospel lectionaries, Sinai ar. 72, dated 897 CE (and a few other texts in between). [2nd attempt, I won't be offended if you point out my nonsense.]

If you don’t know, then who knows in your language? For Dutch, we say ‘Joost mag het weten’ (Joost may know it), where Makhuwa says ‘Nluku tantsuwela’ (God is the one who knows). What do you say?

An important 'time out' by a very clear thinker. Much of what Shoemaker claims about the Hijaz on the eve of Islam is conclusively disproved by material evidence, which grows by the year. I have a surprise, too, from my last survey mission (May 2025) between Taif-Mecca and Medina shorturl.at/8IG8f