Livestream tomorrow on the burning questions of late antique Arabia’s religious history. Join here: www.youtube.com/live/iJ4zsdI...

KANJI!?!? In MY English? It's more likely than you think. youtu.be/_gCyZI-Ettw?...

In case you missed the Kickstarter, pre-orders are now open for this book, for dispatch starting in May (after I start fulfilling pledges). payhip.com/b/W306o

It was a great pleasure and a honor to act as the co-supervisor for Mariana Martins’ dissertation about the emergence of a new Sign Language in Guinea Bissau, for which she received the doctorate yesterday. The book is available open-access.🧵 www.lotpublications.nl/creating-a-s...

Public lecture on Thursday in Paris. I will deliver a lecture on the linguistic pre-history and history of the Mecca region, based on two seasons of epigraphic fieldwork carried out btwn '21-'22. Welcome.

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.

A new article of mine was recently published by the Journal of Islamic Studies: "‘Where did you learn to write Arabic?’: A Critical Analysis of Some Ḥadīths on the Origins and Spread of the Arabic Script" academic.oup.com/jis/advance-...

So what about the other "bad guy", Ibn Miqsam? Was he shunned and dropped from the transmission of the Quran, or did he also become a canonical transmitter among the ten canonical readers? While he is not as prominent in the transmission paths as Ibn Shanabudh he indeed appears!

Qliffī! Save us!

Behold, a THAAD

The trials of Ibn Shanabudh for his reciting of non-Uthmanic readings is often invoked in the context of the "canonization of the seven readings" by Ibn Mujahid. His doing so, and being punished for it are often touted as examples of the establishment of the canon.

Handwritings of great scholars: 1. Sanskrit-devanāgarī: David Pingree (ed.), Yavanajātaka 2. Arabic & Greek: Manfred Ullmann, Wörterbuch zu den griechisch-arabischen Übersetzungen des 9. Jahrhunderts 3. Tangut: К. Б. Кепинг, Тангутский язык: морфология

NEW BOOK | Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah by Jane Hathaway The latest book in the Cambridge Semitic Languages & Cultures series, this groundbreaking volume makes a transformative contribution to studies of the Cairo Genizah. Read freely online or buy a copy: buff.ly/NYtRPfq #OAbooks

We hebben iets teveel bezuinigt op jou onderweis

Fun chain of derivation + borrowing: #Hebrew g-ʔ-y 'to be proud' > gaʔăw-ā 'pride' > gaʔawṯ-ān 'prideful' > gaʔawṯān-ūṯ 'pridefulness' > #Yiddish gavsones 'arrogance' > #Dutch kapsones 'airs' > kapsones-lijer 'braggart'

"Gistradagis" is a Gothic word, attested once, that perfectly corresponds to English 'yesterday' –⁠ except that it means 'tomorrow'. Old Norse is flexible with this word too ('í gær' means 'yesterday/tomorrow'), perhaps due to a common stage when it came to refer to a day on either side of today.

#TIL "the LORD of Hosts" (𐡉𐡄𐡄 𐡑𐡁𐡀𐡕, [yh]h ṣbʾt) is attested as a divine name on an #Aramaic ostracon from Elephantine. (First line, starting with the second 𐡄.)

Fixed again (more or less).

An interesting report from al-Dani's Jami`: Basically every transmitter of Ibn Dhakwan reported and even Ibn Dhakwan's own book say explicitly that Q51:60 and Q83:31 break with the general rule, and have an unharmonized -humu pronoun rather than his regular -himu.

"They do not ??? them, they do not fast for him, they do not feed [the poor] for him" wel-ten yesmeṯri, wel_fell-as etẓumun, wel_fell-as esseččen

New Open Access article: Finding Dūrī: Communal Transmission of Abū ʿAmr among the People of ʿIrāq === The proofs still had the title's pun working in Spanish, but between final proofs and publication someone who didn't get it, changed it. :-( al-qantara.revistas.csic.es/index.php/al...

"Is it okay to fast before the moon-seeing, or not?" "Ma yeggur wuẓum qbel teẓra n uyur, neɣ min?"

ah yes, the RaSnBaSt

It's #InternationalLEGOClassicismDay! 🎉 This year I've been building a LEGO Katabasis Book Nook, which has been a ridiculous amount of fun! Here are a few pictures - and you can find the whole thing on my website: classicalstudies.support/2026/02/20/i... #ILCD10 #BCEPantheon

I have a new blog post out, looking into material that shows how people tried to sell private collections to public institutions in the Weimar Republic, what prices they were asking, and how librarians rejected offers due to fishy provenance. medisi.hypotheses.org/8489 @dehypotheses.bsky.social

Western Amazigh Tetserret / Zenaga : - əskorək = askarag = i did - əskorad = askaraḏi = i did it - ǝnnak = ǝnnag = i said - ǝnnad = ǝnnaḏi = i said it

New Article: When did Faṣīḥ become Qabīḥ? Rehabilitating Classical phonological and morphological features And it's Open Access!: doi.org/10.1093/jss/... A short summary of the contents of this article 🧵

The program of the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2026 (6-17 July) is now online! www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/education... Hopefully, there will be some courses of your liking! (Hittite perhaps?) The application form will be online soon, too, so keep an eye out for it.

lessgoo

One of the bycatches if doing the translation of the Taysir, is that one thing has become clear to me concerning the Taysir. It was clearly written *after* the al-Dani's big book Ǧāmiʿ al-bayān, and to some extent is a recomposition/condensation of said text. Let me explain. 🧵

#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

Uploaded:

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/