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.)

Forthcoming: Soqotra, Mahra, and Dhofar Studies in Modern South Arabian Languages and Oral Literatures. A Volume in Honor of Vitaly Naumkin brill.com/display/titl...

Oct 23-Dec 4: My Square Kufic course returns, over 6 online sessions during which we'll work with all sorts of grids derived from the basic square. Featuring my strong (and correct😜) opinions about this script and the dreaded Wall of Shame. 2/2 www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/whatson/squa...

I have two online events coming up next month, one talk and one course! Oct 16: An online talk version of my Abjad Numerals workshop, where I'll cover their history & how to use them. We'll do live exercises to properly integrate this ancient system. 1/2 www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk/whatson/when...

Updated alignment chart: What counts as a #conlang?

In the reading of the reader al-ʾAʿmaš (d. 148) already on verse 5 of al-Fātiḥah he recites something that no canonical reader does: he reads nistaʿīnu rather than nAstaʿīnu. This is what Sibṭ al-Ḫayyāṭ (d. 541), but this is absent in other descriptions, what's going on? 🧵

Throwback to the time in 2018 I searched for a quote and Google rickroll'd me with something that was missing *six* of my search times.

Affrication *k>č in Gulf Arabic is blocked(?) near rounded vowels u/ū. Where a stem has affrication, though, it *can* affect the whole root, as seen in certain complex forms: *ḥaliq 'throat' > ḥalǧ 'mouth' > ḥlūǧ 'mouths' *ḥinik 'chin' > ḥinič > ḥnūč 'chins' *dīk 'rooster' > dīč > dyūč 'roosters'

I've witnessed it myself in both Tabelbala and Siwa; in both cases, it was used to talk about prices without Arabic-speaking or uninitiated customers being able to understand, and was therefore structured to replaced numbers already borrowed from Arabic

I just remembered a gift you accidentally gave me: Qur'anic Qlippy

Curious what me and my team have been up to recently in my QurCan project? Have burning questions about Quranic manuscripts and Quranic reading traditions? Make sure to tune this Wednesday on YouTube! www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGW7...

Gender assignment in one of the southernmost Chadic languages - both lexical and semantic

My new article for the Journal of the International Qur'anic Studies Association is now available online (open access): “On the Historicity of ʿUthmān’s Canonization of the Qur’an, Part 1: The State of the Field” www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

I don't get it

22) The fact that the imperfect can be negated with mā but *only* when it is phrase-initial (lā needs to be used otherwise) is a beautiful leftover of the etymological origin of the negator mā as a question word mā "what?" (Arabic has wh-fronting).

I would say the dialectal variation in the poetry is rather pronounced. Much more pronounced than in the Quran! Also much more pronounced than in Islamic-era writing which shows little to no variation at all (though a bit more than the Quran).

We don't really know for sure, as this is (of course) never explained explicitly back in the day, but we may assume several factors to be at work here, often simultaneously -- at least: 1) phonetic match 2) simplicity (basically as in low stroke count) 3) semantic considerations 1/

Some light summer reading for me… plus a bonus track because a fourth PhD student I supervised, unrelated to @gloqur.bsky.social, submitted his thesis as well. 😀

One cool bit of type design and one unfortunate one. #typography

That Japanese would have adopted Chinese Kanji to write Japanese syllabically (manyogana) makes good sense to me. But what is puzzling to me is why they did not use characters that are homophonous with said syllables. Like why is 良 use for <ra> while its reading is raũ why 天 for <te> and not ten?

Ah, Cushitic — the most normal of Afroäsiatic languages. (screenshot from Souag (2023) in Almansa-Villatoro & Štubňová-Nigrelli (eds.)) Also, this chapter is convincing me of Afroäsiatic. I didn’t want to admit before amongst real experts who believe that I was kinda iffy about AA without ...

Blades '68: Player Principles handout.

Martin when I told him there are 26 verses in the Hebrew Bible that contain all letters of the alphabet: 🤯 me when Martin told me there's 26 generations from Adam to Moses: 🤯 המבין יבין

One like, one Arabic linguistics opinion

This year's Leiden Summer School is well underway! @phdnix.bsky.social in action during our (mostly his) Comparative Semitics class.

I am utterly shocked and saddened by the news of Andrew West‘s @babelstone.co.uk untimely passing. He was a huge inspiration, an impressive scholar, and a kind and generous person. FAMA PER ORA VOLAT SPIRITUS ASTRA TENET

Note to self: don't decide you'll talk about Modern South Arabian historical vocalism in your comparative Semitics class again. My brain is thoroughly broken. For those who want to suffer along, check out the very difficult but excellent paper by Dufour: www.academia.edu/70038716/Vow...

Can't believe this is the first time I'm seeing this but this is from Sibawayh, beautiful evidence for the lateral fricative nature of the Dâd: if you remove iTbâq from the Dâd you don't get a dâl, but a lâm!

Drought in Northwest Semitic and Egyptian -- an Afro-Asiatic Poetic Inheritance? A guest blogpost by @olawikander.bsky.social on the Afro-Asiatic Corner! afroasiaticcorner.wordpress.com/2025/06/18/d...

An interesting comment by al-Farrāʾ which clearly admits that Ḥamzah tried to fit as much as possible Ibn Masʿūd's reading to the Uthmanic text. "the students of Ibn Masʿūd and Ḥamzah read: wa-man yaṭṭawwaʿ (rather than taṭawwaʿa) because Ibn Masʿūd's muṣhaf has يتطوع"

Hey people who know more about Icelandic naming conventions than me. Why is Ólafur Arnalds called that and not Ólafur Arnaldsson?

Some thoughts on the etymology of Anazigh “shear wool” provided by @phdnix.bsky.social Technical reconstruction gives us four outcomes to this word: *ălləs (Zenatic, Kabyle); *ăləs (Tuareg); *las (Tashlhiyt); something with initial β (Zenaga). afroasiaticcorner.wordpress.com/2025/03/10/p...

#Phenomenal #Hismaic inscription just edited for #OCIANA by J. Norris. The text is by a man with a Greek name of the lost tribe of ʿ𝒂̄𝒅. He calls on the goddess Allāt to be mindful of his friends 𝒚𝒉𝒅 “Judah” (Yəhûdâ) and 𝒚𝒔ʿ “Jesus” (Yēšûaʿ). See: shorturl.at/jKaua

“Distinctive features of Bəṭaḥrēt” by Fabio Gasparini and Miranda J Morris (May ’25) doi.org/10.1093/jss/...

Penciling, day 2.

Funny: Jewish Dutch nesjomme 'soul' has a short /ɔ/ as if from #Hebrew נְשֻׁמָּה* *nəšummā, not נְשָׁמָה nəšāmā. Standard #Yiddish has the expected form, neshome (not **neshume corresponding to the Dutch form).

1yo just said "mayya" when presented with a cup of water; Aramaic is the language of Paradise confirmed

For anyone else who's interested: Bernard (2024) now on Academia. 🐦🐦

Just how strong is the syntactic impact of translationese on Modern Standard Arabic? Well - Frequency of indirect speech Quranic: 0.45% Classical: 0.30% MSA: 30.50% www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Peppa Pig now speaks Tibetan! www.youtube.com/@PeppaPigTib... Amid Chinese govt's efforts to marginalize the language in education, here's hoping that Peppa will help save the day.

ʾAbū ʿAmr al-Dānī didn't make it to Dénia's "Notable People" list on Wikipedia, and I don't know how to feel about that.

Four "sinoform" scripts inspired by, but not directly derived from, Chinese, written around the 10-16 centuries: 1. Tangut; 2. Khitan Small Script; 3. Khitan Large Script; 4. Jurchen (based on Khitan LS).

Well that’s unsurprising.

#NewPublication austriaca.at?arp=0x004029dd

Gaius' companion, Ẓāʿen (ظاعن), then turned to write his own text in Greek. He got his name right, but when trying to write the verb 'he wrote' ἔγραψε, everything goes wrong. 1 wonders what kind of pidgin Greek was used in the deserts in such mixed troops! Find more: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...

Waiting at the airport and thinking about convergence in the prehistory of Amazigh. Some vague thoughts, no conclusions. It has been proposed that the relative similarity of Amazigh varieties (~~ Romance in basic lexicon) is due to a kind of koineization somewhere in its history.

Still playing around with lexicostatistics in Amazigh. The big problem with using normal "basic word" lists is the amount of Arabic loans, even within such lists. There is no doubt hat this skews the data (dialects with many borrowings may have lost lots of basic lexicon in a short time)