my new post for the @digitalorientalist.bsky.social is out! A simple intro to the 敦煌文化 resources - a very handy database with plenty of information and media about the Dunhuang manuscripts, and more!

講義「危機言語の維持・再生と公共的使用の諸問題 」（田窪行則）／総研大日本語言語科学特別講義・第150回NINJALコロキウム - YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvQ9...

I wonder what mystery script these characters were taken from ... 🧐

He keeps doing it. Every time somebody gets beheaded in this text, the word "head" is replaced with a little hand-drawn emoticon. And considering how many people get beheaded in this story, that's a lot of lil face drawings.

国学者・賀茂真淵の師匠や門人に光　浜松の記念館で特別展を開催中：中日新聞しずおかWeb www.chunichi.co.jp/article/1160...

Wir brauchen dringend mehr modernen Sprachunterricht mit Grammophoneinsatz!

An interesting discovery: A manuscript (shelfmark Chambers 821 b) in #Qalamos that served as an English-Bengali dictionary or glossary, in which not only the Bengali words in the right column are written in Bengali script, but also the English terms in the left. .../1

🔓 Open Textbook Library A collection of open access textbooks on a variety of disciplines, incl. 123 for foreign languages and 12 for linguistics. You can find textbooks for Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Turkish. Unfortunately no Yiddish or Hebrew (but Arabic is there). open.umn.edu/opentextbook...

Die Geschichte der Fehldrucke der hebräischen Inschrift in Droste-Hülshoffs "Judenbuche" ist ja ellenlang. Aber dass die Inschrift auf dem Kopf gedruckt wurde, ist mir bisher noch nicht untergekommen:

I just found out that, unbeknownst to me, my "Power Emasculated: Eunuchs, Great Clans and Political Reproduction under the Tang" has a Chinese translation: 去势之势：唐代的宦官、世族与政治繁衍（何弥夏）(www.shsjcb.com/sjcb/view.as...). If anyone can get access to it, please let me know

ESPERANTO WA DAME! 😅 Reason no. 3 why Esperanto won't succeed, according to Kanazawa Shōzaburō 金沢庄三郎 (1872-1967) in 1905? -- Because the pronunciation of carnivorous and herbivorous people will naturally diverge. 🧐🤔

Meet the Numbat, Australia's only truly diurnal marsupial. This beautiful #SciArt is from John Gould's "Mammals of Australia" (1863): "with its beautiful tail spread out to the full extent, it offers a great resemblance to the Squirrels". doi.org/10.5962/p.31... #InternationalNumbatDay #ILoveBHL 🧪

"Macht es nur mit allen Menschen recht, verbindet euch mit den zuverlässigen, ergötzt euch mit den Unterhaltenden, und ertragt die Seltsamen und Langweiligen." #Goethe an Christiane, #otd 1808.

Followerpower: Kennt ihr Studien dazu, dass in Fachaufsätzen, wissenschaftlichen Beiträgen usw. vorwiegend jüngere Sekundärliteratur zitiert wird, also etwa der letzten 20-30 Jahre? Anders formuliert: Gibt es Belege dafür, dass sich so ein 'Forschungsfenster' immer weiter nach vorne verschiebt?

「…については、自由とする。」 解説：「自由とはいうものの、全くの自由ではなく、…」 😅

This kitty was not a great mouser, but did catch a pear! (Still my favourite design from my days as a herald). #heraldry #catsofbsky Arms of Diane Marie Cecile Perry, Public Register of Arms, Flags and Badges of Canada, vol. 6, p. 55. www.gg.ca/en/heraldry/...

Postdoctoral opportunity for US nationals for a two-year position with the SEI, as part of an NSF-funded project on the politics of digitizing newly-invented writing systems. Deadline actually 18th November. Full listing here: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05167

So whatever happened to the AELAW (Ancient European Languages And Writings) database? Did it fizzle out? I'm wondering who on BS would know - maybe @katherinemcdon.bsky.social ? @davidstifter.bsky.social ? Others? Here is a web archive link for the database: web.archive.org/web/20220604...

In the special collections exhibition at the KU Leuven Library, two 18th-century silk prints: one a graduation thesis and the other a congratulatory poem, both common subjects for silk printing at the time. @drkarrschmidt.bsky.social

New preprint with Barbara Meisterernst, on a database of qù-tone alternations in Ancient Chinese, now out with Open-Research-Europe, awaiting open peer review. doi.org/10.12688/ope... The database can be accessed at qualternations.digling.org

In case anyone missed my seminar on Wednesday but wishes they hadn't, it's now on our YouTube channel: youtu.be/oqwzTSLCeBE?...

いつでもあいさつを : ヲハヨヲ Good morning / day / evening : Ohio

Edwin G. Pulleyblank, quoted in H. G. Quaritch Wales, The Indianization of China (and of South-East Asia) (London 1967).

Happy #WombatDay! "This animal has not any claim to swiftness of foot". This is one of our favourite quotes from the historic literature ("An account of the English colony in New South Wales", David Collins, 1804) biodiversitylibrary.org/page/45924805 via #MuseumsVictoria #Wombat #ILoveBHL 📖 🧪

Giulietti/Niglio/Pelliccia (2025): Tenshō 天正. Diario di un pellegrinaggio giapponese alla Curia Romana (1585). Fonti manoscritte e a stampa @ www.taueditrice.it/libro/tensho/

A bundle of miscellaneous papers once belonging to Abraham Ortelius with letters & working notes, and a rudimentary sketch of the Strait of Gibraltar, demonstrating how he envisioned depicting the meeting point of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean for his world atlas. #bookhistory #rarebooks 💙📚📜

PHONO-ML Database La base de données de transcriptions phonétiques en chinois moyen produite par Alexander Delaporte et Guillaume Jacques au CRLAO est disponible publiquement : Gitlab Huma-Num = gitlab.huma-num.fr/phono-ml/dat... Github = github.com/alxdrdelapor... Zenodo = doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

dnuhshcaD ドンフスクッダ < 1909 いぬ @ dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/841587/1...

能く々く 🤓👍 < dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/969260/1...

"Narrenhände beschmieren Tisch und Wände." (1912) 😅

👀 (The pdf of the book gets the spelling right though, or maybe it has meanwhile been corrected, not sure.)

Oct 23 1-3pm we're conducting a workshop on semantic image annotation at the LECTIO institute for intellectual history from Antiquity through early modern times. The workshop is open to all. Participants can join in person or online but need to register from this site www.kuleuven.be/lectio/event...

Dreaming of one day being buried in your own ancient Japanese-style keyhole-shaped tomb? Good news: there's one in Chiba! Bad news? There's a waitlist with 6,000+ people on it already: youtu.be/uz1TqIbbLVA?...

Gestern, zum 181. Geburtstag Friedrich Nietzsches, ging die Online-Datenbank NietzschePics online. Sie macht über 300 Nietzsche-Bildnisse sowie über 500 Briefe zugänglich. Hier geht's direkt zum Projekt 👉https://ores.klassik-stiftung.de/ords/ksw_internet/r/nietzsche-pics/startseite

Sanskrit manuscripts have these abbreviations in the margin referring to texts - anyone aware if there is a complete list of the standard abbreviations?

Boo!

After complaints about Timothy Dexter's A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1797) being entirely devoid of punctuation, in future editions the eccentric businessman supplied a supplemental page so that people “may peper and solt as they please”: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/dexter-pickle

Crunched some interesting data from a 1938 Buddhist book catalogue, 佛學圖書目錄. Of approximately 3467 books listed, nearly 3/4 were woodblock printed works. This old technology remained in widespread use through the modern era. crta.info/wiki/%E4%BD%...

Mayu Fujikawa 2025 Envisioning Diplomacy: Japanese Ambassadors in Early Modern Europe @ www.psupress.org/books/titles...

Suﾞkitaru fa nawo oyoﾞfaﾞsaru ﾞka ﾞkotosi. 過ぎたるは猶及ばざるがごとし What an apt characterization of this romanization scheme. 😼

Some sukoﾞfuru 頗る nice ﾞtakuteñ 濁点 in Severini's Romanization of Japanese ... 🤓

Misplaced dakuten of the day: はし書(かぎ[=がき]) hashikagi[=gaki] 'preface' < 浮世形六枚屏風 @ dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/2537601/...

Guillaume Jacques and I have collaborated to survey spindle whorls and the origins of weaving in East Asia ... lots of new stuff in this preprint ... a novel method for processing spindle whorl archaeological data, comparison with farming, and new linguistic information ... osf.io/preprints/so...

A quantuɯ of solace ... 🤓

I've written about the life and just some of the achievements of my former classmate Andy West aka 魏安, Ando, and BabelStone @babelstone.co.uk www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

東アジア識字研究の現在―その到達と課題―｜2025年 第36回獨協インターナショナル・フォーラム（2025年 12月13・14日（土日）、獨協大学 天野貞祐記念館大講堂＋Zoom）※要申込 bungaku-report.com/blog/2025/10...

A reminder that our first seminar of the season takes place tomorrow and is hybrid. Annick Payne will be giving us an Anatolian Hieroglyphic Masterclass! Zoom registration and more information via this link: viewsproject.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/v...

Breaking language barriers in historical newspaper research! 2 new AI-powered features in the #CrossAsia Newspaper Explorer to explore 📊Show results by similarity 🔍Cross-language search for similar titles Free for all users! All info here: sbb.berlin/j4me1 @stabiberlin.bsky.social

Some amazing stuff at Princeton as part of the Form and Function show. The symposium kicks off soon here, and I'll be opening with some sort of ramble.

Captain James Cook’s South Pacific Logbook to Auction www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-n...