Sā́mapriyaḣ
@avzaagzonunaada
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Linguistics- & probability-liker. Interested in descriptive & historical linguistics, and linguistic prehistory. Sheer hatred for bad terminology & notation.
south of χəχípəy̓
Joined June 2019
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Pinned Tweet
I made a short
#J
ász
#Ossetic
dictionary of the attested vocabulary here with
#Iron
and
#Digoron
equivalents. Check it out. Most of this is from Németh’s work (cf. quoted tweet for the reference), but I’ve added a few modifications and suggestions.
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This is just Greater Czechoslovakia.
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I have found the best Twitter account ever.
I- Japan is KURDISH HOMELAND
日本はクルド人の故郷です
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I find it so fascinating how mountains clearly block the spread of peoples and languages. In the Indian subcontinent, the Himālaya sharply dilineate Indo-Aryan- and Tibeto-Burman-speaking populations. In the Middle East, the Zagros has prevented Iranic and Turkic expansion ...
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We gotta solve all problems of Egyptian historical phonology by then so that we can call the gods properly in their language at the precise exact moment.
There will be a total eclipse in EGYPT???? Next to the NECROPOLIS????? in 2027?????
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An old lady on the train is reading Haspelmath 2002, Understanding Morphology.
I asked her if she’s a linguist and her answer is “not yet, but I’m learning”.
Love people who read academic books on trains like they were a novel. That’s my ethnic group.
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This is what worries me the most. :( The Taliban and their local Islamist supporters will try to wipe out Kalash culture, much like the Nuristani religion was wiped out in the late 19th c. by Afghans.
TTP has announced that they have entered Chitral in a huge number. FYI the Kalash people are a small religious and ethnic minority of Pakistan. The Kalash religion is polytheist faith. In the past, the locals have complained about Tablighis to have tried to convert them.
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What’s the rice discourse?
Many Indian subcontinental languages, especially those spoken by rice-eating ethnic groups, lexically distinguish between unhusked rice grains, husked but uncooked rice grains and cooked rice. E.g.,
Bengali dʰān, čāl, bʰāt
Kashmiri dānʸɨ, tomul, batɨ
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@HeyWatsupBoy
Haha, for the first time in my life, I’m rooting for Pakistan, uhm, I mean, India.
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They wrote the same thing 4 times in Dēvanāgarī because one is supposed to be “Hindi”, one “Marathi”, one “Sanskrit” or something, and I don’t even know the fourth. 😆
உத்தரப்பிரதேசத்தில் அயோத்தி ரயில் நிலையத்தில் "தமிழ் திணிப்பு" 😈😈😈😈
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Butterfly effect led from this video to me getting upset knowing that the westernmost non-Austronesian language of what is now Indonesia — a “Papuan” language — called Tambora went extinct in 1815 when Mt. Tambora erupted.
That makes this the only “Papuan” language I know of ...
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Fun fact: Lake Superior (English), Lake Michigan (Ojibwe) and Lake Ontario (Huron-Wyandot) mean the exact same thing.
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Speak a language isolate, play fire-hockey. Is there any way to be a cooler ethnic group than the Purépecha?
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Tibetan should have the same reputation as Arabic. A classical variant frozen by religion dating to the early middle ages, and numerous “dialects” diverged from it.
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Not gonna lie, /ˈɲɔkːi/ being theoretically approximated by */ˈjnʌkɪj/ and then metathesized to /ˈjʌŋkɪj/ to maintain phonotactical constraints has to be up there amongst my favorite language things ever. Good job Yunkie-woman.
imagine the word gnocchi. imagine how one might say gnocchi. imagine how one might pronounce gnocchi badly. then listen.
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You can create loads of near-intelligible Lithuanian–Sanskrit sentence-pairs with only basic grammar.
Naktyjè, dúosime dúoną dievų̃ dantìms.
Náktau, dāsyā́mō dʱānā́ṁ dēvā́nāṁ dántēbʱyaḣ.
“At night, we shall give bread (Lithuanian)/grain (Sanskrit) to the teeth of the gods.”
I'm by no means the first person to do this but still quite chuffed to have come up with this pair of parallel sentences:
Skt. Dáme dáhyati agníh.
Lit. Namè dẽga ugnìs.
'In the house burns a fire.'
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There is an Indo-Aryan language called Vāgrī Bōlī in southern India surrounded entirely by Tamil in which its speakers are bilingual in.
The speakers of this language are called the Narikkuruvar in Tamil and occupy the lower stratum of society, known traditionally to hunt ...
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In Indian English, an examiner ‘takes’ an examination, while an examinee ‘gives’ it. The exact opposite of native English varieties.
It’s a calque of the respective verbs in Indian languages. E.g., in Bengali, porikkʰa newa ‘take’ v. porikkʰa dewa ‘give’.
Gave my 12th exams, English paper today.. and was happy to see this question appear!😁
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The president of India tweeting in
#Santali
— a Munda language of eastern India that she speaks natively!! 🥹
ᱦᱩᱞ ᱢᱟᱦᱟᱸᱨᱮ ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲ ᱦᱩᱞ ᱨᱮᱱ ᱳᱢᱳᱨ ᱡᱤᱣᱤ ᱟᱞᱟᱭ ᱛᱮᱱ ᱠᱚ ᱥᱤᱫᱚ-ᱠᱟ.ᱱᱦᱩ, ᱪᱟᱸᱫᱽᱼᱵᱷᱟᱭᱨᱚ ᱟᱨ ᱯᱷᱩᱞᱚ ᱡᱷᱟᱱᱚ ᱥᱟᱶᱛᱮ ᱥᱟᱱᱟᱢ ᱵᱤᱨ ᱵᱟᱱᱴᱟ ᱠᱚ ᱜᱚᱰ ᱡᱚᱦᱟᱨ ᱛᱩᱞᱩᱡ ᱢᱟ.ᱱ ᱢᱟᱱᱚᱛᱤᱧ ᱪᱟᱞ ᱟᱠᱚ
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I’d once again like to remind everyone that despite Coptic having been extinct as a vernacular for a few centuries now, we still have a longer tradition of attested Egyptian than any other language!
Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit-Indo-Aryan, Latin-Romance, nothing comes close!
Fun footnote: the Coptic is a descendent of the language of ancient Egypt. Yes, the language written using all those hieroglyphs
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Wonder what they’d do if they met Lštšfum Aš́ʲf?
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Somebody tell this family about the free online intensive Phœnician course doing the rounds. Let’s revitalize Carthage properly!!
Tunisians are losing it with the antiquity LARP pretending it’s Carthage
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Taught my Persian colleague how to count in Bengali and she is confused why ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘four’, ‘five’ and ‘nine’ sound so similar to Persian. 🙂
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Old Azeri is ancestral to Tati, not to the Turkic language usually called Azeri (i.e., Azerbaijani Turkish) today.
Old Uyghur is ancestral to Yellow Yugur, not to the language usually Uyghur today.
Other examples?
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Old Persian prayer for the New Year (Persepolis southern terrace wall inscription of Darius, ca. 520 BCE–486 BCE).
Abi imām dahyāūm mā āǰamyā mā hainā, mā dušyāram, mā drauga.
May there not come upon this country no hostile army, no bad year, no malice!
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Terrible news. The last speaker of the Beḷāra language (an underdescribed South Dravidian language presumed to be closely related to Tulu), Sidda Beḷāra, has passed away.
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Hydronym of the night!
Dniepr ‘major river in eastern Europe’
Rus. Днепр /dʲnʲepr/, Ukr. Дніпро́ /dʲnʲɪˈpro̞/, Bel. Дняпро́ /dʲnʲɐˈpro̞/, AGrk. Δάναπρις /dä́näpris̠/
All from “Scythian” *dānu-afra- (~ -apra-) “deep river”, cf. Ossetic дон /don/ ‘water, river’, арф /ärf/ ‘deep’
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Was?!
Namastē doesn't mean “the light in me bows to the light in you”. It just means “"(my) bow to you”. No need to go super dramatic or to exoticize too much.
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Spent five hours on flight today studying Coptic. Will need to reignite that language.
Anyway, here are my Coptic books.
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As most people know, horses are not native to the Americas and were introduced by Europeans following the Columbian contact. So, the native languages of the Americas had to find ways to refer to this new creature. Some Athabascan languages chose to specialize their word for ...
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Frogs have the most froggy name possible in every language.
Bengali /bæŋ/
Circassian /ħäntʼärqʷ/
Coptic /kʰrur/
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Really feel for these people. :( The last pagans in a hostile part of the world, with their culture surviving on borrowed time.
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The earliest (significant) attestations of Circassian and Udi — two Caucasian languages — are from Egypt!!
The Old Udi palimpsests were identified in 1996 by Georgian historian Zaza Alekşiz̆e (who died earlier this year) following their discovery at St. Catherine’s monastery ...
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Learn Japanese to read manga. ❌
Learn Japanese to translate Yoshida’s new Sogdian grammar. ✔️
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It’s not “self-repatriation of ethnic Armenians to the motherland”. The Armenians of Łarabał aren’t recent settlers from the now-restricted country of Armenia. Some of our oldest records of Armenians are from Łarabał, long before there were any Turks in the area. “Historian”??
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Yes, leave them alone. Contact between mutually isolated populations never ends up being just for one or the other’s material development. Instead, in almost all cases, one of the populations ends up being decimated. Read what happened to their neighboring Andamanese ...
Ok but when are we going to make contact with North Sentinel Island? Are we going to have Mars colonies and trans human cyborgs but just keep a bunch of people in a pre bronze age bubble until the end of time?
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Learning words can actually be a lot of fun if you like historical linguistics or comparative semantics. Every word, even morpheme, comes equipped with a story!!
Literally every part of learning a language is great except having to learn words
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That’s why you should order your alphabet like an IPA chart instead of the arbitrary Mediterranean ABC mess.
am i the only adult who still has to sing the alphabet song to know what order all the letters go in?
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Fun fact: Greek ἁγίᾱ hagíā (ἅγιος hágios, ἅγιον hágion) ‘sacred’ is an exact cognate of Sanskrit यज्या yaj́yā (यज्यः yaj́yaḣ, यज्यम् yaj́yam) ‘worthy of worship’.
Unfortunately, σοφίᾱ sopʰíā ‘skill, wisdom’ isn’t Indo-European. So, we can’t have a full Sanskritization.
Today in AD 532:
The Emperor Justinian laid the foundation stone of the Hagia Sophia.
The building would be finished five years later.
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Rigveda 1:3
अश्वि॑ना॒ यज्व॑री॒र् इष{स्} ... चन॒स्यत॑म्
áśvinā, yáj́varīr íṣ{as} ... ćanasyátam
Oh twin horses, graciously accept this sacrificial drink.
आ या॑तं रुद्रवर्तनी
ā́ yātaṁ, rudravartanī
Come hither, oh ye whose tracks are flame-red.
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It’s a (sad) miracle, if you ask me, why ancient Indo-Iranic comparative studies aren’t huge in India. Not only does India have the biggest stock of people knowledgeable on the ancient & historical texts in Sanskrit and the Prakrits, but *also* of Avestan texts given that the ...
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I find “we will not eat bugs, eew” to be an extremely bizarre position among people that eat shrimps, lobsters and crabs.
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Also very accurate that the doctors in all three countries is the same friendly bearded Mirpuri guy.
Healthcare across the globe 🌎
Patient:
🗣️“My leg broke”
🇬🇧UK: your appointment is in 43 months
🇺🇸US: your bill is $17,000 dollars
🇨🇦CA: have you considered suicide?
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Check this out 👇 Free online lessons on early Indo-European languages from Uni Göttingen. Represented are Hittite, Ancient Greek, Vedic, Avestan, Latin, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Old Irish, Old Lithuanian, Classical Armenian, Old Albanian & Tocharian.
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One of the words for ‘moon’ 🌙 in Sanskrit is श॒शिन्- śaśín- (ɴᴏᴍ.sɢ श॒शी śaśī́) — literally “hared (one)”.
The derivational source is श॒श- śaśá- (ɴᴏᴍ.sɢ श॒शः śaśáḣ) ‘hare’ 🐇, from pre-Sanskrit *śasá- — a distant cognate to English hare, both from PIE *kʸes-o-.
Chinese (and later Japanese) reproductions of Indian icons of Candra can also display the lunar hare. The Indian side also conceived of a hare on the Moon.
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The Hittite ḫ of planets, so to speak.
DID YOU KNOW: Neptune was the first planet to get its existence predicted by calculations before it was actually seen by a telescope.
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Some Indo-Iranic animal words with no clear cognate in other IE languages:
*ħús̠tras 🐫 (Sanskrit úṣṭraḣ, Avestan uštrə̄)
*kħáras 🫏 (Sanskrit kʰáraḣ, Avestan xarə̄)
*u̯arāj̑ʰás 🐗 (Sanskrit varāháḣ, Avestan warāzə̄)
*kapáu̯tas 🕊️ (Sanskrit kapṓtaḣ, Balochi kapōt)
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Just because they are a Tai people doesn’t mean they “migrated from Thailand”!!
They just crossed the mountains from north’n Burma or south’n China.
I want people to realize that the location of the most famous member of a lang. family doesn’t imply origin of the family there.
Confirmation that the Ahom people of eastern India, , who established a kingdom from 1228–1826, originally migrated from Thailand, but mixed w local groups after arriving so now, only a minority of their ancestry is Thai. S.E. Asian migration into S. Asia remains poorly studied.
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In case you’re sweating over how to pronounce X, I’ve got you.
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My (controversial??) opinion is that PIE reconstruction is extremely accurate for its home region. People who criticize the reconstruction just haven’t looked at the languages that are directly south of where PIE (in all likelihood) used to be.
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Over the past 30 minutes or so at the airport, I heard three Indian names — Tāniyā, Nikītā, Anuṣkā.
Funny thing is that all three of these now-common names are borrowings from Russian.
(Nikíta in Russian is, in fact, a male name, but the borrowed Indian version is female.)
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Proposal to rename Proto-Indo-European as Very Old Punjabi.
If I had this much confidence, I'd have won everything the life has to offer.
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I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I knew a guy while in grad school who went by Bismarck. Here’s the catch. He’s Chinese, Wényuè, and that’s his “English name”.
For most Chinese abroad, the “English name” is like Alice or Roy, but this guy chose something far more epic.
Otto von Bismarck on a horse after becoming a first Chancellor of the German Empire, 21 March 1871.
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What are languages you really want to learn but probably never will?
For me, plenty, but Modern Greek and Manchu immediately come to mind.
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Zangezur is not a “resonant Turkic historical name”, LOL. As anybody who knows anything about Turkic can tell you, /z/ doesn’t occur word-initially in native Turkic lexemes. All instances of initial /z/ in modern Turkic languages are borrowed from Arabic, Persian, Armenian etc.
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Jász phrase of the day!
#J
ász daban horz = 'your day (be) good'
Compare
#Iron
dæ bon xorz,
#Digoron
dæ bon xwarz
The Jász record is significant because it predates the
#Ossetic
change of Proto-Iranian */ā/ (Ossetic <a>) to /o/ before nasal consonants (/-n/, /-m/ and /-yn/).
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I love this 😁 The Assamese have the most distinct accent in English of any major Indian ethnic group. Obviously, as can be heard, Assamese lacks the palatalized post-alveolar affricates ⟨c(ʰ), j(ʰ)⟩ having moved them to /s, z/. As a result, words like ⟨chicken⟩ will be ...
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I think it’s kinda funny that most Mainstream Indo-Aryan languages replaced the inherited Indo-Iranic words for ‘milk’ and ‘water’ — Skt. kṣīrá- & udán- — by (reflexes of) words for ‘(thing which was) milked’ and ‘drinkable (thing)’ — Skt. dugdʰá- & pānī́ya-.
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You eat both tea and cigarettes in Bengali.
You eat tea in Persian and you drink cigarettes in Turkish.
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Apparently, Afghan Persian uses کیله kēla for ‘banana’ 🍌, a loanword from Hindi-Urdu کیلا kēlā which reflexes Sanskrit कदल- kadala- (via Prakrit kayaḷa-).
The Iranian Persian word for ‘banana’ is مُوز mouz which is an indirect loan from Sanskrit मोच- mōća- ‘banana flower’.
We often focus a lot on the influence Persian had on Hindi and Urdu but we barely pay attention to the influence those had on Persian.
Some Hindi/Urdu loanwords used in Dari are "Kile" (کیله, "banana"), "Sarak" (سرک, "street") or "Morch" (مرچ, "chili").
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My grandma will just fill that space with pictures and idols of gods and goddesses and turn it into a little multipurpose temple.
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Like these posts that present “descendant of Genghis Khan” as if a Eurasian being his descendant is some kind of a unique achievement. What next? “Has two ears”??
Muhammad Ali in Pakistan wearing a Sindhi cap standing next to Hazara Olympic boxer Abrar Hussain- a descendant of Genghis Khan
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Blatantly stealing the idea:
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@jasongfleischer
@ringo_ring
That’s awesome, but you guys should now give her an honorary PhD. Those are handed out to politicians and rich “philanthropists” like candy, but here we actually have someone who truly deserves it, having done more for science than probably anyone in history.
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Regular reminder that PIE *bʰréh₂tēr ‘brother’ and *su̯ésōr ‘sister’ regularly yield bṛ̆o and sus in the Nuristani language Katë.
No affectionate syllable-cutting required like English bro and sis. Just got rid of all the problem parts by regular sound changes.
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Not many people know this, but just as Eurasians bred sheep for their wool, the native peoples of the (central) Pacific Northwest had a special breed of dog that was reared for its wool.
In modern dialects of
#Halkomelem
, ‘dog’ is sqʷəméy̓, literally, “soft-wooled (one)”.
Coast Salish weavers once bred little, fluffy white dogs whose fur they blended with the wool of mountain goats to weave blankets. Despite the wool dogs’ abundance in the early 18th century, they were almost extinct by 1858. 🐕️
#ArchaeoArchives
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What do we think of this?
It’s somewhat old, original printing in the ’50s, and I don’t know much about Ancient Greek, but it was for sale for cheap and has ϝ in the contents.
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Both countries attacking the Baloch and pretending they have some beef with each other so that no-one talks about the actual people being killed. :(
#BREAKING
⚡️🇮🇷🇵🇰Iranian bases in Sistan and Baluchistan Province are on alert in anticipation of a counter-attack from Pakistan.
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@madhurarrao
May be I’m missing something, but what warranted this response here? What’s so offensive about being asked “what language do you think in?”?
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translate this to your language, I want to see something
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In Iranic languages (and, by calquing off of Persian, in some Indo-Aryan and Turkic languages too), you ‘eat’ an oath — at least synchronically. Diachronically, it may not actually be the ‘eat’ verb, but we shan’t worry about that.
In French, "promises" are something you "hold", like a torch that must continue burning, whereas in English, you "keep" them, like a diary that shouldn’t be forgotten. But in Japanese, you "protect" them, like a treasure. Don’t languages make you see the world differently?
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I actually like the “how many languages you speak” question because it lets me get into how difficult it is to properly quantify that and also introduce the asker to a number of minority languages they may not know of.
What I hate, however, is being asked my opinion on ...
my most controversial linguistics opinion: asking a linguist how many languages they speak is actually a fair question. we just don't like it because it reminds us that we have failed to be Ken Hales
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पानी, सच and खाना are native Indo-Aryan words 😂 nothing specifically “Urdu” about them
Hindi पानी pānī < Sanskrit पा॒नीय॑म् pānī́yam
Hindi सच sač — probably back-formation from सच्चा saččā < Sanskrit सत्य-क- satya-ka-
Hindi खाना kʰānā < Sanskrit खादन-क- kʰādana-ka-
Start removing Urdu words from your speech gradually. In six months you won't ever miss them. Start today. Start with:
Prabhaat instead of Subah
Jal for Paani
Satya for Sach
Hriday for Dil
Bhojan for Khaana
No Aurat. Use Mahila, Stree, Naari.
No Shaheed. Use Veer, Hutatma,
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That I sincerely believe “cutter” is a better approximation in English to the Arabic name of the country than “CAT-are” or “cut-ARE” or any such (unless you speak a northern English dialect).
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Sadly, yes, but I’m glad we stopped killing these beautiful birds.
The Mauryan emperor Aśōkaḣ (3rd c. BC) himself reduced peacock-slaughter in the royal kitchen to two a day, and expressed his intent on banning it completely in the future. Text below from the Girnār rock-edict:
Peacock Meat was a delicacy of ancient India from at least 3rd century BCE.
Everyday two peacocks and one deer was cooked in the Royal Mauryan palace.
Buddhaghosha also confirms
that peacock was a delicacy of India in the Mauryan period.
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Caucasian Albanian cemetery discovered in Gujarat!! Someone tell Әliyev.
The Armenian cemetery of Surat, India, testifying to the centuries-long presence of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Esfahan, Iran in this Indian Ocean port city
Read more:
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Turkic is completely wrong. Probably Dravidian too.
The Urheimat of Turkic would be much more east. And why is Chuvash almost in India?! 😅
Some of the others, like where Sino-Tibetan or Afro-Asiatic or Niger-Congo (if truly a thing) originate from are completely ....
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In my experience, the only people who say IE languages are easy have never studied a non-IE language (and probably studied only those IE languages that are already close to their native language).
"Indo-European languages are easy mode" say people who have never had to learn Old Irish
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Realizing that adding upper dots makes pharyngeals uvulars in the Arabic script. 😲
ع ← غ
ح ← خ
Must be obvious to graphemists, I know, but after all these years of knowing the script, I’m only realizing now.
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