A. Z. Fοrеmаn: Sеrious Philolοgy, Sillу Βеhavior
@azforeman
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Historical linguist, medievalist, Russian-American, grad student, 1st amendment geek, translator. I write poems. I talk like dead people for fun.
@azforeman.bsky.social
Joined November 2010
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Pinned Tweet
I was advised to make a video-ad for my Patreon. So I did. By throwing roughly three millennia of phonology into about a minute and a half.
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Not the translator's note you needed
But probably the one you deserved
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The existence of Chicago style pizza implies the existence of MLA style pizza
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“Once Covid is over” is just English for “Inshallah”
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This reply is even more badass if you hear it in your head in Arnold’s accent
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BCE/CE always feels like straight-up euphemism, a testament to how unsecular secular culture is. I feel like an actually secular culture wouldn't care, would just keep using AD, treating the meaning of "Anno Domini" as basically a curiosity like the etymology of "Wednesday".
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I have a joke about Oedipus and Midas and it’s motherfucking gold
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Are we doing that thing again where English speakers get all perplexed by the existence of English-based creoles?
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I once was sitting in O’Hare airport reading a book of Latin poetry when a guy looking like a monk walks up to me looking utterly lost and asks “Loquerisne Latine”? (Do you speak Latin?) To which I answer “Ita, possumne te adiuvare?” (Yes, can I help you?.)
People who studied Latin, can you tell me any stories about your Latin-studying experiences? Funny or nonfunny.
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I asked a Muslim man why Muslim women cover their hair. He smiled, and took out two pieces of candy from his pocket. He opened one and ate it quickly. Then he opened the other one, too, and ate it. "Man" he said "I really love candy".
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This is the dumbest pair of sentences I have ever seen in the pages of the National Review. And that is saying a lot.
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What if you squeezed a millennium of French phonology into 2 minutes and 20 seconds?
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Turned out he was indeed a Polish monk and knew only Polish and Latin. Had never been outside Poland before, or even seen the inside of an airport, and needed help finding his way.
That is my personal story of Latin as an auxlang.
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The ironic part is that in Chicago of all places he came upon a Latin speaker before a Polish speaker
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“Blut und Boden” but leftistly
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Sometimes people ask how far back in time you could go without needing an interpreter to understand English.
IMO, if you stick to London, any time after 1500 people will be more or less intelligible-ish to you, even if they can't understand your futurespeak.
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This may be the hardest self-own I have ever seen on this site
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My translation, from Polish, of a tragic poem by Tadeusz Borowski, one of the most chilling Holocaust poets I've ever read.
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This will never not be funny
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I love it when Cicero is quoted in the original French
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@Chen_YenHan
A very old Soviet joke:
“In America I am free to tell Reagan he’s an idiot!”
“In the Soviet Union I am free to tell Reagan he’s an idiot, too”
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Have been busy as hell, but here's another reconstructive sound tour. This time, the sounds of the Middle East in the Early Middle Ages: Old Ḥijāzī Arabic, Sibawayhi's Arabic, Tiberian Hebrew, Babylonian Hebrew, and Early New Persian.
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Rote learning & verbatim memorization of long pieces of text is actually good for you. It’s useful pedagogically, intellectually & creatively. It helps you have insights that you otherwise might not & enables you to reflect on the material in a different way. We don’t do enough
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*laughs in having actually read historical documents in English from every century over the past thousand years*
If you think ability to read modern cursive adequately prepares you for even reading documents, lol. Just lol.
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Like I keep saying if Danish were a historical language and you reconstructed its phonology nobody would ever believe you
I'm sorry but Danish isn't a real language.
This is the phonology of somebody's shitty conlang.
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“Sic transit Gloria” is Latin. It means “You’ve got a nice car, Gloria”
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Four written languages are attested from the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The first three are no surprise: Latin, Greek and Oscan. The fourth is (wait for it...) Arabic*. Specifically the ancient variety of Arabic traditionally called Safaitic (thread)
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When I was a child I noticed that the numerals and words for “mother”, “night”, “me”, “wolf” and some other words in Russian and English were similar, and this couldn’t be an accident. I decided that maybe they originally came from the same source. I was extremely proud of myself
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@queersocialism
Were you one of those kids in college who pretended to have done the reading and never actually did?
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I've seen many things but never before have I seen an Arabic-speaker pluralize "muffin" as mafāfīn.
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If India changes its official name to Bharat in English, Pakistan should do an ultimate troll move and rename itself as India.
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English is really just Extremely Low German.
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I have lived long enough to hear an Arab pluralize “iPhone” as ayāfin
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A 9th Century Old Irish Poem about being safe from Vikings, read in Old Irish (with reconstructed pronunciation) and in Modern English Translation.
This short piece was written by a monk in the margin of an Irish manuscript of Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae. The poem's
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Nobody ever learned to speak a foreign language without looking and sounding like an idiot at least some of the time.
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What about Jesus’ miracle of having 12 close friends in his 30s?
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Translate the names of historical figures to make them sound like they’re involved in organized crime.
Charlemagne = Big Carl
Francesco Petrarca = Frankie the Rock
Charles Martel = Chuck the Hammer
John Calvin = Baldy Sean
Flavius Josephus = Joey the Golden Kid
Robert le Fort =
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Does "raw-dog" (vb.) now mean "just do something without caring or trying or preparing too hard"? Because that is a semantic development I was NOT expecting.
I had a student say to me "I just raw-dogged your final. I was surprised you gave me an A"
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Bugs Bunny’s power over etymology is frightening
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Dan Brown on Asian languages and translation.
Jesus Christ.
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This reconstruction of Julius Caesar’s face makes him look like someone who could take a moment to murder you with his bare hands and then casually go back to eating lunch.
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PDF is now third most popular religion
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Maybe at least have some humor about it and say you switched from counting years since the Birth of Jesus to counting years since the death of Emperor Ai of Han.
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Okay, I guess I'm going to have to have a go here.
I've studied Arabic a lot, and I love it a lot. But I've also studied and loved Modern Occitan and Xaladytka Romani. I know damn well what real language endangerment looks like.
There are as many as seven thousand or so
This is absolutely true, though it will trigger many Arabs. Arabic is a struggling language, perhaps not as much as Urdu, but it is struggling.
Almost every intelligent Arab I know relies heavily on loanwords, or even entire English phrases, to convey any idea that exceeds
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Sound of four European languages (Parisian French, Lisbon Portuguese, Toledan Spanish and London English) in the first half of the 16th century.
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By the 8th century CE, both Sanskrit and Arabic grammarians had developed the study of phonetics to a level that nobody in Europe would even approach until the 16th-17th centuries and in many ways would only come to match in the 18th and 19th. And there are completely rationally
The British learned more about India in 200 years than Indians had learned about India in 2000 years.
The French deciphered ancient Egyptian in 100 years, something Egyptians themselves hadn't done in 1000 years.
Post-enlightenment Europe was a man among boys.
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This is a great way to announce that you are a complete fucking idiot.
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Remembering this absolute banger of a tweet-dyad.
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Fun fact:
The word "Qur'ān" was commonly used in medieval Jewish Arabic to refer to established liturgical reading traditions of the Hebrew Bible.
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Recordings of me reading seven Old Arabic inscriptions with reconstructed vocalization, and translations of same, including a verse-rendering of the "Baal and Mot" fragment, which I believe is the oldest Arabic poetic text yet discovered.
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How is it that both Dutch and Egyptian Arabic have an idiom that literally means “ant-fucking” used to refer to what in English is called “nitpicking”? That feels like it has to be way beyond coincidence.
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Guess who just passed his PhD candidacy exam?
This guy
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If you think a language only borrows from a language when it lacks words for the concept in question, ask yourself if you think the English didn’t have words for things like “move” and “person” before 1066.
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When people ask "when did people stop speaking Latin as a native language?" I like to answer: “Well, it was still spoken into the 9th century, though at that point spoken Latin had become pretty different from the written language.”
(Thread...)
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Modern French people reacting to reconstructions of the sound of Middle French: “lol sounds Canadian”
Modern English speakers reacting to the sound of Early Modern English: “lol sounds Irish”
Modern Portuguese people reacting to Early Modern Portuguese: “lol sounds like a rural
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My reading of the first 76 lines of "Karel ende Elegast" in a reconstruction of Middle Dutch pronunciation is now available publicly
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Learning Arabic by doing standard Arabic first and then a dialect later is actually kinda weird, and learners would be better off spending at least a year learning a form of spoken Arabic before they even touch MSA.
What language opinion gets you this reaction?
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Historical philology is awesome.
We can tell you how Isaac Newton pronounced English, because he left notes on his own pronunciation. (His MEAT vowel was [e:] and his /r/ was a trill.)
How cool is that?
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Neither Dante nor anybody else in the Late Middle Ages seems to have had any idea that the Romance languages were the descendants of Latin.
One of those things that just seems so obvious in retrospect, but they really had no idea.
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What is a completely true linguistic fact that sounds really weird when you just say it?
For example: Americans can understand British people way more easily than they can French people. But if you’re Deaf, it’s actually the reverse.
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Whom do I have to kill or blow to get people to understand that there are other forms of linguistic complexity than morphological?
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"Where have the lovers gone?
Hafiz
Tr. from Persian
I see no love in anyone.
Where have the lovers gone?
When did the days of friendship end?
Why have our friends withdrawn?
Life's liquor is grime-dark. Where's Khizr
now in our hour of need?
Color drained from the
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It's hard to be sure what the earliest recorded Arabic poetry is, but a good candidate is North Arabian inscription KRS 2453:
"It is Lord Mot's feast: the brute eats yet.
The exchange of nights and days is set.
Behold Baal sleeps. Asleep, he is not dead."
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"Dorito" is a diminutive
The existence of the dorito implies the existence of a much larger and more epic chip: the doro.
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@EmExAstris
@PostingTreyf
Are you saying this because you think there's some portion of it that I don't know, or because you think it makes the point I was making any less the case?
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I think the first person who realized that Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac etc. all share a common ancestor was Ibn Ḥazm in 11th century Andalus. He in fact suggested that they were originally dialects of a single language, and drew comparisons to the diversity of vernacular Arabics.
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Borges was always eloquent and in his talking about language he had the habit of expressing gut-level prejudices in quite sophisticated ways. His relationship to English was quite strange, or rather the product of peculiar circumstances.
The man rarely spoke English, especially
In 1977, Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential 20th c. Spanish-language writers, told William F. Buckley (whose first language was Spanish) his reasons for feeling, age 78, that English was 'far finer' than his native tongue. Right or wrong, I love his savor for language
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It's weird and frankly a bit disturbing to me that having an extremely famous poem memorized should be at all remarkable. It speaks to a serious decline in Anglophone cultural literacy.
There are linguistic communities on this earth where this is so completely normal. I can
Egyptologist Guy De La Badoyere effortlessly recites the words of Percy Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias' from memory, live on
#TimesRadio
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This Greek inscription, found on the grave of one Marcus Antonius Encolpus, may be the best thing anyone ever put on their grave:
Do not pass by my epitaph, dear passer-by.
Stop. Read and learn, and when you understand, go on:
There is no Charon waiting on a boat in Hades.
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Acquiring a native-like accent in a language you learn as an adult is doable.
There’s really nothing impossible about it.
It’s just really hard and takes a crapton of extra work, arguably more work than it’s worth for most learners. But in this as in many other things, people
What language opinion gets you this reaction?
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If a language stops changing, it is dead.
Loving language so much that you wish it wouldn't change is like loving a person so much that you wish their heart would stop beating. It's creepy. Whoever taught you to love like this, well, they really fucked up.
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Just want to contribute to the edifying posts in this site's ether by noting that, at some point in the 1st century a woman in Pompeii wrote a bit of graffiti on a brothel wall
It reads I Got Fucked Here "fututa sum hic"
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The late Franklin Lewis once told me that he once offered to teach Barks Persian personally. Barks refused and intimated that it would mess with his project.
When you are an English-speaker professing to be interested in Rumi and have a chance to learn Persian from Frank Lewis
Meet Coleman Barks, the man responsible for nearly every 'Rumi quote' you've seen. Coleman hasn't studied Islam, Sufism, or Persian in academia or traditional settings, he doesn't even know Persian! But that didn't stop him from writing over a dozen translation books!
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Often while reading Ancient or Medieval literature I’ll read something that makes me go WTF. Peasants praying to St. Martin to make every part of their body into a penis. Bards who suck their ruler’s nipples. Women who kill men by crushing their testicles with their bare hands.
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Should I start an English-language podcast about the history of Arabic?
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I managed to convince a Syrian woman at the pharmacy that she would not be harming her baby daughter by speaking to her in Arabic rather than English, that it was fine to speak Arabic to her.
I feel like I actually did a thing that mattered. Can I get this sense of
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Never forgetting this take
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Jesus Christ man STOP DIGGING
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School is one of the worst places to learn to speak a new language
What language opinion gets you this reaction?
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