Marijn van Putten

And it turns out it is not the only manuscript with this variant reading! (Codex Amrensis 68, Arabe 352g, 51r)

So while this reading is seemingly lost to the literary tradition it's remembered in at least two manuscripts!

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.

Gefeliciteerd!

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.

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...

You Are Reviewer 2 by Matthew Murray 🦇 A solo d6-based

midnitelibrary.itch.io/you-are-revi...

The hidden life of Kūfī scripts: practice-based insights and theories

... 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.

Do they merge Tsere and Hireq before nun?

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? 🧐

Maar dat ligt op een stapeltje om naar te kijken over een paar jaar wanneer ik niet een ERC project heb om tot een einde te brengen...

Ik heb nog ergens een manuscript liggen dat een van al-Dani's super technische teksten naar het Mozarabisch vertaald (natuurlijk in Arabisch schrift). Een bizar ding. Want wie is er nog geïnteresseerd in de ultra-technische details van Koranische recitatie die geen Arabisch kent?

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.

Dat had ik precies zo uitgekiend!

It doesn't any of the times it occurs in the Quran with a feminine antecedent, so I don't think so :-)

Q7:56 ʾinna raḥmata ḷḷāhi qarībun mina l-muḥsinīna
Q33:63 laʿalla s-sāʿata takūnu qarīban
Q42:17 laʿalla s-sāʿata qarībun

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.

逆漢文訓読 in Japanese i guess!

That's incredible!

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/

(the text might say when and where is it from, but my Classical/pre-Modern Japanese and Classical Chinese both aren't good enough to really decipher what's going on)

Here's something pretty cool that deserves more attention. 🤓

What exactly is happening here? 🤔🧐
(And can you think of an appropriate term to describe this?)

Where/when is this from? And what's the point of it? Like, kanbun-kundoku helps Japanese speakers decipher Classical Chinese... but the system is Japanese, so I don't see how this would be helpful to (non-Japanese) Classical Chinese readers to decipher the Japanese...

Reverse kanbun-kundoku. Love it!

In his Arabic, the Mabaan speaker I've been working with mostly uses the genitive particle

taan تان "of"

The final n is puzzling to me. Sudanese usually has bitaaʕ or ḥagg, Juba has ta/bitá. Has anyone seen this form before elsewhere?

WTF?! 🫣 Is this a joke?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A religious quote, "primitive languages", and nonsense everywhere. Is Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications a scam journal?

AI slop published on your watch: very bad look for HSSComms and Springer/Nature  Dear editors, I have failed to locate contact information for most of the academic editors for Humanities and Social Sciences Communications; I trust that you will forward this message to them. I want to note that AI slop is being published on your watch in the journal you edit. This paper, out last week (Al-Jarrah 2026), is full of inaccurate claims and includes countless hallucinated references. Even a cursory look at the bibliography shows that at least 10 and probably many more references are bullshit pure and simple; the simplest explanation is that they are confabulated by generative AI, which sheds doubt on the quality of the manuscript as a whole and on the review and editorial processes at your journal. It is a great lapse of editorial judgement to let this kind of obvious drivel pass and I am warning my colleagues at MPI and Radboud to avoid your journal until clear and unambiguous action is taken. You may also want to take note that many people are finding out about this and the online discussion of this paper and of the journal's failing standards is something I hope that Springer Nature cares about. In my opinion the paper does not pass even the most minimal quality assurance checks and is fully against the COPE guidelines on publication ethics. You may want to hold the author accountable for this; I think the only reasonable course is retraction. But the scholarly community also holds the journal accountable. By letting AI slop through, your journal is polluting the information ecology of scientific publishing. Amidst a rising tide of synthetic text, scholarly publishing, with its tradition of human oversight and strong peer revidew, should be one of the last stalwarts to defend the integrity of our research. I look forward to your response and to find out what decisive action you are taking.

Re: the AI slop paper shared by @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @lameensouag.bsky.social, I wrote to the editors — will update when I get a reply, and will be following closely what they do.

Key point is that we should hold the *journal* accountable for this mess

I have a few predictions...

1/n

There's something a little bit ironic about you typoing "review". 😅