яཀོب 半男

Just published: a small etymological note on New Persian "malang" - probably a loanword from Bactrian

journals.ysu.am/index.php/JI...

Bactrian Documents IV Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2025. Bactrian Documents IV: Documents from South of the Hindukush, I (Part II Inscriptions of the Seleucid and Parthian Periods and of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, Vol. VI Bactrian). London: Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. With a contribution by Frantz Grenet. Following on from the three volumes of Bactrian documents from Northern Afghanistan (BD1-3), the present volume primarily contains the edition of a collection of fourth-century letters written on birchbark in a place which cannot be located precisely but which was evidently somewhere to the south of the Hindukush, in what is now Southern Afghanistan or Pakistan.

Bactrian Documents IV

Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2025. Bactrian Documents IV: Documents from South of the Hindukush, I (Part II Inscriptions of the Seleucid and Parthian Periods and of Eastern Iran and Central Asia, Vol. VI Bactrian). London: Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum. With a contribution by…

A Grammar of Khowar This book is the first full-length English-language grammar of Khowar, one of the Far Northwestern Indo-Aryan languages. It reflects more than 30 years of field research by the author, and attempts to...

Open access: “A grammar of Khowar” by Elena Bashir (June ’25) uclpress.co.uk/book/a-gramm...

Cognate to Low German place names in -hude, like Buxtehude, Hamburg-Winterhude or Hude near Oldenburg!

Baloo from The Jungle Book would then be etymologically related to English beaver, Polish bóbr 'beaver' and (a bit more closely) to Persian babr 'tiger'.

Seems likely to me that Sanskrit bhallū́ka- 'bear' is a Prakritism from an l variant of babhru- 'brown' (babhlu- > bhallu-), which means that Hindi bhālū 'bear' is a direct cognate of Bhadarwahi ḍhḷabbū 'bear' and also of Nuristani Kalasha bröw 'bear' (derived in CDIAL from unlikely *bhrāru-).

Pronominal index set C in Ch'orti' (Mayan) (as opposed to the usual Mayan sets A and B) probably derives from independent pronouns in focus position, as argued here:

kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/75421/

She meant the polite game of insistence and refusal, but the lady understood that she meant poverty/need and was offended. That was liable to misunderstanding for Germans as well, though.

I know the use as "forcing food etc. upon guests" from my mother (northwestern Germany). Once led to an unfortunate misunderstanding when she told a Polish lady that she knew the "Benötigung" in Poland was greater than in Germany.

From a book on Avar (Nakh-Daghestanian):
"iya - a polysemous interjection, expressing incomprehension, astonishment, surprise, disagreement with the other's opinion."

I am pretty sure I heard this word in Pakistan and remember being irritated by its ambiguity. Is this a shared Persosphere thing?

Submitted version

Published version

The book was finally published by John Benjamins after 3 years, though still with some really annoying errors introduced by them (see pictures for one example)

Always glad to sign away my copyright for 3 years of waiting and then a shit product, which also has restricted access.

A good occasion for my first post on here: My article on the diachronic typology of retroflex/rhotic vowels (incl. some ideas on Khotanese phonology and Proto-Algic reconstruction) is now out in the ICHL25 proceedings.

Not OA, but I can send PDFs to anyone interested
benjamins.com/catalog/cilt...

Yeah, with original *-d- there are things like xōy < *xauda- and pāy < *pāda-, so I guess the expected reflex of -d- < *-dz- would actually also be -y-?

Maybe buland 'high' < *br̥dant- and sort of indirectly in Middle Persian an 'I' (for expected ad, maybe adapted to oblique man)

Yeah, I'll send it to you

And (a less widely accepted perspective focused more on the external relations):

Tremblay 2005 - "Bildeten die iranischen Sprachen ursprünglich eine genetische Familie oder
einen Sprachbund innerhalb des indo-iranischen Zweiges?" in "Akten der XI. Fachtagung der Indogermanischen Gesellschaft"

For Iranian as a dialect continuum, there's Korn (2019) - "Isoglosses and Subdivisions of Iranian" benjamins.com/catalog/jhl....

In this case, I followed the request of an author from the speaker community, Samiullah Tāza, who wrote the largest dictionary of the language. His justification is that Waigal is actually just the name of one village, whereas all speakers of the language call themselves Kalasha/Kalashë.

Beyond Khwarezmian I haven't found any others so far. Maybe one could unify everything under one etymon in some way, but there are some phonological difficulties with the Greek and related terms, which have led people to classify them as "Mediterranean" substrate words

Yeah, Turner's proposal must be wrong. Some have suggested a relation to Greek γάλα 'milk' but that has other proposed cognates which make the match a bit difficult. Sanskrit jalá- 'water' otoh seems too distant semantically. My latest idea was to connect Khwarezmian ⟨zr(y)k⟩ 'cream, skin on milk'.