Gopalakrishnan R

The semantics of it may have changed but the etymon *bayt itself is pretty solidly PSemitic, no?

Aha, I see. Thanks!

Now that I think about it, the English word 'hell' itself probably underwent something similar, as the older polytheist understanding of an underworld was replaced by the Christian one.

Černy says ⲁⲙⲛⲧⲉ 'hell' comes from ı ͗mntt 'the west'. How true is that, and how might 'west' have come to be used in the sense of the Christian hell?

The real linguistics is the fun with words we have along the way

Shit, I meant to say: when 2nd syllable begins with an apical consonant, the vowel in the first syllable is deleted and you get either a word-initial cluster or a word-initial apical, neither of which existed before. E.g.:

*uɻu > Telugu d̪unnu 'to plough' (< *ɖunnu), Konda ɽū, cf. Old Kannada uɻ-.

I have a historical linguistics question:

Are parallel independent developments ever accounted for by *inherited* shared tendencies, apart from typology?

e.g. I've seen it alleged (popularly) that *Semitic* languages specifically tend to have sonorant alternations: m~n~l~r

Someone who's more on the P-side should totally look into "apical displacement" properly, but we'd need more fieldwork data on this subgroup, all lgs in it except Telugu are marginalised.

This paper has more info — doi.org/10.1093/oso/...

"apical displacement", where if a word had a light 1st syllable & a heavy 2nd syllable (so stress pulled to 2nd syllable), and 2nd syllable begins with an apical consonant, but what counted as "apical" seems to have varied. Images from Krishnamurti (2003), The Dravidian Languages, pg. 157-158

Oh yeah, during this year's V-NYI, @anghyflawn.net talked about Salvic languages potentially having inherited a phonetic tendency to palatalise (from Proto-Slavic?), and morphologising the palatalisation in different ways.

In South-Central Dravidian, there is a phonemenon called ...

"offers a new perspective on the evolution of pragmatic markers in language contact and grammaticalization, drawing on data-driven and diachronic studies of Chinese compounds"

This is really fucking cool. I'll be waiting for when it gets uploaded on the usual suspects.

What's the semantic difference between the two? I'm interested in that you translate them with get and be passives

"bUt ThE GrEaT EsKiMo VoCaBuLaRy HoAx!"

book cover

Just published "Locative and existential predication: On forms, functions and neighboring domains" edited by Chris Lasse Däbritz, Josefina Budzisch & Rodolfo Basile #openaccess #rcg langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

The absolute perfect background would be a night sky where the arrangement of the stars exactly aligns with the vowels on the chart.

we got grammar of japhug 2 announcement before gta 6

Thanks for clarifying, I was wondering this

Which would make us write “the analogy of the singular form on basis of the plural mirrors the well-established collectivist nature of western Pennsylvanian culture, where you:SG is much less important that you:PL”

Alas…

The rise and fall of prohibitive ʕan When I was writing my dissertation I learned of Zanzibari Arabic, a relatively obscure and oft-overlooked variety of Arabic. Arabic came to the Zanzibar archipelago by way of migrants from Oman and…

By @koutchoukalimar.bsky.social

Fundamentals in Informed Elicitation and Language Documentation (FIELD) 47th International Conference of the Linguistic Society of India

Sign up for this pre-conference workshop - Fundamentals in Informed Elicitation and Language Documentation to be held before the 47th International Conference of the Linguistic Society of India. Date: 11th November. Last date for registration: 30th September 2025. Details: icolsi47.github.io/field/

Poster by Dialect Exchange 方言广场, with an anatomical diagram of a pig's digestive system. Text on the poster: DID YOU KNOW? Pig's intestines (豬腸) in TEOCHEW is called (豬番) "de¹ huang¹" DE¹ HUANG¹ While "intestines" itself is called 腸 in TEOCHEW, only the word 番 "huang¹" is used for "pig's intestine" because 腸 "deng⁵" happens to rhyme with 唐 "deng⁵" (Chinese people) in TEOCHEW, so 番 (Barbarians) is substituted as 豬番 for 豬腸

Cool post I stumbled upon explaining why 豬腸 became 豬番 in Teochew... but it just irks me a bit when people say things "rhyme" when they are *homophones*... They're technically not wrong but what about the maxim of quantity 🤓

SIL talk: Jenneke van der Wal Speaker: Jenneke van der Wal Title: Mapping Linguistic Epistemicity Date/Time: 25 September, 4pm Place: Trans 10, room 0.19 / MS Teams Abstract It is a well-observed crosslinguistic fact that markers ...

In Utrecht to give a talk on the MapLE project

utl.sites.uu.nl/2025/09/15/s...

This conversation with my son was like something in a semantics textbook.

me: Do you like the Mexican rice I made?
A: It's not very good.
me: Oh, why not?
A: It's not *very* good, but it is *good*.
me: ... Okay. If I serve you some, will you eat a bit?
A: No! I will eat *all* of it.

My fascinating fact of the day #2:
Cantonese has 3 sentence-final particles regarding the speaker and addressee’s knowledge, as Sze-Wing Tang analyses in (2015).

Lo1 (the 1 refers to the tone level) is a kind of ‘duh!’:
Keoi wui heoi lo1.
he will go duh
‘He (obviously) will go (needless to say).’

seal in devanagari characters

I'm guessing this is the seal of an Indian library of the 18th or 19th century, looking at other images online. It seems to read 'mortaba' in the centre, though i don't know what that means... anyone out among you able to help?

It's something like /kanːaɖa/ [ˈkɐnːɐɽä]

Please boost! #linguistics student here at Swarthmore is running a survey for English speakers (who don't know Mandarin / any other tone languages) about how we learn tones. Take a few minutes to help out with this student research!
swarthmore.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

No, I've never come across either. Both are definitely borrowings from other Drav languages.

How can you be sure that's not a catplant? Have you checked that kitties don't grow like plants?

Same for 'beard' in Dravidian — dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/...

Supposed Tamil 'kaṭṭam' doesn't exist except in one early 2nd millennium lexicon and is clearly a borrowing.

Do we finally know what this part of the Ancient Egyptian royal titulary means...? 🤔

I'll be sharing some hunches as part of my talk at the 48th North Atlantic Conference on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, 9/27 at Ohio State!

As far as I know, this idea is NEW.

#Egyptology
#AncientBlueSky
#Linguistics