quietstuff.bsky.social
@quietstuff.bsky.social
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i made a crossword this year 🫡 i don't think it's solvable but it should be fun
semitic linguistics bonanza
root of "name" in arabic; god of the hebrew bible and all that; daughter 🦇; roman jewish guy that proposed a bunch of nations descended from 35 down; farming thing with a bajillion names. baydar, ʔand...
crosshare.org
Reposted
Dam Shrimp
November 10, 2025 at 8:12 AM
respectful, euphemistic terms of address from tripoli 1954 (altho due to the subject matter probably found across lebanon)

ḥåḍərtak حضْرتك, "your presence": to anyone
janǟbak جنابك, "your sides (kinda)/vicinity?": to anyone
saɛå̄ttak سعادتك, "your happiness": to a bey, pasha, or high-ranking official
November 10, 2025 at 4:54 AM
the word اللي lli, usually a relativizer (الزلمة اللي هون l-zalame lli hōn "the man that's here"), has a weird alternate usage: منيح اللي جيت mnīḥ lli jīt "good that you came"

i was proud of the og idea in the 2nd pic - BUT what prob actually happened (3rd pic) is so cool

(forgive clunky writing!)
November 9, 2025 at 9:21 PM
if u reduce someone's workload you are literally "cutting out" part of that workload for them how am i supposed to understand the passive voice as the exact opposite 😭
i still understand "has their work cut out for them" as the opposite of what it's supposed to mean and i don't think i'm ever going to be able to get it right
November 9, 2025 at 2:11 AM
tried to get some work done on the bus and got completely sniped by two ppl sitting somewhere behind me speaking a language that i swear has ʕ and õ# that i can't pick up on anything else from
November 8, 2025 at 11:55 PM
there's a sort of r-like, *maybe* retroflex pronunciation of d found throughout south lebanon, you can hear it in the vid in the last post

anecdotally i think i've heard it (+ for other voiced coronals) from east leb too

to that point here are fleisch's 1946 notes on zahle… what is dâl niṭʿiyya?
November 8, 2025 at 7:59 PM
writers block but i literally just need to finish annotating a paragraph i don't even need to come up with any ideas
November 8, 2025 at 4:43 AM
here i will yap abt خِتْيَار xityār, خِتْيَارة xityāra, عَجُوز ʕajūz, and عَجُوزِة ʕajūze

1) the most common levantine word for 'old man' is خِتْيَار xityār

it's a resolution of the weird onset of some form like *خْتْيَار *xtyār, from *خْتِيَار *xtiyār, the form that underlies the arabic word اِخْتِيَار ixtiyār 'choice'
November 8, 2025 at 4:30 AM
i read el-hajjé 1954 le parler arabe du tripoli liban (left) first and had insane deja vu the instant i saw nakhla 1937 grammaire du dialecte libano-syrien (right)

el-hajjé does have nakhla in his bibliography so i guess he used him as a guide for this part kinda, the rest of the chapter diverges
November 8, 2025 at 3:18 AM
November 7, 2025 at 11:05 PM
Reposted
#Incredible ! There is good evidence that Greek literacy was relatively widespread among the ancient Arabs east of Ḥawrān. Here, our #Safaitic author partially writes out the Safaitic letters in the Greek order, omitting vowels!

Find more on #OCIANA: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions...
November 5, 2025 at 8:51 AM
quick map of what's on record for lebanon

does not include survey results (eg from fleisch's inquests or bergstraesser's atlas), nor the one grotzfeld paper with fun facts on bludan & stuff, nor a collection of fleisch recordings i just found (next post). also saida has no materials idk why green
November 5, 2025 at 8:13 AM
"and they held a funeral and afterwards they took him to the cemetery and buried him, god have mercy on his soul... he died an awful death, butros"
...
"as for the question of how 3rd-weak verbs conjugate in the perfective, the dialect of hammana has adopted an original solution,"
November 4, 2025 at 7:55 PM
just drew the connection between gemination and gemini. brain expanded. perhaps even doubled
November 3, 2025 at 8:44 PM
neat diminutive: mṣayra, ⟨mṣai̯ra⟩ (i would've thought mṣayriyye/⟨mṣai̯riyye⟩, but this might be forced by the rhyme)

for that matter, neat original singular i didn't know was used: məṣriyye 'a coin'
November 2, 2025 at 8:34 PM
aura from a fun tv program where the guy on the right tells folk stories
November 2, 2025 at 6:50 AM
Reposted
Excellent Shami accent too all things considered. The popular joke on Twitter already is that he speaks it better than King Abdullah
November 1, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted
I think this Egyptian speaker has pausal glottalization of -VC to -VʔC#, it can be heard in ṭamāṭeʔm# baṭāṭeʔs# ʔalwāʔn# lamūʔn# tōʔm# semseʔm# ħelwīʔn# (I hear it clearer in some than in others). This occurrence is also mentioned for western Syria on map N. 67 of Behnstedt's Sprachatlas von Syrien.
November 1, 2025 at 8:02 PM
does this levantine "hal-" fit into this hierarchy or is it some discourse thing that's unrelated? (well except maybe if a noun needs to be at a specific level before u can opt to add hal-?)

afaict it's used only when narrating and its purpose is/

(…also insane attestation of ياباني of all words)
October 31, 2025 at 9:35 PM
first-draft mumbo-jumbo that can and will be mercilessly deworded but some thoughts about trust
October 30, 2025 at 7:31 AM
alright now that ive gotten this out of my system this paper, Henry Huxley (1902) Syrian Songs, Proverbs, and Stories, is actually su -- okay no there's one more
October 28, 2025 at 10:26 PM
oh just reading about semen dripping down a man's beard what's up
October 28, 2025 at 10:21 PM
the actual conjugation of this verb "to touch"*:

huwwe saṭaʕ
hiyye saṭaʕet
henne saṭaʕo
...
ʔenta sṭoʕᵉt
ʔente sṭoʕte
ʔento sṭoʕto
ʔana sṭoʕᵉt
neḥna sṭoʕna

(* usually npi as in like "don't touch" whereas otherwise "to touch" is daʔar b)
(the impfv is more boring it's just always -osṭaʕ-)
October 28, 2025 at 8:58 AM
i wish there was a monograph titled "the arabic dialect of salam al-rassi". there's a good 18 hours of video from his tv shows uploaded to the youtube channel salamalrassi (let's say that's 10+ hours of just his own speech, prob much more). probably the only archive of a traditional hasbayya dialect
October 26, 2025 at 6:52 PM
this came up on my reddit feed. fucking fascinated by how dated it already is. not a single 6 7 or 6 1
October 26, 2025 at 5:10 AM