яཀོب 半男
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bitmalang.bsky.social
яཀོب 半男
@bitmalang.bsky.social
Mostly historical linguistics.
An exciting new article from Nicholas Sims-Williams, that proves - in my opinion - that the language of the Issyk-Kushan or "unknown" script is Bactrian after all!

brill.com/view/journal...
brill.com
November 6, 2025 at 2:44 PM
Just published: a small etymological note on New Persian "malang" - probably a loanword from Bactrian

journals.ysu.am/index.php/JI...
On the etymology of New Persian malang ‘intoxicated; unorthodox dervish’ | Journal of Iranian Linguistics
Aslanov, M. G. (1966), Afgansko-Russkij Slovar’ (Puštu), Moscow: Sovetskaja Ėnciklopedija.
journals.ysu.am
July 31, 2025 at 8:37 AM
Reposted by яཀོب 半男
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…
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.
www.biblioiranica.info
July 3, 2025 at 10:06 AM
Reposted by яཀོب 半男
Open access: “A grammar of Khowar” by Elena Bashir (June ’25) uclpress.co.uk/book/a-gramm...
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...
uclpress.co.uk
July 1, 2025 at 5:03 AM
Cognate to Low German place names in -hude, like Buxtehude, Hamburg-Winterhude or Hude near Oldenburg!
Just passed by Queenhithe – an unassuming but ancient bit of London, being a landing place on the Thames that dates back at least to Saxon times.

A 'hithe' is a dock or port, also present in place-names like 'Chelsea' (from Ċealchȳþ, the 'chalk-dock').
June 29, 2025 at 1:38 AM
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-).
May 5, 2025 at 11:30 PM
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?
April 14, 2025 at 10:04 PM
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...
The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels
This paper presents the results of a study on the possible diachronic pathways that lead to so-called rhotic or retroflex vowels. Based on a historical-comparative examination of several unrelated are...
benjamins.com
April 10, 2025 at 10:47 AM