Hava Bas-Idis
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havabasidis.bsky.social
Hava Bas-Idis
@havabasidis.bsky.social
550 followers 400 following 810 posts
/ˈχɑvʌ bɑˈsɪdɪs/. she/her 🏳️‍⚧️. TESOL by day; by night, Afroasiatic languages, the Pleistocene-Holecene transition in Africa and the "ANE", and the complex relationships between linguistic academia, indigenous rights, and empire. Member of the SIL hate club.
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havabasidis.bsky.social
Very smart people ask me for my opinion about problems and then I give my opinion about the problem and they nod and say "That was a good opinion" and modify the project accordingly because these people who are all smarter than me value my input? And I pay my rent with this?
The Pokemon Totodile, a small, adorable blue-and-red creature resembling a baby alligator, dances joyously in a green forest, mouth agape in delight and little arms wiggling gleefully in the air.
September 17, 2025 at 5:52 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Okay so this is very much a personal bugaboo. tl;dr I'm not fond of 1) the final canonization of halachah and 2) the death of Judaism's mythological heart. I toyed around with applying to rabbinical school, and still might, on the basis of wanting to re-introduce Zohar studies to liberal Judaism.
Notes app screenshot: "I'm not bothered so much Maimonides himself, in truth, as the manner in which his philosophy & legal opinions became "canonized" by his intellectual successors, admittedly a very slow process. In legal terms, the Mishneh Torah marked the beginning of the final crystallization of halachah, something I (a Reconstructionist) feel should never be finalized. But my big problem with him is the very project of "rationalistic Judaism" itself, of which Maimonides has the misfortune of being the mascot. I just can't intellectually countenance trying to turn the Sages into Aristoteleans; the fundamental premise of his whole endeavor is just flatly, demonstrably false. But more importantly to me, I mourn the loss of the divine multiplicity, anthropomorphism, personality, imminence, and mythological richness that leaps from the pages of the Tanakh and Midrash. No more angels, demons, great serpents, magic, divination--all the" Notes app screenshot: "color and vibrance of tradition turned into an intellectual embarrassment to be hidden and explained away. Maimonides is humiliated and ashamed of the very traditions that I'm most inclined to cherish, and his intellectual inheritors largely succeeded in extirpating them from the rationalistic mainstream. Even the Kabbalah, which to me exhibits far more contunuity with tradition in terms of its spiritual modality, has been covered up and sequestered by the embarrassments of Sabbateanism. Even reading through the works of say Aryeh Kaplan z"l, you can feel the attempts to 'modernize', 'rationalize', 'intellectualize' the Kabbalah draining away its mythic vitality through appeals to Maimonides."
March 24, 2025 at 12:01 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Brian's mother from Monty Python's "Life of Brian", wagging her finger out of a window and saying, "He's not the תנ״ך [Hebrew Bible] - he's a very naughty boy!"
February 10, 2025 at 4:27 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Shame!
Dark blue cover of a book, titled in bold letters: "Rahlfs-Hanhart Septuaginta, Editio altera". A pale finger is pointing at it in consternation.
February 10, 2025 at 4:21 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Coptic
Meme of Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec ordering food at a restaurant. The words 'bacon and eggs' have been replaced with 'clitics'. First box: "Just give me all the clitics you have." Second box: "Wait, wait. I worry what you just heard was, 'Give me a lot of clitics.'" Third box: "What I said was, 'Give me all the clitics you have.' Do you understand?"
January 9, 2025 at 8:07 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
I have arrived at the section on prepositions and adverbs
Charlie Day from It's Always Sunny standing in front of a cork board, holding a cigarette with a crazed look in his eyes. The board is covered in thumbtacks and pieces of paper, with red string connecting them in a grand conspiracy. "PEPE SILVIA" is written in the center.
January 3, 2025 at 9:31 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Without downloading any new pics what's your energy going into 2025
A bearded old man wearing a black cape and a conical iron helmet looks forlornly over a cliff into a verdant green valley. The scene appears like a medieval fantasy setting. There is texting overlaying the image saying: "So when a crow recognizes patterns, it's "intelligent" and "really cool" but when I do it I'm "delusional" and "at odds with what is considered standard methodology in mainstream historical linguistics."
December 28, 2024 at 4:28 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Pluractionality in Egyptian morphology!! One verb form is morphologically "perfective" (mry nswt 'whom the king loves'), the other is morphologically "imperfective" (mrrw njwt.f 'whom his town loves'), with the pluractional marked by reduplication (mr-y vs. mr-r-w). Reminds me of Chadic 👀
When the two forms are used with reference to the same tense, however, the perfective denotes a single action and the imperfective describes repeated or ongoing actions. A good example of this contrast can be seen in a common set of relative clauses used to describe someone as an individual whom people “love” (mrj) or “bless” (ḥzj): for example, mry nswt mrrw njwt.f ḥzzw nt̠rw.s nbw (Bersheh I, pl. 15) "one whom the king loves, whom his town loves, and whom all its gods bless" The perfective relative is used in the first clause and the imperfective in the next two clauses not because they express a difference in tense but because of the subjects they have. The perfective mry is used with the singular subject nswt “the king” because it is thought of as a single instance of “loving.”With the collective subject njwt.f “his town” and the plural subject nt̠rw.s nbw “all its (the town’s) gods,” however, the imperfectives mrrw and ḥzzw are used because these subjects refer to more than one actor and therefore more than one instance of “loving” and “blessing.”
December 27, 2024 at 5:43 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
How I feel rn stuyding Middle Egyptian sytnax
Cartoon drawing of a figuring lying on the ground, surrounded by a pool of blue tears.
December 26, 2024 at 7:06 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
A staple of visiting my family for the holidays is the infamous Wall of Vegemite.
A wall-mounted set of wooden shelves, covered in no less than 20 yellow and red jars of vegemite. I'm the center is a wooden plaque reading "VEGEMITE" in capital letters. On the bottom shelf are an assortment of Christmas decorations.
December 25, 2024 at 5:49 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
How do you make a sign hover in the middle of a square in JSesh? I want to move the second 𓈇 and the 𓆑 to the middle, rather than having them lying at the base of the square
Egyptian hieroglyphs reading: "All the southern and northern countries are under his feet."
December 16, 2024 at 3:23 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Practicing some common determinatives. You can tell that drawing little humans is not my strong suit.
Grid paper with hand-drawn hieroglyphs in pencil. It includes several silhoutted outlines of human figures in various states of activity, such as kneeling, rejoicing, carrying, sitting. Also includes several body parts, such as ears, tusks, arms, eyes, eyelashes, and a discharging phallus. Hand-drawn hieroglyphs, as before. This page includes several animals, such as cattle, fish, birds, and an enigmatic animal resembling an arrow-tailed greyhound associated with the god Seth. Also depicted are a sail, a star, an oil-lamp, and several geometric shapes representing buildings and natural features. This page includes boats, various pots, ropes, papyrus scrolls, and some simple strokes.
December 14, 2024 at 4:39 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Cursive hieroglyph practice with some uniliterals, biliterals
Grid paper with handdrawn hieroglyphs in pencil, beneath each one is the corresponding phonetic value. Among them are a number of birds, animals, plants, body parts, and vessels. Grid paper with handdrawn hieroglyphs in pencil, beneath each one is the corresponding phonetic value. Among them are a number of birds, animals, plants, body parts, and vessels.
December 13, 2024 at 5:28 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
The declension of the Icelandic word banani, "banana". Definite dative plural: bönununum.
Declensions of the Icelandic noun banani. Indefinite singular: nominative banani oblique banana Definite singular: nominative bananinn dative banananum accusative bananann genitive bananans Indefinite plural: nominative bananar dative: banönum/bönunum accusarive banana genitive: banana Definite plural: nominative bananarnir dative banönunum/bönununum accusative bananana genitive banananna
December 13, 2024 at 12:46 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Jább! They sure do.
December 13, 2024 at 12:37 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
More bird practice. My quail chick continues to look doofy
Drawings in blue marker on a whiteboard. There are 10 different hieroglyphic birds: an Egyptian vulture, a quail chick, an owl, a long-legged buzzard, a falcon, a vulture, a guineafowl, a hoopoe, a lapwing, and a lapwing taking flight. They are all viewd in profile, facing the left.
December 11, 2024 at 6:02 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Bird practice: 𓅓, the owl
Alternating rows of hand drawn hieroglyphic owls, in left and right orientation, and both in silhouette and with details filled in for the wings, beak, and eyes. The owls have their heads turned to directly face the viewer, unlike the other bird hieroglyphs.
December 10, 2024 at 11:42 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Bird practice: 𓅱, the quail chick (this one is deceptively hard to do consistently)
Much like the first image, contains a number of small baby birds resembling ducklings. These are quail chicks.
December 10, 2024 at 11:00 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Bird practice: 𓄿, the Egyptian vulture
Grid paper containing repeating rows of hand-drawn Egyptian vultures, in the style of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. They are drawn in profile, some facing left and others right. Some are drawn as silhouettes, others have details for the eyes and wings.
December 10, 2024 at 10:47 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
(The original)
Post from Tumblr user "reallyreallyreallytrying": "average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
December 9, 2024 at 6:53 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Hadn't realized that 𓃹𓈖𓈖 <wnn> (be, exist) is supposed to have derived from earlier semantics "move, run". What other languages attest this type of semantic change? Verb of motion > copula/verb of existence?
"107. To express existence, whether absolute or as relative to some situation, i.e. presence, the verb 𓃹𓈖𓈖 wnn 'exist', 'be' (perhaps originally 'move', 'run') is used."
December 9, 2024 at 5:13 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Gardiner calling out his peers for their "specially barbarous transcription" of the pharaonic name ḏḥwty-ms.
"...guessed transcriptions in Appendix B at the end of this book. Here we need only warn the student against one specially barbarous transcription of a royal name ; Thothmes is still used for the Manethonian Tuthmosis by many Egyptologists who ought to know better."
December 8, 2024 at 9:49 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
If you were visited by three ghosts for christmas who would you want them to be? (Hanukkah and Christmas fall on the same day this year, so it works)
A Kabbalistic amulet (kame'a) for warding away the demonness Lilit. It features an assortment of cryptographic Hebrew characters. In red are printed three inscrutable figures, the angels Senoy, Sansenoy, and Semangelaf, the angels who chased Lilit out of the Garden of Eden. Senoy is a single wing hovering above a pedestal. Sansenoy is a single eye upon an archway, above three blocks, with a pair of geometric wings on either side. Semangelof is a single eye hovering atop a strange body made of eight flowing tendrils, four on each side.
December 8, 2024 at 6:47 PM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Gardiner, my dude, was this example sentence reaaaaally necessary?

<ḏd s gr st> - "When a man speaks, a woman is silent."
Screenshot containing a line of Egyptian hieroglyphs.
December 6, 2024 at 5:36 AM
havabasidis.bsky.social
Looking back through Gardiner...This text that Gardiner in 1957 had lamented as a casualty of WWII has actually been digitized on archive.org! :")
archive.org/details/aegy...
"Until quite recently another urgent need was a handy selection of passages for study, since K. Sethe's widely used Ägyptische Lesestücke (Texte des Mittleren Reiches, 1924) is no longer available and is likely to have been a war-casualty. The place of this work has, however, now been taken by A. de Buck's Egyptian Readingbook, vol. I (Leyden, 1940).
December 5, 2024 at 8:58 PM