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kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

an unrelated question i have is why the spirantization situation for perfect verbs, as Thackston gives it, apparently differs from this paradigm in Greenspahn's Intro to Aramaic.

specifically: why does the 3rd radical ב not have dagesh lene in 1cs kiθveθ & 3fs kiθvaθ?

cf. Syriac keθ/b/eθ, keθ/b/aθ

perfect verb paradigm from Greenspahn's Biblical Aramaic showing forms like 1cs kith-veth "i wrote" with no dagesh lenes in the last three consonants

November 7, 2025 at 3:47 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

taking Thackston's description of Syriac stress at face value, the 2mp & 2fp perfects are stressed differently:

masc. /kə-ˈθav-ton/ vs. fem. /kə-θav-ˈteːn/

is this correct? and/or do the main Syriac traditions abide by this?

why does f. *-tina yield long /eː/ but m. *-tunu yields short /o/?

Stress may fall on any of the final three syllables in a word.
(1) Ultimate stress. Any final syllable (ultima) that is closed and
contains a long vowel is stressed, as in hakkim (hak-kim'), nebnon

(neb-non), bdneyn (bd-neyn), saddarndk (sad-dar-ndk'), bndt (bd-
ndf), hzayt (hd-zayf), qatluh (qat-luh'), sappirdn (sap-pi-rdn).

(2) Penultimate stress. If the final syllable is not stressed, then
the next to last syllable (penultima) receives stress if it contains a
long vowel or is closed, e.g., malkd (mal'-kd), bdne (bd'-ne), emret
(em'-ret), qatleh (qaf-leh), qtalton (qd-taV-ton), attat (at'-tat).
(3) Antepenultimate stress. If the criteria set forth in (1) and (2)
above are not met, then stress recedes to the syllable before the
penultimate, the antepenultimate, e.g., madbra (mxid'-bd-rd), atttd
(at'-t9-td), malktd (mal'-ka-td), etqtel (et'-q9-tel).
In no instance may an open syllable with a short vowel be

stressed. In such a situation stress falls forward to the next stress-
able syllable, as emar (e-mar'), hzd (hd-zd'), end (e-nd'), qtal (qd-
taV).

§ 2.1 The Perfect: Full Inflection. Following is the full inflection
of the perfect. The masculine-feminine distinction is maintained in
both the second and third persons; the first persons are of common
gender. Because the third-person masculine singular form is the
basic lexical form of the verb, all paradigms begin with that form, in
accord with general Semitic usage.

SINGULAR PLURAL
3m ktab ktab or
ktabun
f ketbat ktab or
ktaben
2m ktabt ktabton
f ktabt ktabten
I c ischium ketbet ktabn or
ktabnan

November 7, 2025 at 2:52 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

i wanted to know where the word 'solecism' came from and stumbled upon some ancient sociolinguistics

from sóloikos, “speaking incorrectly”, from Σόλοι (Sóloi), an ancient Athenian colony in Cilicia whose inhabitants spoke a dialect regarded by Athenians as a corrupted and barbarous form of Attic Greek. Compare Atticism.

November 3, 2025 at 6:11 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

this guy (Salimbene di Adam)'s father is trying to get his son to quit the monastery and refers to the other monks there as "pissintunici", tunic-pissers 😭

Dixit igitur mihi pater meus: "Fili dilecte, non credas istis pissintunicis (id est qui in tunicis mingunt) qui te deceperunt, sed veni mecum et omnia mea tibi dabo."

October 27, 2025 at 1:50 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

into my veins

We need whole texts-novels, plays, or poems-to care about literature. Teachers are doomed to fail to inspire most students if they must teach deracinated skills for how to decode isolated excerpts apparently deposited from some timeless Olympus where the writing gods live. It's crucial to
"To be or not to be" that it's in Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet, and that Hamlet was written around 1600, and that Shakespeare was a guy, a wildly successful popular entertainer, himself drawing from loads of other texts, in conversation with fellow playwrights, dealing with his culture's religious turmoil, and that Hamlet has been mourning his father, has fallen out with Ophelia, and is being spied upon by his friends. The point-one point, a point that matters for soliciting students to care-is that literature is made by people like us, people responding to other people, fighting fights, living lives in their time, like we are, and that we can enter the worlds they offer us, too. Excerpts pluck literature from its home in history, and prevent us from making homes for ourselves in books.

October 24, 2025 at 5:08 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

i like to use this example. yeah i can't imagine it's an easy job

an english sentence crossreferenced with the order of the same sentence in french (order mostly the same) german (some different) and turkish (basically inverted)

From turkishlearning community on Reddit
French:
rai-s essese un costume que j 'ai ysa dans un magasin en face de notre höte!
nearly parallel order of
morphemes and concepts
English:
d like to try on å sutl
e see-n in a'shop across the street from our hotel.
German:
sprobier-on, dan ichin eina Gechalte
nearly parallel order (except for verb in local clause)
Enslish:
l'd like to try on a suit I've see-n in a shop across the street from our hotel.
Jurkisb:
Orel-imiz-in kargı-sın-da-ki dükkin-da gör-düğ-i,bir elbise-ui dene-uck iste-r.
inverse order of
morphemes and concepts
English:
I'd like to fry on a suit 've see-n in a shop across the street ]rom our hote

October 22, 2025 at 3:21 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

disgustingly excited about this new acquisition

a primer of medieval Latin an anthology of prose and poetry
by Charles H. Beeson

October 22, 2025 at 2:58 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

got some random wine yesterday that they were featuring at the local place and i was tickled that they had a little Phoenician 𐤁 /b/ on there

"Beirut" is from Phoenician 𐤁𐤓𐤕 bērūt, from the plural of *biʔr "well"

photo of a bottle of cabernet called ana beirut

October 17, 2025 at 1:14 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

acoenonoëtus (< ἀ-κοινο-νόητος) "without common-sense"

acoenonoetus, i, m (from greek) without common-sense, Iu.

October 16, 2025 at 7:14 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

mildly interesting

Shaving seems to have not been known to the Romans during their early history (under the kings of Rome and the early Republic). Pliny tells us that P. Ticinius was the first who brought a barber to Rome, which was in the 454th year from the founding of the city (that is, around 299 BCE). Scipio Africanus (236–183 BCE) was apparently the first among the Romans who shaved his beard. However, after that point, shaving seems to have caught on very quickly, and soon almost all Roman men were clean-shaven; being clean-shaven became a sign of being Roman and not Greek. Only in the later times of the Republic did the Roman youth begin shaving their beards only partially, trimming it into an ornamental form; prepubescent boys oiled their chins in hopes of forcing premature growth of a beard.

October 16, 2025 at 2:06 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

huh yep looks like this is indeed the Pi'el participle of the "forget" verb

Entry
Discussion Citations
XA
^ Hebrew
i
i
Etymology
According to Genesis 41:51 from the present participle of n! / n' (nish, "to cause to forget"), as the wealth and prosperity that Joseph had acquired in Egypt had caused him to forget his father's family. Apparently also attested in Akkadian as IF <7 IE= (Menasî).

October 10, 2025 at 1:15 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

i saw this in the bio of Zeno of Citium and thought it was interesting. i wonder what exactly the Phoenician reading would be (a participle with m- plus some form of [nsy] i guess)

His father, Mnaseas, had a name ambiguously meaningful both in Phoenician ("one causing to forget") and in Greek ("mindful"). footnote 14: Magill, Frank N. (2003). The Ancient World: Dictionary of World Biography. Vol. 1. Routledge. p. 1273.

October 10, 2025 at 12:12 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

this is a cool thing that German does that i don't think there is an English equivalent for.

if somebody says "what?" to your question, you restate the question but as *indirect* not direct.

in German this means the sentence is put into subordinate clause syntax (verb at the end)

October 9, 2025 at 2:48 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

i'm seeing the name Shruti spelled శృతి <śṛti> wh makes sense i guess bc Sanskrit ṛ is usually pronounced /ru/ in Telugu ("Krushna", etc). is this spelling a hypercorrection though? the name is actually Śruti in Skt, from śru- "listen". do ppl also spell it శ్రుతి <śruti>? is one considered more correct?

beginning of a telugu story with image of a little girl and an older lady (her mom? grandma? i haven't read far enough to know)

October 4, 2025 at 5:24 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

i like the fake devanagari on this sign 1. for the obvious reason, that इ is an actual character, but also 2. because it looks like they are using the IPA symbol for retroflex /ʈ/ here

a vertical sign in fake devanagari reading Chutneys.

October 1, 2025 at 2:37 AM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

it feels obvious to me that these lines from Sleeping Beauty were intended to rhyme (with "her" as an /h/-less clitic sung nonrhotically; "adore 'a") so it's interesting to me that the singers actually say [hɜ˞] in the recorded version making it not rhyme

September 23, 2025 at 4:46 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

psychroluta, a great Greco-Latin word for somebody who takes cold baths/showers (from ψυχρός "cold" + λούομαι "bathe")

wuXpo-NoúTns, ou, o,
A.bather in cold water, Lat. psychroluta Seneca Ep.53.3.

September 22, 2025 at 9:51 PM

kobayashi ḫamṭu

@mattboot.bsky.social

"There's only one way to effectively fight against a dominant language: to take an 'atheist' position and thus to not *believe* in the prestige of that language, to be convinced of the total arbitrariness of its domination and authority."