Sāmapriyavasuḣ

Especially in Europe, but also elsewhere to an extent, I am loving seeing this resurgence of interest in mother-tongues!! :)

Onderwijs in Fries krijgt grotere rol: 'Helft Friezen spreekt het dagelijks' De taal wordt in Friesland nog altijd veel gesproken, maar onder jongeren neemt het gebruik af.

Onderwijs in Fries krijgt grotere rol: 'Helft Friezen spreekt het dagelijks' - nos.nl/l/2603301

@avzaagzonunaada.bsky.social

Creating a sign language out of everything and everywhere Mariana Martins: Creating a sign language out of everything and everywhere - An example from the deaf people of Bissau

It was a great pleasure and a honor to act as the co-supervisor for Mariana Martins’ dissertation about the emergence of a new Sign Language in Guinea Bissau, for which she received the doctorate yesterday. The book is available open-access.🧵

www.lotpublications.nl/creating-a-s...

#Burushaski
plurals

'flower(s)' asqúr-ing
'dried apricots' baȚér-ing
(*-ümü-k)

'clothes'
gaȚú : gaȚóng
(*kàȚu +(a/Q)mü-k)

'girl ~s'
dasín : dasíwanc
(*tàs.hiñü +amü-c)

Big fan of this!!

De Nederlandse ploeg praat onderling Fries Kok beleefde naast het succes op de 500 meter ook een mooi resultaat op de teamsprint. Team Nederland reed naar het goud. Opvallend was dat Team Nederland bestond uit drie Friezinnen: Femke Kok, Marr...

interview with 500m speed skating Olympic champion Femke Kok in Frisian
@avzaagzonunaada.bsky.social
www.omropfryslan.nl/nl/video/FNO...

One consequence of now having lived in “thank you” cultures for nearly a decade is that I don’t know what to do if someone does a small favor for me in India (like giving a ride home at night) as saying “thank you” is weird here. Can’t remember what I used to do before moving out of India.

... analogous to a Chittagonian speaker learning Gaudian (“standard Bengali”).

On that note, this “standard Tamaziɣt” of Morroco, what is it based on? Taclhiyt?

... whose native varieties may have only partial (if any!) intelligibility with the new standard, through modern education and media (newspapers in the early days, then , radio, TV, ...).

I have no experience with Amazigh, but I imagine for a Riffian speaker to learn “standard Tamaziɣt” must be ...

Latter, sadly, an all too familiar problem in many other parts of the world too. :( That said, I wonder how it was with European nation-building projects before, or even in India with the literary languages. In most cases, I feel, the current standards had to be imposed over “dialect” speakers, ...

... shall (both) be national languages of Balochistan.”

Don’t know why I didn’t write the whole thing.

That’s actually a very interesting framing. In some ways, recognizes the indifeneity of Amazigh languages.

Balochi version:
balōčānī zabān, balōčī u brāhūī, har dō balōčistān-ay rāǰī zabān bant.

Brahui version:
balōčātā zabānk, balōčī ō brāhūī, balōčistānnā rāǰī bōlīk marōr.

‘The languages of the Baloch, Balochi & Brahui, shall (both) be national languages.’

Now that I think of it, this sounds good if there is at least some demonstrated relation, however distant, between the two. Calling Brahui an ethno-Balochi language feels unsatisfactory.

The Balochistan independence charter, which declares Balochi and Brahui co-official has an interesting framing:

... frontier, like the rGyalrongic languages, are “ethno-Tibetan” languages because their speakers ethnically identify as Tibetans, but don’t speak a variety in the Tibetan continuum.

I call Zaza-Gorani, and usually Laki, “ethno-Kurdish” languages, in the sense that most speakers of these languages self-identify as “Kurds”, but their languages are distinct from (albeit related to) the Kurdish continuum proper.

I suppose, by analogy, several languages at the eastern Tibetan ...

How old is Buchung in German? Did they just coin it recently from booking?

Thank you, it’s from The Phonetics of Tarifit by Akfir & Zellou, released yesterday, Cambridge. Probably a typo as you say.

@maartenkossmann.bsky.social are what they call cognates truly cognates? The first one is probably good, but for ‘mistake’, the cited Tashlhiyt word is clearly from Arabic, while the corresponding Tarifit doesn’t look so (at least not the same source).

They say it in the Caucasus too. I imagine any culture that uses the terms “brother” and “sister” to mean cousins.

This mistake (corrected in the editions I have found) is due to want of an underline: waru "blackfooted wallaby" vs. waṟu "fire". The former has a tap/trilled r while the latter has a retroflex fricative r, similar to English.

I have glossed the full verse Acts 2:3 in Pitjantjatjara below:

1/4

Our project on documenting Turkic runiform inscriptions has just published its first article in Turkish, devoted to our 2024 fieldwork. A good moment to recall that season: Southern Khakassia, searching for Yenisei Turkic inscriptions at local burial grounds, and life in a wooden yurt.

What is guest-host-enemy?

I do see the phonetic appeal of this, especially the latter. But somewhat hesitant it is necessary only from the correspondences. I guess very much in line with the Indo-European laryngeal features debate. In my opinion, *T, *D, *Dʰ is good enough without invoking ejectives or implosives.

Yeah, and in my opinion, unlike the exact values of laryngeals, entirely unnecessary. What we have are correspondences:

Common Turkic r, z = Chuvashic r
Common Turkic l, ş = Chuvashic l

From there, no reason to reconstruct anything but *z and *ş (which merge with *r & *l, respectively).

At least in modern Chuvash it is a trill. But we have no historical phonetic records from the Bolğar period.

... (Turkic too) have leveled out the uvular obstruent there. Unfortunately, we don’t have good lexica for most neighboring languages (wordlists exist, but those typically don’t record specialized vocab like ‘calf’ and ‘foal’) to trace the precise pathway of loaning into Burushaski.

... Burushaski. So, Mongolic is the most likely source. Now there was never any Mongol near there either, but the word could have traveled by intermediaries. It would have to be fairly old though. The Starling Altaic database shows ⟨birağu⟩ in Written Mongolian, but most later Mongolic languages ...