Α. Ζ. Foreman: Serious Philology, Silly Вehavior

Chuck Norris didn’t die. Death simply got Chuck Norris’d

War bad That’s all

I dare you to read a book

Most sensical versions of this idea involve people discovering the remains of other kinds of creatures (not necessarily dinosaurs) and creating explanations based on single bones (often the skull) for legendary beasts. But the dragon/dinosaur similarity doesn’t come into it. If you find dinosaur bones you still don’t know what one looks like unless you have enough of a single animal to put together and form an idea of its shape. And that does not happen before the 19th century.

@Mindpron @maxtmcc There’s some theories that this common mythology came to be from ancient people discovering dinosaur bones! I find that to be really likely and interesting. I wish dragons were real, but we haven’t found any fossils or credible evidence. I bet dinosaurs are the closest thing.

one fact that I feel like has really not penetrated the public consciousness to the extent that it should is “birds are dinosaurs.” and not in like a “they are distant descendants” way, in a “dinosaurs did not go extinct” way

@DECollinsTweets @IhabHassane I speak Arabic and I can tell you yes he is saying this and Ihab’s summary is not misleading.

@IhabHassane I don't want to be cynical, but did he also say this in English so we can hear his words of solidarity and support? But if he DID say/feel this, then this is the ONLY episode of support from Muslims.

Shia Muslim Lebanese Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, condemned the terrorist attack on the synagogue, renounced the attacker, connected with Jewish leaders, and expressed solidarity and support for the Jewish community.

Fun fact: In modern standard Russian the name of the Hebrew language (*especially* modern Hebrew) is actually “Ivrit” and has almost completely displaced the inherited term in that sense. There was a real shift over the course of the 20th century and by the 70s the term “Ivrit” was fully normalized. Funny story of why that is. Over the course of the 19th century, the historical adjective for “Hebrew” (yevreyskiy) took on the meaning of “Jewish” b/c the historical noun for “a Hebrew” (yevrey) came to mean “Jew.” Or rather, those are now the respectful terms. The original historical Slavic word for “Jew” became a wildly antisemitic slur in Russian, nastier than any antisemitic slur in English. (The angriest my mother ever got with me in my life was probably the time she caught me using this word as a kid. I had just heard it being used by some guys at church and thought it was a synonym for “yevrey” and didn’t know it was a bad word.) The closest analogue in English is probably the n-word, in that I feel weird even typing the word out. Anywho, the result is that “yevreyskiy yazyk” came to mean “Jewish language” and was very commonly used to refer to *Yiddish* well into the 70s. This situation could cause all kinds of amusing but understandable weirdness at a certain point in time before the naturalization of “Ivrit” as the Russian name of the language. Elisheva Bikhovsky (b. 1888, née Elizaveta Zhirkova), one of the few non-Jews of the period to become a major Hebrew-language author, at one point actually thought that Yiddish and Hebrew were literally the same language and that “Jews just speak Jewish” (before she actually started learning both of these languages once she became very close with Jewish friends) in part for precisely this reason. You *can* still use “yevreyskiy yazyk” to refer to the language and be understood but it is mostly found in historical contexts and is dispreferred. I think I have met one really old dude in my life who ever used it casually in that sense in the wild. Biblical Hebrew specifically though can sometimes still be “drevneyevreyskiy yazyk” though Hebraists more recently have preferred “bibleyskiy ivrit”. (There was even a time during the Soviet Union where you could have “yevreyskiy yazyk” referring to Yiddish and “Drevneyevreyskiy yazyk” referring to the language of the Bible. Which, while not genuinely ambiguous, still feels all kinds of insane.

@TrueStoneCold @MaloneySuzanne No one calls it Ivrit or Francais for a reason. And this conflation is harmful for reasons many have explained before

It’s called Persian not “Farsi”. Never use that term

@ait_kisou @cobbaltt See also: the names of Russia, France, Azerbaijan, Belgium

@cobbaltt Not really “stole their name” I would say. The name of the piece of land and its inhabitants remained the same and the kingdom was named after the piece of land (which was part of the kingdom)

"You see, originally Prussia was named after the Prussians, a Baltic-speaking people. Then the Teutonic Order invaded, imposed Christianity, and eventually the Prussians lost their language and a Germanic kindgom stole their ethnonym"

Yeah the Shahnameh didn’t use zero Arabic. Writing a long work in English with only the few basic function words taken from Latin and French (as Ferdowsi did with words like طور) and using Old English or Old Norse for the rest (while leaning into archaisms occasionally) would be quite doable. Hard but doable. I can’t for the life of me think of a reason why you’d want to but there’s really nothing intrinsically impossible about the task.

@azforeman @nishanciefendi @DrMichaelBonner Try writing an epic work of literature equivalent to the Shahnameh, using English with zero Latin or French. Can’t be done,

One more time for benefit of the obtuse. Persian has borrowed a gigantic Arabic vocabulary in almost exactly the same manner and in a similar proportion as English has borrowed from Latin. In educated speech and writing, seemingly no word from the learned tongue is inadmissable to the native language. Often, the original meaning of a word changes, new words can be created in conformity with learned structures, the native language ends up with multiple synonyms with different shades of meaning, there is an exalted or hieratic quality to speech or writing laden with the learned language, and the older native word, if it is not lost, coexists with the learned borrowing. Repeating the different origins of the languages in question is irrelevant.

@SmithVarta21845 @nishanciefendi @DrMichaelBonner Also the Shahnameh does NOT lack Arabic loanwords. Not by a long shot.

Writing something meaningful in English without any loans from Old French may seem strikingly hard at first blush, but it can indeed be done. I'm doing it right now, and not even dumbing anything down to do so. (And no, believe it or not, "French" is not a loan from French.) You've got to think through it carefully, though. It's kind of like driving a pickup backward. Keeping your eyes behind you with one hand on the wheel will tire you out after a while.

@freedom4iran_au @sharghzadeh This is a fucked up thing to say to another human being who says they’re getting death threats. Full stop. I don’t even agree with him a lot of the time but I know what it is like to get death threats and I know you’re being a gaping asshole.

@azforeman @sharghzadeh Maybe look at how he’s gaslit and smeared people for months before rushing to defend his latest victim performance.

My parent's names and addresses were doxxed. I was given death threats. These cultists want to destroy my country and kill my family.

@freedom4iran_au @sharghzadeh What the fuck is wrong with you? That’s a horrible way to react to someone dealing with threats to their family

@sharghzadeh Boo hoo.. me me me! Every problem has a solution. Best solution for you is to completely shut down all your social media. Problem solved.

This has the most Keralan energy per pixel I have ever beheld in my life

Again, no one actually thinks ableism is wrong if the person’s disability causes something truly unpleasant—something that “justifies” your disgust, annoyance, or anger. We only really reject ableism when we feel like you’re *overreacting* to a person’s *benign* disability

I am, for various reasons, not a great fan of Gessen (despite indisputable talent). I am, even more, not fan of academic-left "colonial gaze" jargon & claims that people shouldn't write on a topic because of their identity. Also, Gessen has been a US citizen for about 40 years.

Sometimes people just like the sound of an accent. I’ve had Welsh speakers tell me they like my accent in their language just because it *doesn’t* sound like an Englishman.

@vuorille @benjcartlidge @harbricht That’s so cool. I didn’t know the second one was an option. I thought Bavarians just deleted their /r/ in contexts like that.

@azforeman @benjcartlidge @harbricht Hallertau, a short drive to the south of Ingolstadt. We have two options: Either omit the R and say "awad", or strengthen the R and say arwad.

Shower thought: is Finnish a proto-Germanic speaker accent overlaid onto proto-Finnic?

People constantly assert that I am fluent in languages I don’t consider myself fluent in, just because I was able to have a conversation

خب دیگه سوره‌ی ترامپ قمارباز هم نازل شد. روزی سه بار بخونید باشد که رستگار شوید. #انقلاب_شیروخورشید #جاویدشاه #ترامپ

Kostas Karyotakis