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A Facebook post by our old pal Slavomír Čéplö/bulbul pointed me to Ahmad Al-Jallad’s All lines lead to Proto-Arabic: a review article on Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies [2025], 1–16), in which Al-Jallad (seen here in 2018 and 2022) does a thorough demolition job on Owens’ book, which sounds like a classic case of an expert in a limited field trying to extend his expertise too widely (cf. John McWhorter). It begins (I omit the footnotes):

The past century or so has witnessed what one might call a “documentary turn” in the study of Arabic’s history. The full range of modern Arabic’s dialectal diversity came into focus as linguists began to produce descriptions of peripheral dialects, spanning from Central Asia to the Yemeni highlands and from Cypress to Chad. Sociolinguistic approaches to the dialects have advanced our understanding of language change and dialect formation in real time. The epigraphic exploration of Arabia revealed a “Jāhiliyyah” with stunning linguistic diversity, even when compared to the rich materials compiled by the Arabic Grammarians. Contrary to the commonly held belief, Arabic was not alone in Arabia, but was rather a part of a rich linguistic landscape, lost to history until recently. The discovery and study of papyri from the early Islamic period afford a unique view into the written register of Arabic before the rise of the grammatical tradition, and both pre-modern Christian and Jewish Arabic materials attest to writing traditions that existed parallel to normative Classical Arabic, and shed valuable light on the pre-modern dialectal landscape. The combination of these new sources of data and approaches have rendered the traditional view of Arabic’s past obsolete, and so the time is ripe to synthesize this material into the writing of new linguistic histories of Arabic.

The work under review is the latest monograph by Professor Jonathan Owens, a renowned authority on the Arabic dialects of Nigeria, Libya, and Chad, who has made significant contributions to the field of Arabic sociolinguistics and dialectology at large. Owens should be congratulated for the great effort put into this work, which spans over 500 pages. In this book, he builds on the case made in Owens (2006/9) that the field of Arabic historical linguistics has been fundamentally misguided, giving undue weight to older attested stages of the language when it comes to reconstruction. Here, he attempts to build a new, “non-linear” paradigm with a focus on the history of the modern Arabic vernaculars, but draws also on other sources such as epigraphy and papyri. […]

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Way back in 2013 I told the world about my discovery of a lost masterpiece, Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], and last year I posted about Stephen Bruce’s forthcoming translation, originally inspired by that post. Now it has come forth and the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Northwestern University Press has sent me a copy, and it is every bit as good as I hoped and expected, from the gorgeous cover (featuring Karl Bryullov’s Portrait of V. A. Perovsky on Column Capitals) to the fifty pages of detailed end notes. Reading through it, I quickly gave up comparing it with the Russian (Bruce’s translation is thoroughly reliable) and simply enjoyed the ride; the fact is, I didn’t feel any great loss, because Veltman is not a stylist like Bunin or Nabokov (though his prose is thoroughly enjoyable), he is a raconteur, and his rambling storytelling can be enjoyed in any language. As a matter of fact (and I feel bad about even saying this — sorry, Alexandr Fomich!), I actually enjoy the many poems more in translation; in Russian they annoy me slightly by their tossed-off salon-verse style, but Bruce has made them sound fluent and charming in English, with natural-sounding rhyme and meter, which must have taken a lot of work to pull off.

And reading it consecutively in my native language, without stopping to look things up or figure out a complicated Russian construction, I find myself enjoying it in a different way, and making what feels like an important discovery: the ground theme of the novel is freedom. He starts by saying that with determination and imagination “we shall be everywhere and learn everything,” and in the context of the Russian Empire, where nobody was allowed to go anywhere the autocracy didn’t want them to go (Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which came out around the same time, in the early 1830s, is about this), that was a daring idea. He says that using the flying carpet of imagination we can go anywhere we want, and no one can stop us. I suspect it’s only his jolly style and his neverending divagations into inoffensive topics like wine, women, and song that kept him out of trouble. In any event, it’s a charming and invigorating read, not like anything else in Russian literature, and I am pleased as punch that it has made its appearance in English; I devoutly hope it is just the start of a series of Veltman translations. If it is, Veltman is in good hands with Bruce and NUP, and I hope I can report on future volumes. If you want to be an early adopter and help promote the Veltmanic future, you can order it at the publisher’s page (hint: Christmas is just around the corner), and a little bird tells me that if you enter the code WANDERER at checkout you get 30% off through the end of February.

I can’t resist quoting the start of the acknowledgments:

This translation began over a decade ago as a hobby, a welcome distraction from the rigors of graduate school, rather than a project with a clear path to publication. I owe my initial discovery of Veltman and The Wanderer to Stephen Dodson, whose blog Language Hat introduced me to this fascinating work. His continued interest, along with insightful suggestions from his readers, has helped clarify some of the book’s more obscure references.

So you, the Varied Reader, have gotten your due as well!

Simon Akam in the New Yorker has one of the best essays I’ve read (archived) about the struggle to standardize a language. Here’s the start:

Ask him how it all began, and he remembers the ice. It was a bitter morning in January, 1982, when Bernard Cathomas, aged thirty-six, carefully picked his way up a slippery, sloping Zurich street. His destination was No. 33, an ochre house with green shutters—the home of Heinrich Schmid, a linguist at the University of Zurich. Inside, the décor suggested that “professor” was an encompassing identity: old wooden floors, a faded carpet, a living room seemingly untouched since the nineteen-thirties, when Schmid had grown up in the house. Schmid’s wife served Rüeblitorte, a Swiss carrot cake that manages bourgeois indulgence with a vegetable alibi.

Cathomas had already written from Chur, in the canton of the Grisons, having recently become the general secretary of the Lia Rumantscha, a small association charged with protecting Switzerland’s least known national language, Romansh. Spoken by less than one per cent of the Swiss population, the language was itself splintered into five major “idioms,” not always readily intelligible to one another, each with its own spelling conventions. Earlier attempts at unification had collapsed in rivalries. In his letter, Cathomas said that Schmid’s authority would be valuable in standardizing the language. Cathomas wrote in German but started and ended in his native Sursilvan, the biggest of the Romansh idioms: “Jeu engraziel cordialmein per Vies interess e Vossa attenziun per quest problem.” Translation: “I thank you very much for your interest and attention to this problem.”

Schmid, the man he was counting on, hadn’t grown up speaking Romansh; he first learned it in high school, and later worked on the “Dicziunari Rumantsch Grischun,” a Romansh dictionary begun in 1904 and still lumbering toward completion. But the depth of his expertise was formidable. By the time Cathomas knocked on his door, Schmid had already sketched a plan for standardizing Romansh: a “majority principle” in which the most widely shared spellings across the idioms would win out.

“He really already had everything,” Cathomas recalled. “He had worked it all out in his head.”

What Cathomas hadn’t reckoned with was how quickly the tidy scheme, once loosed into the valleys, would ignite quarrels that engulfed Swiss classrooms, newspapers, and eventually cantonal politics—a parable of how an attempt to secure a language’s survival can feel, to those being standardized, like an assault on what makes them distinct.

I hope that lead-in entices you to read the rest; it’s gripping, sad, and funny, with sympathy for all sides. (And specially for J.W. Brewer, I cite the band name Liricas Analas ‘Anal Lyrics.’) Here’s a bit near the end:

The Lia Rumantscha is also asking the International Organization for Standardization to classify each idiom as a separate language. Some people doubt that this hyperlocalism will pay off. One member of the Zurich team told me about a Swiss firm that sold a G.P.S. device with directions spoken in Swiss German. “No one bought it,” he noted. “People said, ‘That’s not my Swiss German.’ ” You can give the machine a voice, he suggested, but people still want it to sound like their cousin.

I might add that I am the proud owner of a Lia Rumantscha publication, the Dicziunari rumantsch ladin-tudais-ch. Thanks for the link go to my dear old friend Dave, to whom I tip all my hats.

Trinity College Dublin reports World’s first film in ancient Sumerian released by Trinity filmmakers:

The world’s first film shot entirely in the ancient Sumerian language is today available to audiences worldwide to view on YouTube [4th December, 2025].

Dumuzi’s Dream and Dumuzi’s Demons, performed by Trinity students entirely in the dead language of Sumerian, tells the story of how Dumuzi, a Sumerian shepherd god, repeatedly escapes from underworld demons, until they finally catch him for good. The short film is a dramatization of the mythological poem known today as Dumuzi’s Dream. The script of the film follows, word for word, the text of this poem, which is preserved on cuneiform clay tablets excavated in modern-day Iraq and housed in Museums all over the world.

The 20-minute film stars Trinity students Olivia Romao (4th year Music) and Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys (4th year English/Classics) and was directed and produced by Professor Martin Worthington (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies). The film is now freely available on YouTube with subtitles in over twenty languages, including Irish, Arabic, Mandarin and Hungarian. […]

Gwenhwyfar Ferch Rhys, who played Dumuzi, said: “Viewers don’t need to feel too sorry for Dumuzi being led to the underworld. There is another Sumerian story where he gets to escape for part of every year—we might do that one next time! And people interested in the history of religion may be interested to learn that Sumerian culture included a god who died and came back to life.”

Now that’s what I call a movie! You can watch it at the link, and I hope ə de vivre will show up with a critique. (Via MetaFilter.)

Josie Giles has written what rozele, who sent me the link, calls “a nice punchy piece… among other things giving a critical counterpoint to the enthusiasm about the Scottish Languages”; it’s called Twenty Ways to Minoritise a National Language:

Yesterday, St Andrew’s Day – a date carefully chosen to signal national pride – the Scottish Languages Act came into force, enshrining Gaelic and Scots alongside each other as official national languages. It is a chiefly symbolic act, with remarkably few concrete measures to ensure that these national languages recover and thrive, and even less financial commitment. Despite consistent and well-researched campaigning from groups like Misneachd, communities where Gaelic is actually still the vernacular continue to lack strong statutory support, and there’s no consideration of language heartland policy for Scots at all. Without integrating language planning into socioeconomic policy – that is, without considering how the rural housing crisis or the lack of jobs within language communities shapes whether or not languages survive – I don’t really see a future for Scotland’s new national languages except their slow withering into national symbols.

Here in Edinburgh, in an urban cultural centre, it’s remarkable how little Gaelic and Scots I encounter. Gaelic exists as a small subculture, unheard unless you deliberately seek it out, which needs constant effort and forging of personal connections. Scots exists mostly as the occasional word dropped into well-spoken conversation. At arts festivals and centres, which are my main employers, they’re almost never spoken, and when they’re on the stage there’s only one or two special events, rarely well-attended. The places where these languages are still used fluidly and (for the most part) unselfconsciously are all distant geographically and economically from the cultural core: Shetland, Niddrie, Uist, Ayr.

And yet everyone I speak to in Scottish culture is enthusiastic about the survival of minority languages. “I’d love to learn Gaelic,” I hear once a week from someone who has had their whole life to start. When the sea-fog rolls in over Arthur’s Seat, we rush to name it haar. The era of deliberate and legislated language extermination as a matter of national policy in these islands has passed – we’ve now entered an era of managed decline, where everyone thinks that minority languages are important and fewer and fewer people use them. As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been collecting contemporary strategies of minoritisation, the ways we work to ensure that the languages are symbols rather than tools, ideas rather than communities. Here are twenty of them.

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Ella Archibald-Binge reports for the Guardian on an encouraging development in Australia:

There are several words for “morning” in the Gumbaynggirr language but bambuuda is Anne-Marie Briggs’ favourite. Drawn from bamburr, meaning soft and gentle, it speaks to the quiet moments before sunrise, literally translating as “in the softness”. “Doesn’t it just melt your heart?” says Anne-Marie, sitting at the kitchen table of the Coffs Harbour home she shares with her 12-year-old son, Darruy.

The pair have found an easy morning routine since moving to Coffs three years ago. On a bright spring day Darruy wolfs down his Weet-Bix before strolling across the road to the small independent school that has been making headlines for its unique approach to education on the New South Wales mid-north coast.

When the bell rings, the students converge on a shady sandpit. They stomp bare feet to the click of clapsticks, singing and dancing as the sun gathers warmth. By 9.30am, barely a word of English has been spoken. This is how each day begins at the Gumbaynggirr Giingana Freedom school, the state’s first Aboriginal bilingual school. GGFS opened three years ago amid a broader push to breathe new life into the critically endangered Gumbaynggirr language.

As Indigenous languages decline, Gumbaynggirr is experiencing a resurgence. What began with a handful of elders pooling their pensions to record a few words in the 1980s has led to its revival, to the point where it is once again being spoken in homes and learned by babies.

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Etymonline introduces me to a redolent word heretofore unknown to me:

”

SNIFTY was on etymonline’s list. The list is a file of hundreds of words and phrases that want more research. Snifty. It didn’t even have a squib entry on the site. But it led a splendid steeplechase. The Century Dictionary entry (above) turned out to be only the least third of it and the wrong end.

Snifty barked once and sprouted three heads, bounded through a thicket of nicknames in old newspapers, and wrapped itself around nifty. Then the blatant beast head-faked toward Scotland and doubled back to that impenetrable Germanic SN- forest. By this time the editors were trying to decide if we were looking at one word or two, or three, or something somehow in between.

Coincidentally a Reddit thread had got me curious about snooty/snotty. Snotty/snooty like nifty/snifty presents itself as more than one word, not quite two. And it goes to ground in that same SN- forest, the dunkle Tannen of pre-literate Germanic. The words taunt as they plunge, with grins suggestive of something in language deeper and wilder than we moderns guess. Something not comprehended in our tone-deaf train of “froms.” […]

Here’s how etymonline described [nifty]: “A slang word of uncertain origin, perhaps originating in California (used in the east by 1867) as more or less a deformed clip of magnificent. Bret Harte (1868) wrote that it was a shortened, altered form of Magnificat.” Looking at the new lay of the evidence, after the “snifty” hunt, nifty might turn out to be a clip of snifty. Imagine “that’s snifty” misheard, mis-divided. The scientifically accurate DNA of the word nifty in that event would not touch magnificent.

There follows much more speculation and thoughts about “picture-charts of etymologies,” and it ends with some personal ads, including one from Joe to Kitty saying “Send your ‘snifty’ friend a note.” Fun stuff. Oh, and if you’re curious about what the OED has for these words, it says snifty is from a verb snift ‘to sniff’ and nifty is “Of unknown origin.” (Thanks, Nick!)

Another interesting post by Anatoly Vorobey at Avva (again, I translate from his Russian); he shows a shop sign that says in Hebrew “Air conditioning / Please close the door” and says:

But the phrase ‘to close the door’ lacks the definite article ha and the direct object particle et: instead of “lisgor et hadelet,” it’s written “lisgor delet.” The effect is a bit comical, difficult to convey in Russian; it’s as if someone wrote, “We have air conditioning; please close a door somewhere.” Or if in English it was “Air conditioning inside, please close a door.” The sign was probably written by “Russians” [i.e., Russian immigrants to Israel].

This particle et is a strange thing; you can omit it (but leave the definite article) and then it looks sort of like high style: “na lisgor hadelet.” I searched the Hebrew Language Academy website and found an interesting note about it: it seems it’s not entirely clear why in Biblical Hebrew this particle is sometimes absent before an object with a definite article. And David Ben-Gurion, the founding father and first prime minister of modern Israel, couldn’t stand it, considered it harmful, and deliberately didn’t use it in writing.

But he failed to break the established et ha- tradition, and people generally continue to use et even more than in the past (for example, in phrases like “I have [something]”). And they usually ask visitors to close et ha-door. Not like in this sign.

I find that very intriguing, and I hope Hatters with more Hebrew than I will have things to say about it.

As a card-carrying AI hater, I feel it my duty to point out when it’s actually useful, and Dan Cohen presents such a case:

“All goes in the usual monotonous way.” That is the depressed sigh of George Boole in a letter to his sister Maryann in 1850. It was the spark for my book Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Boole, the English mathematician who gave us the logic at the heart of the digital device you are reading this on, was teaching in Cork, Ireland at the time. On a cold December day, he wrote to Maryann about his feelings of profound loneliness. In a city that was on edge from religious strife and famine, he played piano at home to an empty room, and took long walks by himself. At the end of the day, he retreated to his equations, which seemed to transcend the petty differences of humanity.

But before developing my thesis about the fervent emotions behind Boole’s seemingly cold mathematical logic, I first had to read his damn handwriting. Talk about monotony! There were hundreds of letters and notebooks in his drifty scrawl. In retrospect, Boole’s handwriting is actually not that bad; I’ve encountered far worse since reading his in Cork. And it helped that I had taken a brief course on paleography, the art of deciphering handwritten historical documents. But it would have saved me a lot of time getting to the interesting interpretive phase of my research if a computer could have converted his handwriting into machine-readable text, as it already could for typeset text through a process called optical character recognition (OCR).

Since I wrote that book, university and industry labs have been trying to solve the incredibly difficult problem of handwritten text recognition (HTR). OCR quickly approached 99% accuracy for digitized books, whereas even the best HTR systems struggled to reach 80% — two incorrect words out of every ten. The issue is obvious: unlike the rigorous composition of books, handwriting is highly variable by author, and words are often indeterminate and irregularly arranged on a page.

He uses George’s letter to Maryann as a test, which most approaches fail; then he hits the jackpot:
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From Pablo Scheffer’s “Among the Rabble” (LRB, Vol. 47 No. 20 · 6 November 2025; archived), a review of The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages by Shane Bobrycki:

In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti drew a distinction between what he called ‘open’ and ‘closed’ crowds. Open crowds are what we tend to think of when we speak of crowds: spontaneous occasions where people come together with a shared if hazy purpose, temporarily suspending the normal order of things. Closed crowds, by contrast, are planned gatherings with a fixed motive. They solidify rather than disturb existing social hierarchies. One of the reasons the early Middle Ages tend not to feature in histories of the crowd, Bobrycki suggests, is that gatherings in this period were overwhelmingly closed. […]

Early​ medieval speakers of Latin inherited a trove of words to describe different types of crowd: populus, caterva, vulgus, conventio, tumultus, societas, contio, grex. Caterva and grex were both used to describe troops of men, but caterva originated as a military term referring to a band of barbarian soldiers, while grex, which had pejorative undertones, had been a word for a flock or herd of animals. In the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville expounded on the distinction between a ‘multitude’ (multitudo) and a ‘crowd’ or ‘rabble’ (turba). The former was defined by numbers, the latter by space: ‘For a few people can make up a turba in narrow confines.’ These nuances were being abandoned, however. Some writers were using turba not just for disorderly rabbles, but for hosts of angels and gatherings of monks; military terms such as legio and cohors lost their specificity and became synonyms for ‘many’. Even plebs came to be used simply as an alternative to populus.

As gatherings became more organised affairs, new words were needed. Germanic languages had inherited the word ‘thing’ (ding in German and þing in Old Norse), which originally referred to a local assembly – the kind where disputes were settled and collective decisions reached – but evolved to include the time or place of these assemblies, the discussions held and the agreements made. A thinghûs (‘thing house’) came to be anything from a legal court to a theatre; a thingâri (‘thing doer’) could just as easily be a preacher or a litigant. The noun thingatio even entered Latin through Lombard law, where it denoted public legitimisation.

Gotta love thingatio. (We discussed caterva in 2017; Y said “What an odd word, caterva. De Vaan’s dictionary doesn’t get very far with an etymology.”)