Once, long ago, when Languagehat was a pup, Blogovia flourished, and friendly links o’erspread the world like a canopy. Now, like a region abandoned by industry, it is full of ghost towns, and all the young pups flock to the dread silos of Social Media. Every once in a while, though, one comes back to life, and such is the case of the blog of bulbul (aka Slavomír Čéplö), the much-loved bulbulistan, which has been missing in action for over a decade apart from a brief pondering of the passage of time in 2019. Now there are three posts in rapid succession: mentalist (a dive into the history and semantic range of Bulgarian пич, which reminded him of “a Slovak vulgar term for feminine genitals”), depowedlajo (an exploration of Targumic used for humorous effect in a Purim play published in Vienna in 1878 titled Reb Simmel Andrichau — I expect this will appeal to rozele among others), and now work, which begins:
So, anyway, been a while, right? How have y’all been the last *checks notes* few years? Yeah, I know, interesting times… How about instead of focusing on that shit, I show you what I have been up to since 2015 or so. Let’s start with some of the projects I have been working on that you might find interesting.
He talks about his work on HunaynNET (a project that collected all texts of classical science that were translated into both Syriac and Arabic: “The translations were then re-edited and aligned on the level of semantic and syntactic units […] The text is also tokenized and links to dictionaries and corpora are provided; and in some cases, we also provided aligned text of translations into modern languages”), Simtho (“an electronic corpus – the only one worthy of the name – of the Syriac language”), and the Zoroastrian Middle-Persian Corpus and Dictionary:
This DFG-supported ongoing project seeks to collect, annotate and analyze all available Zoroastrian texts written in Middle Persian to create a searchable corpus (in transcription) and finally an updated dictionary of Middle Persian. I was largely responsible for data processing, conversion and import, so none of what you see online is my work. The web application is still very much a work in progress, but once finished, it will be a one-stop shop for all your Zoroastrian Middle Persian needs, including manuscript images and comprehensive lexical resources.
Good stuff; congrats, bulbul, and don’t be a stranger!
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