Back in 2005 I welcomed Lameen Souag’s brand-new blog Jabal al-Lughat; it’s gone silent (like too many blogs) for a couple of years, but now it’s back with a post Miscellaneous Darja notes, which begins:
With Twitter apparently determined to become an eX-network, the moment seems right for turning back towards blogging. I might change platforms (Substack sounds promising – any good ideas?), but in the meantime, let’s see if this is still working and post some miscellaneous notes on Dellys Arabic from my holiday.
I am delighted to see anyone turning back towards blogging, especially such a distinguished exemplar of the form; as I’ve kvetched many times, I don’t understand why people choose to share their thoughts on mediums (or, if you prefer, media) where they will vanish beneath the waves after a few comments. Here are the next couple of paragraphs to whet your appetite:
Today, when a watch started randomly beeping, I heard a cousin say ʕəbbẓi næ̃mpoṛt waħda təħbəs “press any one, it’ll stop”. This is obviously the same construction as næ̃mpoṛt ħaja, and was indeed produced by the same person. So it seems that næ̃mpoṛt is indeed a fixed part of his grammar; but note that it is followed by an indefinite noun (ħaja ‘thing’, waħda ‘one’) rather than an interrogative pronoun as it would be in French (quoi ‘what’, qui ‘who’).
When I heard the verb ykạmiri ‘he’s filming’, I initially thought this was proof positive that the loanverb ending -i had become a productive denominal verbaliser (cp. kạmira ‘videocamera’); after all, there is no French verb camérer. But it turns out that camérer is attested in Algerian French, so the case remains ambiguous.
For the rest, which is just as interesting, click the link, and I hope Lameen will continue to grace the fertile land of Blogovia!
“I don’t understand why people choose to share their thoughts on mediums…”
It’s where you get seen. Look at how many younger people today use the internet: they are no longer used to going to third-party URLs outside of a handful of walled-garden services. The idea of following a range of blogs with an RSS reader is practically magic to them. I myself lost interest in returning to scientific blogging after I heard from some younger members of the linguistics community that that they had little interest in following old-school blogs and so were unlikely to see my content.
That said, I am one of the RSS-using elite and very pleased that Lameen is back.
I don’t even use an RSS reader…
Look at how many younger people today use the internet: they are no longer used to going to third-party URLs outside of a handful of walled-garden services. The idea of following a range of blogs with an RSS reader is practically magic to them.
They’ll come around!
*shakes cane*
That said, of course I’m aware of the eyeballs situation, but why not do as I (and Anatoly Vorobey and doubtless others) do and share your blog posts on some social medium or other so that those who need such breadcrumbs can find them? The important thing is to have a place where the posts are secure and can keep attracting comments.
For LH, new comments are as important as new posts. Do RSS readers handle that? I confess I haven’t used one in many years, and the number of blogs I follow has dwindled considerably.
I use the ‘Commented-On Language Hat Posts’ feature — thank you again to J.C.
I’ve never had a Twitter/X account. So if posters there were trying to attract my eyeballs [**], they’ve failed.
I hang out at the Hattery and a few other sites because of the quality of the content, not the quantity or out of any need to feel ‘fresh’/current/connected (to a bunch of babbling idiocy, chiefly).
[**] (I doubt it, since I on principle don’t spend money on anything advertising via intrusive online ads.)
*shakes walking pole*
Yes, RSS works fine for comments. I use an RSS reader that shows me comments coming in on old posts on this blog and lots of others including Geoff Lindsey’s English Speech Services, The Life of Words, Linguism, Sentence first, Separated by a Common Language, Shady Characters, etc.
Doesn’t work for Language Log, though; I think the blogger has to set up the feed for comments, and they’ve never done that.
Some content creators are migrating from social media and/or blogs to “newsletters”. I’ve been meaning to find out why. Is it … monetisation?
God, even the word gives me the creeps.
In recent years I’ve followed some scholarly tweeters, including Lameen and Benjamin Suchard. The dialog has been lively and interesting. Then they shut the spigot on non-subscribers, so I stopped. I started again thanks to Nitter, but I don’t know how long that will last. If I didn’t want to sign up then, I certainly don’t now.
I’m not on Twitter/twixer etc. and do prefer blogs, but comments are not always searchable.
And mechanical regurgitator searches sometimes include nonsense proposals.
E.g. that William H. Brownlee considered the Qumran “Teacher of Righteousness” to be Judah Maccabee (false, though once mistakenly published in secondary literature) rather than Judah the Essene,
My latest publication was announced by Brill as available in May, but the paper book, so far, is nowhere to be seen.
I may need to adjust.
The comments are searchable through the usual search engines, with site:languagehat.com.
Yes, JC’s “Commented-On Language Hat Posts” page is essential, and really should be integrated into the site, though I understand that that’s easier said than done.
Well, is the book available online? Books even get DOIs these days, and have joined journal articles in routinely coming out a year before they’re printed.
Yes, JC’s “Commented-On Language Hat Posts” page is essential, and really should be integrated into the site, though I understand that that’s easier said than done.
I don’t even understand what that means — it’s right there on the site now.
Thanks for the welcome! Twitter had some real advantages for rapid conversations despite its ephemerality, but its current management appears determined to squander them, and I like the way blogging forces you to think in terms of longer units. Let’s see how it goes.
Indeed, the “Commented-On Language Hat Posts” feature is quite helpful.
I’ve been reading blogs for decades now and I still have no idea what an RSS reader is or why anyone would want to use one.
They alert you when a blog you follow is updated. It’s extremely useful for blogs that only rarely have new posts. (LH, of course, you can simply click on each day in the reasonable expectation of finding something new, but that, alas, is no longer common.) I use Inoreader myself.
Newsletters seem to be an author thing – I am actually subscribed to Richard Osman’s, which is mainly puzzles, but I’ve seen new authors encouraged to start one, and it seems to be because you can count how many subscribers you have. And I’m sure I got a Dilbert newsletter for a while in about 1998, so it’s not new!
(Not counting actual newsletters including news of events and so on, from things like the Scots Music Group and the Waverley…)
When I was only considering learning [Maghrebi] Arabic (or maybe it was “determined” already?), one of the first para-Arabic texts I read was Lameen’s comment on reddit/Arabs’s dialect project, here.
(I’m afraid i could understand nothing in the story itself, though the Egyptian sound transcribed as ayoh! amused me greatly.).
I don’t remember where I read what Songhay or Berber piece by Lameen, great many of them are peer-reviweed publications, but I definitely landed on Lameen’s blog many more times in Arabic context during the folowing years. E.g. his note about kexx in hadith (when I wanted to learn more about arabic baby talk).
What I want to say: some random readers from Russia or Madagascar who are only visible in the site’s stats actually read the stuff.
Yes, that’s something I have to remind myself of.
The Commented-On Posts page really isn’t essential; when its host was being flaky a while back, I installed an RSS reader (Feedbro) as a browser add-on and I’ve been completely satisfied with it ever since.
The Commented-On page is a bit more convenient for reading a single active blog, since it lists only the post titles rather than putting comments on all posts together chronologically; also, it covers the whole blog history, whereas the RSS reader only stores a limited number of comments. But for a couple-dozen other blogs I follow that only update from time to time, the RSS reader is the way to go, including for comments. I realize now that I was missing out on a lot without it.
Jabal al-Lughat has a comments feed —
http://lughat.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default— which shows an apparent real recent comment on an old post, but infestations of spam on other old posts (for example). I hope Lameen can do something about that.And since I added Jabal al-Lughat to my RSS reader, I see that Lameen just now posted another new blog post, “An unusual polysemy in Algeria and its cultural background”.
I didn’t know that there is also an rss feed for the comments on languagehat.com. On my rss reader, Feedly, I found it by adding languagehat.com/comments as a source. Thanks, ktschwarz, for making me aware of this!
The Commented-On page is a bit more convenient for reading a single active blog […]. But for a couple-dozen other blogs I follow that only update from time to time, the RSS reader is the way to go, including for comments.
I agree, which is why I invented it. When we can get a hundred comments in a day, an RSS comments feed is inadequate.
On the other hand, when I come back to the Commented-On page after a work day, I’m sent to the last of maybe 20 new comments on a thread and I have to scroll up to when I think I last read it. An RSS feed will not skip comments, might be better for my way of reading.
RSS will feed only so many posts (set to 20 for this blog). If the computer is off or asleep, the RSS reader won’t update, and you might miss some comments.
This is not the case. The number of posts that the reader saves should be customizable; I have it set to Feedbro’s maximum of 2000 for Language Hat, a little over a month’s worth of comments. (So if you can’t increase it from 20, get a reader that can, such as Feedbro.) The feed display may take some minutes to refresh after the computer wakes up, but you can refresh or reload it manually any time, and it doesn’t just miss things that went by when the computer was asleep (if that were the case, RSS would be useless!), it goes to the feed to get them.
New content is generally copied into the feed within several minutes, which means occasionally the feed contains an old version of a comment or post that was later edited or deleted.
No RSS reader I’ve used had that option, and I recall Songdog increased the number by ppular request some time back. Our mileage, evidently, does vary.
“mediums”…. what?
smalls, larges, mediums.
The number of posts that the reader saves should be customizable
You two are talking about two different things: the number of posts actually referred to in the feed file at any given time (typically, as Y says, about 20) and the number of posts retained in the reader’s own cache from past versions of the feed file (sometimes none, sometimes a small number, sometimes a large number, sometimes tunable).
So ideally you should run your reader continually so you don’t miss out on anything. On a PC that you never turn off, like. Or on a micro instance in the cloud somewhere.
Just came across this thread on reddit where Lameen answer questions. Following a link in one of his answers,
“If a language has a small class of morphologically anomalous nouns all relating to wild food-gathering activities, the hypothesis that should immediately spring to mind is: this is substratum vocabulary.”
It always surprised me how Russian has specialised suffixes for berries and mushrooms (the main two things we gather in the wild now (of course we also can pick young nettle for soup and what not)).
I don’t see such regularity with (other than berries) plants and anymals, even with fishes. I think parallels from other languages are not difficult to find (even English -berry) though what surprises me is not small classes, conversely, it is dedicated morphology for classes fo things.
John Cowan: two different things: the number of posts actually referred to in the feed file at any given time … and the number of posts retained in the reader’s own cache
Thanks, I get it now. I had incorrectly assumed that the feed file was much bigger than it really is, because Feedbro often shows me a hundred or more new comments after a day or two away — but that’s because it was polling the feeds even while the computer was sleeping (other readers may or may not do that, I don’t know). While it was powered off or without internet it must have missed some, but I didn’t notice.
The languagehat comments feed actually contains only 20 comments at a time, which goes back only about half a day on average, with a lot of variance. So yes, the Commented-On Posts page *is* essential! My bad.
(The Lorem RSS feed was helpful in figuring this out: it emits sentences of lorem ipsum at regular intervals that you can specify.)