I'm still waiting for the list of attendees for my first university seminar (➡️ Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). But so far, I got several emails saying: 'I didn't get the place. Can I still participate?' The elective seminar is going to be well attended - in other words: crowded 😅
#linguistics

The district in Berlin where I live is partner of two recently haunted places: Charkiw 🇺🇦 and Sderot 🇮🇱🇵🇸. No good karma for Steglitz-Zehlendorf and its partners

How to read a professor's door

السياسة الإسرائيلية لغز في نظري. إنّ دولة إسرائيل ديمقراطية وحكومة غزة هي منظمة إرهابية. لماذا تستخدم دولة القانون سواء طرائق حماس؟ لماذا تدمّر الجهتان البنية التحتية المدينة للعدو؟ يا للخزى والعار في الديمقراطية!
#فلسطين_حرة

#Hamas - false friends between Arabic & (Biblical) Hebrew:

ḥamās حماس 'enthusiasm'
ḥāmās חמס 'violence, crime'

By looking at the consonants, they could be cognates. But the vocalic patterns don't fit (Proto-Semitic *CaCāC vs. *CaCaC).
#langtwt

A new article by UC Berkeley Prof. Hannah Sande: 'Is grammatical tone item-based or process-based?'

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

Draft of Buckley’s recent introduction to the Pomoan language—worth a read: ling.upenn.edu/~gene/papers/B…

Last night I dreamed I had a peripatetic discussion with Marijn van Putten about the phonological representation of certain morphemes in Classical Arabic while walking through a beautiful park in Marrakech. What a dream! I think I processed the latest idea for my thesis

Latin had six noun cases, but in all Romance languages except Romanian, nouns only have one singular form and one plural form left.

What happened?

This extra large infographic tells you in 10 steps how the Latin case system collapsed – and how the accusative emerged victorious:

We don't KNOW the future. We don't know what will be useful in 10/20/50 years and why. We need to stop financing only research that is finalized to achieving something: curiosity-driven research is fundamental.

This is such a thorny issue, because it intersects bad ideas about language limiting thought (which have driven a lot of linguistic erasure) and valid ideas about languages encoding cultural knowledge (which motivates language preservation).

But a few clarifying points 🧵

Arabic & Hebrew are natlangs. If you want to listen to a #conlang , I recommend e.g. Quenya, Dothraki, & Horn. The latter is the language I developed for Prime Video DE's 'The Gryphon'. Though there has been language contact between Proto-Canaanite and Horn 😎