Joseph Chenard
@joe_chenard
PhD student in historical linguistics at @UofT. Mainly Comparative Semitics but also interested in Indo-European linguistics. 🇨🇦🇻🇦
academia.edu/78743202/The_N…
29: Edward Greenstein's 2022 explanation positing a misunderstood Aramaic definite state as the cause of the seemingly feminine name of Qoheleth has basically solved that conundrum. Case closed.
31: Handbooks still saying that Biblical Hebrew is basically a VSO language is deeply misleading; this is a function of the morphosyntax of the wayyiqtol, nothing more. Sentences with qatal and pure yiqtol are often SVO or in some cases even a little V2-ish.
Famous coin minted in the 4th century BC in Yehud (the Persian province of what had once been the kingdom of Judah). I had never noticed before that the God on the Winged Wheel (often identified with Yahweh) is facing what seems to be a Silenus mask.
Today is the feast day of St. Charbel Makhlouf. TIL he took his religious name from a 2nd century Syriac martyr, St. Charbel, who in turn bore an Akkadian name: šar-bēl 'Bel is king/sovereign'! The name Bel being derived from the Akkadian bēlum 'lord'.
TIL that one particular Cretan hieroglyph was said by Arthur Evans to be depicting Silphium, the legendary medicinal/aphrodisiac/contraceptive plant which was used so much by the Romans that it became extinct.
Cf. typologically with the Indo-European root *peh3(i)-, which seems originally to have meant "gulp down, swallow" (which it still means in Anatolian) but has switched to a general meaning "drink" in Core IE.
The verb “to eat” in Ge’ez is በልዐ, a clear reflex of the Semitic root *b-l-ʕ “to swallow” with a semantic shift “to swallow” > “to eat.” The original Semitic root *ʔ-k-l “to eat” only appears in Ge’ez in the noun እክል “cereal.” 3/6
Pope Benedict XV's prayers for peace during World War I, in Neo-Aramaic and Arabic
TIL that the French word for "walrus," morse, supposedly originates from a Pre-Uralic substrate language of Northern Europe (according to Ante Aikio). sgr.fi/sust/sust266/s…
Harvard's new study places the Uralic people's ancient homeland to Yakutia instead of Western Siberia, which we previously thought. Let's talk about it! news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
if I had a nickel for every time an Arabic dialect rotated the cardinal directions 90 degrees clockwise for some reason, I'd have two nickels (for northern Sinai and eastern Mauritania), which...
#New in #OCIANA: A remarkable prayer in #Dhofari in praise ℎ̣𝑚𝑑 of a deity called ʾ𝑦𝑙. Is ʾ𝑦𝑙 a local pronunciation of the pan-Semitic father deity, ʾilu? The deity seems to be later in the text called ℎ̣𝑦 'living'! See the commentary here: ociana.osu.edu/inscriptions/4…
My New Paper, published in @alusuralwusta! Arya Tabibzadeh (2025): 'Masʾalatun or Mas'ʾalatun? That Is the Question! The Implications of Traditional Persian Metrics for Classical Arabic Stress, journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/alus… @MideastMedieval
Mysterious pre-Islamic script from Oman finally deciphered | Science | AAAS science.org/content/articl…
