iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 3h

The incomparable joy of getting someone else excited by your special interests

El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

Inspired by discourse in the Bad Place, here are some examples of “untranslatable” English words: tinyurl.com/Untranslatab...

are there any english words that are "untranslatable" in other languages? our equivalent of saudade, ikigai, hygge etc

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

He gets his name right later on the same page, so I think probably an autocorrect mishap. Either that or Schneider was really mistaken on Maarten’s first name, then later corrected it in the second paragraph but forgot to do the same for the first

2.2.2.3.4.1 Questions of terminology: “Berber”, “Proto-Berber”, “Ancient Libyan” In the French tradition of Berber linguistics, the traditional position has been to see the different regional varieties of Berber as dialects of one language (Kossmann 1999, 15; one example is Chaker 2003), although a leading French scholar such as Lionel Galand has also spoken of “langues berbères” (Galand 1989; for the discussion, Breyer 2021, 31-3). Maarten Kossmann considers the linguistic variety within Berber as comparable to Germanic or Romance languages (Kossmann 1999, 15; Kossmann 2020). He classifies the Berber languages into these seven distinct groups: 1. Zenaga block (Zenaga of Mauritania, Tetserrét in Niger); 2. Tuareg block; 3a. Western Moroccan block (SW Morocco, Central Morocco, i.e., Tashelhiyt and most of Tamazight); 3b. Possibly including NW Moroccan Berber (Ghomara, Senhadja de Sraïr); 4. Zenatic block (Eastern Morocco, Western Algeria, Saharan oases, Tunisia, Zuara) extending towards the east with Sokna, Elfoqaha, Siwa; 5. Kabyle (N Algeria), possibly linked to the western Moroccan block; 6. Ghadames (Libya), probably to be linked to Djebel Nefusa (Libya) ; 7. Awdjilah (Libya).

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Hey @maartenkossmann.bsky.social are you related to Manfred Kossmann, one of the leading current Berber scholars? ;) From Thomas Schneider’s “Language Contact in Ancient Egypt”

Libyans and Tjemehu-Libyans were linguistically related (El-Sayed 2011, 1727). By contrast, one of the leading current Berber scholars, Manfred Kossmann, holds that the Libyans of the western desert of Egypt who are mentioned in the Egyptian evidence were not speakers of (Proto-)Berber (Kossmann 2020) or at the very least, that there is no positive proof to that effect (Kossmann 1999, 16; Kossmann 2013, 56-7). In the following review of the evidence, I will dispute this assumption and reaffirm El-Sayed’s assessment through a review of the linguistic and contextual evidence, while adding to the debate a number of new etymologies and interpretations.

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

My two-sentence horror submission:

Wayback Machine page for redacted url saying “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

to Moses in the first person plural (e.g. Q 20:85). So while I think Mutter successfully shows that the Qur’anic 1pl speaker cannot always be identified with God, he/they cannot always be distinguished from God either. almuslih.org/wp-content/u...

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Who needs AI slop when you can draw your own scientific illustrations like this? www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I’m apparently from Maryland, California, or Arizona

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Turns out the answer is no, but the silence isn’t too informative because the book actually lives up to its title (unlike many other contemporary works of the same name) and nearly exclusively covers battles and raids

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Following up on @islamicorigins.bsky.social’s dissertation 5 years later: was a version of the marital age Hadith found in Musa Ibn Uqbah’s Maghazi?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I’ve seen many variations of this joke, but I never got the setup. It seems to presume that some teachers actually do ask students caught eating or chewing gum if they “have enough to share with the class.” But the punchline to these jokes implies the teachers aren’t expecting an unironic…

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

So fans regularly disrupt a protected ecologically sensitive site, and now the cables will be placed close to an *actual* Bronze Age inhumation site, all to appease a bunch of overgrown children who don’t want their fictional grave for a fictional character disturbed?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

The most recent thing I watched was the original Star Wars hexalogy for the first time. So if you haven’t seen that yet either, I’d recommend it (yes, including the prequels) lol

You got any movie recommendations from stuff you've watched recently ?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Probably Istanbul, though a big part of that was due to the Hagia Sophia museum, which has now been reconverted into a mosque and its Christian artwork covered up A close second is Sharm El-Sheikh, but I haven’t been since I was little, and probably won’t ever get to go back :(

Of all the cities you've ever spent significant time in, which has been your favorite ?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

As much as I’d love to spend my life being a student and learning one special interest after another, I don’t think such a thing is financially feasible, sadly :(

Are you gonna taje [sic] up linguistics seriously after the whole physics thing is over?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

UK funding for invaluable astronomy and particle physics research is being decimated, despite an overall budget increase, in favor of funding for more AI slop: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

Fascinating article! I think the biggest surprise to me was that there’s a Greek word of obscure origin that Beekes *didn’t* posit a pre-Greek etymology for (even more ironic that his Indo-European etymology isn’t convincing, and the name *is* likely of non-IE origin)

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

You know how Islamophobes sometimes wear shirts or sport tattoos that say “Kafir”? I think I found the equivalent of that for Judaism

Man wearing a blue shirt that says “Amalek” on it

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

We live in a deeply serious country run by deeply serious people

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Wiktionary claims that Arabic زنبور is from Aramaic zibbūr, which is in turn cognate to dabbūr “bee/hornet”. Even if the loan from Aramaic is valid, despite the intrusive n, is d>Z an attested sound change in any variety of Aramaic?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Interesting and unexpected mention of “kingdom of the Arabs” in the Syriac Alexander Legend (Neshana), which Tommaso Tesei dates to the mid-6th century with a revision in the early 7th. Is this a last-minute update to reflect the Arab conquests? Or a reference to Romans’ and Sasanians’ Arab vassals?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Some of the questions were way too vague or loaded to answer meaningfully, but I’ll take Mamdani as my spirit politician

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

Pozdniakov & Vydrin make a forceful case for the inclusion of Mande within “Niger-Congo”: iling-ran.ru/web/ru/publications/journals/languageinafrica/7-1 What do we think? @maartenkossmann.bsky.social @lameensouag.bsky.social

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

Normally I don’t subject Bluesky to idiocy on Twitter (or vice versa), but I came across a take so mind-boggling stupid that now the rest of you have to see it too

Tweet by Phil Metzger:

The way I see it, (tr-)billionaires are slaves who serve the rest of us. Their “wealth” is simply what portion of the economy they manage to produce stuff for us. Managing a larger chunk makes them work a lot harder but doesn’t improve their personal quality of life *at all*.

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

Yeah, it’s a “hard exercise” because you have to be psychic and guess the gender of the musician and baker

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Me when I cold message an academic whose research I’m interested in: “Of course I know you’re super busy, so no pressure to respond :)” Me when they don’t respond:

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

“Palestinianism” is not a thing, but anti-Palestinianism has evolved into a grotesque bigotry unto its own, connected to but also distinct from garden variety anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia

The Times column by Melanie Phillips, titled “Dangerous Palestinianism has gripped politics”

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

Dawkins seems to have “developed strong beliefs that [a LLM is] sentient”

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/e...

Cambridge dictionary definition of “lead to something”

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

Elad: “Democrats’ alienating their base helped Republicans win” The replies and QTs: “So you’re saying Republicans aren’t to blame?”

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Tragically, it appears that the microdata from 1882 to 1976 were accidentally or deliberately destroyed, leaving only the 1848 and 1868 censuses, as well as a few remaining registers of the 1882 census that managed to survive destruction drive.google.com/file/d/0B4sC...

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

In 2022, anonymized samples of the 1848 and 1868 censuses of Egypt released on @ipums.bsky.social. This is an exciting start but we can go bigger. Imagine how valuable it would be to researchers and genealogists alike if the full censuses were digitized, and the images made publicly available?

Image of what is presumably a sample of one of the Egyptian census registers

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Me when I help a friend 🏴‍☠️ a handbook on ethics

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Unsurprisingly, the frustration of lonely youth unable to find a partner is nothing new either. In 16th century Egypt, an 18-year old Copt struggled to find a wife. In an act of desperation, he took monastic vows to motivate his parents to “rescue” him and arrange a marriage. Unfortunately…

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

The modern fascination with interracial cuckoldry has a long pedigree. Around the 15th century, an Aragonese chronicle told the tale of a count whose wife became obsessed with a Muslim king’s penis, then locked her husband in a chest and had sex with the king on top of it

Those few texts that do focus on the desire of married Christian women for
non-Christians tend to do so playfully, in the context of "frontier adventures." An
Aragonese chronicle, for example, tells about one Count Don Rodrigo, who was
engaged in a border skirmish with a Muslim king. Before turning his horse to flee,
the king dropped his trousers and showed the count his penis: "What do you think
of this," he boasted, and disappeared. Hearing the story from her husband at the
dinner table, the count's wife conceived a desire for the Muslim and determined to
join him, setting in motion an elaborate plot. The tale narrates the count's many
travails, which included being locked in a chest by his wife, who had intercourse
upon it with the Muslim and then presented it to him as a post-coital present. In the
end, the count avenges himself, and the highly literary trickster narrative concludes
on a didactic note: not with a moral about the dangers of miscegenation but with the
text of certain

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Supposedly it’s a Protestant baptism with the father’s name missing, but there are also other adjacent entries with two women’s names, so I don’t think it’s some weird oversight

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

Here’s what I’m trying to translate. I can understand a bit of it: Line 1: 7 Aug 1672.. 2: …Jeanne Gourdol and Suzanne 3. Blaizot(?)… 4. …father aged 25 and mother aged 25 5. …Jaques Bloch(?) 6. Godfather from…age 30 or there- 7. -abouts…Anne Gourdolle(?) 8. Saint-Barthelemy(?) parish…27 July(?)

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

So some scholars propose that this was a separate word meaning “stream”, rather than “ear of corn”, and which started with *θ. This would kill two Ephraimites with one stone: “stream” would make more contextual sense here and isn’t falsified by Semitic cognates. Problem is that there *are* no…

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

I don’t know who first proposed it, but it is a fairly common hypothesis, because it would explain why this particular word was chosen of all words with ש‎. The problem with it is that we have cognates of שבלת, and the Proto-Semitic word does start with *s, not *θ en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%...

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

He nuked his own account in shame, so here’s the background for context

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Tried to reply to him, but he deactivated so I’ll just leave my reply here: Tell that to Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Mehri, Soqotri, and many more Ethiosemitic and Modern South Arabian langauges : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethio-S... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_...

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

Can someone who understands Taiwanese politics explain to me why the DPP forms the government when the KMT alone has more seats? Does the TPP tend to vote with the DPP?

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

Well yeah, the name kind of gave it away

Duolingo challenge to translate the word “twin” into French in the sentence: “Did you know that Thomas has a twin brother?”

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El Cabbage @alcabbage045.bsky.social · 16/01/2026

Friend at work: “Tumblr is so intense sometimes, I just saw a post saying if you use AI, you’re a bad person and should die” Me:

Meme of person saying “Waow” but thinking “based based based based…”

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