iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2026

Nice dedication from the author also. We could use more people described as ‘a good doctor — but even better — a wonderful man of letters’

Fortunatus est ille, boves qui curat agrestis

I Norman Bisset
Meddyg da — ond gwell — llenor gwych

Oddi wrth Evan J. Jones

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2026

Fantastic bookshop find: a Latin textbook in Welsh, complete with glossary and a guide to spotting Latin borrowings in the modern language.

Cover of Llyfr Dysgu Lladin — Latin Textbook

Explanations of Latin grammar in Welsh. Examples include Insula Mōna - Ynys Môn and Urbs Dēva - Dinas Caer

A classic Latin glossary with principal parts and everything, but the translations are into Welsh

Table showing the outcomes of various Latin consonants in Modern Welsh, with examples

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 29/09/2026

Amazing. How was the University led before this new era of prudence? And, crucially, what happened to the people in charge?

→ On whether the uni is in financial deficit, Mathieson said: "It's correct that the university is not in deficit, because it's been responsibly led for the past three years where we've actually made reductions in our expenditure. But we're living beyond our means, our income is not keeping up with our expenditure."

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/09/2026

See here: www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/c48z2b8... In 2025, a year into the savings programme, capex went to £207m (of these £149m land and buildings)

Year
Capital Expenditure [£m]
2016
136
2017
188
2018
186
2019
145
2020
113
2021
140
2022
158
2023
165
2024
186

University of Edinburgh capital expenditure
2016-2024. Source: Annual Reports.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/09/2026

Can’t find the book (it’s in the house somewhere…), but the internet remembers! Here’s a proof pic from a scan I’ve tracked down (this is a 2000 edition, slightly later than mine but clearly not yet updated – I remember this spread vividly).

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 21/09/2026

It’s day 1 of teaching! Time to meet some first-years.

Selfie in an academic office of a man wearing a t-shirt showing an angry raccoon with the caption ‘Ignore all previous instructions’

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/08/2026

In Scotland we have so much noise around home funding (rightly) and ‘international students squeezing out locals’ — yet the proportion of Scottish students is basically flat and instead it’s just swapping out Europeans for lucrative overseas students.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 18/08/2026

FWIW Pullum & Huddleston's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language explicitly endorses ‘that’ with human antecedents as grammatical in Present-Day English (but I suspect you knew that)

With personal antecedents, there is a preference for who when the relativised element is subject, as in the boy who threw the dart, and for the non-wh type elsewhere, e.g. the boy (that)they had found hiding in the cupboard. The non-wh here avoids the choice between formal whom and informal who. It must be emphasised, however, that we are concerned here only with preferences: a phrase like the boy that threw the dart is certainly fully grammatical.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 13/08/2026

The average Polish shop is also likely to carry some version of these.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 11/08/2026

From the Cambridge ET judgement. Great workplace!

5. Our task was a complex one because it was not always clear who had been responsible for the detriments; who had been the real decision-makers; and how decisions had been reached. In many instances, as we have found, decisions were presented to decision-makers as a fait accompli without any genuine or meaningful inquiry into how the decision had been reached, which they then put their names to.
6. Pre-determined outcomes appeared to have been rubber-stamped, and little if any paper-trails were put before us showing the thought process behind the decision-making; and various witnesses struggled to explain to us what it was that they took into consideration when reaching their
conclusions. In one example the person being complained about drafted the response to the Claimant rejecting his complaints against them. Ghost writing was a consistent and a concerning theme throughout this matter.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 11/08/2026

I’m giving an inaugural lecture on the 30th of September! Do come along — it would be great to see people there.

THE UNIVERSITY of EDINBURGH
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
PROFESSOR PAVEL IOSAD
PERSONAL CHAIR OF SYNCHRONIC AND DIACHRONIC PHONOLOGY
INAUGURAL LECTURE
30 SEPTEMBER 5.15PM
VENUE: LECTURE THEATRE C, 40 GEORGE SQUARE
FROM PHILOLOGY TO PHONOLOGY:
THERE AND BACK AGAIN
Philology - the study of older texts and languages in their cultural and historical context - might not, at first glance, seem to be closely related to the highly formal, if not abstruse, approaches that theoretical linguists apply to investigate contemporary sound patterns. I will explore how phonology can profit from a philological sensibility, and how philology can benefit from the fruits of phonological analysis - by retreading my own paths between the two fields.
REGISTER: https://edin.ac/4kfNRVn

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 01/08/2026

We do FWIW. cahss.ed.ac.uk/research-stu...

Have you submitted the thesis through Turnitin?
Please note your thesis must be submitted through Turnitin before submission and all similarity reports should be discussed with your Academic Supervisory Team BEFORE submission for examination.
Please consult your Graduate School for details to proceed with this requirement.
Please note it can occasionally take several hours (or even a few days) for the Similarity Reports to be produced therefore you must take this into account in the submission deadlines.
PLEASE ENSURE THAT ALL PLAGIARISM CHECKS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED AND TURN IT IN SIMILARITY REPORTS ARE DISCUSSED WITH SUPERVISORS. YOU WILL BE ASKED TO COMPLETE A DECLARATION TO CONFIRM THIS HAS BEEN COMPLETED AT THE TIME OF SUBMISSION. IF THE PLAGIARISM CHECKS HAVE NOT BEEN COMPLETED BUT YOU CONFIRM IT HAS THIS CAN RESULT IN A REFERRAL TO THE MISCONDUCT OFFICER.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 15/07/2026

So this Defence Universities Alliance thing… we do actually need defence capacity but it’s a bit insane that somehow the defence sector still has nothing to do with languages, area studies, history and suchlike. Complete loss of institutional memory. This used to be widely recognised!

Chosen from almost 100 applicants, founding members of the DUA will strengthen connections between academia and the defence sector, helping to support a pipeline of skilled graduates into exciting careers, including cyber security, robotics, Al, aerospace engineering and advanced manufacturing. In doing so, the initiative will ensure young people leave university ready for work, with a bridge between study and employment.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 11/07/2026

At least you can see *something*. Lots of tourists at Holyrood parkrun this morning will have to come back again for the views.

Salisbury Crags… in there somewhere have I presume

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 05/07/2026

Perhaps ironically, if you are in Edinburgh you can get a wide variety of excellent herbal teas and other such products from Bulgaria at Balkan in Goldenacre

Box of teabags with a Bulgarian folk motif, labelled Родопски чай / Rhodopean tea

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/06/2026

Apparently this morning’s discourse is the ‘autodidact tradition’. If the question is ‘who’s to say this isn’t just as good as university’, maybe start here before you then ask ‘what were the upsides and downsides’, ‘what infrastructure supported this tradition’, and ‘where did it go’?

Jonathan Rose
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/06/2026

I have also acquired my first Irish flute. (Although for now I am hopelessly lagging behind my silver flute-playing daughter, who is actually able to reliably produce sound from it.)

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/06/2026

Woodwind loot from Budapest (a Transylvanian flute in A and a book of Hungarian tunes mostly for the C flute)

A wooden flute and a book with many wooden flutes of a similar type on the cover

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 26/06/2026

that was… quite something

Thunder map of southern Scotland and Lothian being absolutely battered

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 14/06/2026

Where will these best and brightest scientists work Wesley? In the shrinking higher education sector? The one your pro-growth plan mentions once, as a source of student loan debt? www.ft.com/content/83d1...

Donald Trump's message to world-leading scientists and engineers is: you're not welcome here. We should welcome them with open arms. We need a global talent programme to attract 20,000 of the world's best and brightest over the next three years. Voters concerned with high migration aren't so worried about tomorrow's Nobel Prize winners discovering the future here in Britain.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 20/05/2026

This morning’s annoyance. Even when being nicely positive about language diversity, why forget basic fact checks? Just counting national languages, we easily get four *families* in Indo-European, Uralic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, plus Sámi), Semitic (Maltese), plus Basque.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 09/05/2026

Christian Aid week. We are so back lads.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 20/04/2026

Bit of a gratuitous drive-by shooting in the @resprofnews.bsky.social morning email!

The idea that world-class researchers are giving the first-year core course
lecture is a bit of a stretch, in our experience.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 08/03/2026

What a gorgeous day in Inverness — perfect for some suffering!

View down the Ness towards the cathedral from Ness Islands.

Inverness Castle from across the river Ona sunny day

The Ness in central Inverness. There are spires.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 04/03/2026

I’m giving a talk on how the study of Slavic phonology relates to the history of generative phonology, on Zoom next Tuesday (10th March), noon CST/6pm GMT. Abstract in alt text.

The sound patterns of Slavic and the origins of generative phonology

The history of generative phonology is usually told as a more or less uninterrupted line that begins in Prague, moves to Massachusetts with Roman Jakobson and, by way of Morris Halle’s Sound Pattern of Russian, leads to Chomsky & Halle‘s Sound Pattern of English. But histories do not work that way: there are always forks in the road and paths not taken. The importance of Slavic languages in the history of phonology is often recognized; in this talk, I explore how developments in the analysis of Slavic phonologies hold up a mirror to the generative
mainstream, which, I argue, should be considered just one of a family of
approaches that took their lead from Jakobsonian ideas. Slavic phonologists rejected some aspects of the generative phonological enterprise, but their proposals could also prefigure what was to be rediscovered by generativists, often decades later. I argue that this demonstrates that these currents in Slavic phonology must be considered equal members of the same broad tradition as mainstream generative theory.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 13/01/2026

On my way to Cambridge for #ocp23. Nice day for it!

The Tweed in Berwick on a sunny day, viewed from the train

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 21/12/2025

In the (mercifully short) period that my eldest participated in this sort of thing, this was the message that was clearly felt to be necessary.

SCOTTISH FA
WELCOME SPECTATORS & PARENTS
PLEASE REMEMBER
These are children
This is a game
Coaches are volunteers
Referees are human
This is not the Premier League
Let's work together to create an environment that develops better players and better people
Let Them Play!
Respect Our Game!

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 17/11/2025

See your Chile and raise you

Map of Norway, with the northern bit chopped off and moved to the side

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 21/10/2025

Did the thing, with the aid of nurse Vlad from Homiel. Maybe that’s enough contribution to not get kicked out?

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 30/09/2025

In a Sofia pub… good beer, and these here horseradish crisps totally slap. What a concept.

Unfinished glass of an IPA with a big bowl of crisps

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 21/09/2025

‘Foreign language institutes’ were or indeed are a thing in places like the ex-Soviet countries and China, ‘tis true. Modern Britain on the other hand…

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 10/09/2025

I don't suppose anyone in charge in globally minded Scotland will see this map and go 'huh, seems bad'

Map showing German provision at below-average-tariff institutions. There isn't any north of the Tyne.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 03/09/2025

A false friend for the ages: In some Latgalian dialects, the word for ‘cow’ (Standard Latvian _govs_, same root as _cow_, Old Irish _bó_, Latin _bos_, _bovine_ etc.) is [gusʲ], which is phonetically identical to the Russian word for _goose_ (Latvian _zuoss_, English _goose_, Latin _ānser_ etc.)

Dieser Palatalisierung unterliegen die Konsonanten im Infläntischen auch in der Stellung _hinter_ palatalen Vokalen… _gùś_ ‘Kuh’ (aus *_guovis_) in Liksna, Dagda, Jozefovo u.a.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 28/08/2025

Of all the books we might have lived through why does it have to be this one

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 25/08/2025

Some photos as August draws to a close. Scotland is all right, really.

The Forth Bridge in a sunny day, seen from the Forth Road Bridge. North Queensferry harbour in the foreground.

Two deer grazing. They have mighty impressive antlers.

Gullane beach on a sunny but blustery day

Loch Leven, with hills in the background

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 13/08/2025

See the analysis by Bermúdez-Otero 2011. My kids are both (Scottish) rhotic speakers and the difference between coda and onset [r] is very obvious. At one point youngest had [w] in onset but [ɹ]~[j] in coda, which was great fun.

If, as 1 have suggested, linking and intrusive Li] escapes the phonotactic restriction in (28c) because it surfaces in onset position, just like word-initial lil, then the reasons why the former undergoes lenition and the latter does not are not apparent on the surface: thus, r-lenition overapplies. However, this opaque pattern is easy to describe in stratal-cyclic terms (Kiparsky 1979: 437ff; McCarthy 1991: 203-4). Intrusive r is inserted at the word level after w-final nonhigh vowels in order to satisfy the constraint FINALC, i.e. *VwJ (McCarthy 1991: 203,
1993: 176), which outranks *CODA[r] at the word level." In the same cycle, the inserted r is targeted by coda lenition and undergoes a corresponding featural change: a plausible option, straightforwardly reflecting the early timing and increased magnitude of the tongue-root gesture in the phonetic realization of lenited [7], is to have the Dorsal node replace the Coronal node as the designated primary articulator, notated with an asterisk in (31) below (after Kenstowicz 1994: 149). At the phrase level, however, the relative ranking of FINALC and
*CODA[] is reversed: in consequence, word-final r undergoes deletion in preconsonantal and prepausal environments, but in prevocalic position it escapes into the onset, carrying with it the designation of Dorsal as primary articulator.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 27/06/2025

Satan is exactly right. Basically these things are human catnip. Relatedly: avoid these if you do not want to become addicted.

Packet of Tambov Wolf sunflower seeds. Sorry, Romanians, these are superior.

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Pavel Iosad @anghyflawn.net · 02/06/2025

Emailed my MP (who also happens to be a Secretary of State) and the response (after lots of quoting the white paper back at me) was not massively helpful either