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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀

@mattitiahu.bsky.social
3K followers 813 following 2.9K posts

Philologist and historical linguist. Formerly UCPH, MPI-SHH, and Cambridge. Mostly Ancient Greek, comparative Indo-European, and nonsense. (ⲛ̄ⲧⲟϥ/ⲛ̄ⲧⲟⲟⲩ) orcid.org/0009-0001-1782-5223 brill.com/display/title/57781 iecor.clld.org

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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 14h
After making it past the opening crawl of the first two chapters of Lingua Latina per se illustrata, we're ready to start learning about Roman culture... LLPSI: Here's some Roman culture:
A dialogue about a boy beating his younger sister because she's singing too loudly and laughing about it afterwards.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Another morning, another headline story to the effect of: "I fed my data into the plagiarism machine. Who could have thought that it would then plagiarise my data?"
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
100 hours into Elden Ring and I still have no fucking idea what this game is about.
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James K. Tauber @jtauber.com · 27/09/2026
A little something I've been thinking about for a while and finally started working on... jtauber.github.io/asterisk/ Feedback welcome!
jtauber.github.io
Asterisk
A workbench for comparative philology.
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B.S.W. Barootes @barootes.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
And yet I was only allowed to access a 1955 B.Litt. thesis, the only lengthy study on Robert Braybrooke, in person and take notes (no photos). I had to sign a register of those who had ever accessed the thesis.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Cambridgecore: Not an online eBooks platform, but rather a bunch of tweed-clad students in a teashop on King's Parade.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It's pretty impressive how much this synthesis of linguistics and archaeology got it right before the aDNA revolution came only only a couple of years later.
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Sampsa Holopainen @sampsaholopainen.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This paper (by me, Terhi Honkola and Samuli Helama) on possible connections between the 4.2 ka climatic event and the early spread of the Uralic languages was published last week.
sciencedirect.com
Extreme events and the spread of Uralic languages
In this paper we present novel aspects concerning the possible connection between the 4.2 ka climatic event and the early spread of Uralic languages f…
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Corey Pein @coreypein.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If this is true, why has Obsidian been silent about their subordination while Bethesda and Microsoft make the statements?
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
ok this is a good bit
theonion.com
Xi Jinping Impressed With How Much Trump’s English Has Improved Since Last Visit
WASHINGTON—Marveling at how his American counterpart’s grasp of the difficult language had progressed, Chinese leader Xi Jinping told reporters Thursday that he was deeply impressed with how much Pres...
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
My dad had one of these things and despite him being a bit of a weird Reform-voting libertarian, he had a very strong sense of professional ethics for which this was a symbol for him.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Agnes Callard, why does that name sound familiar? Oh wait... oh no...
web.archive.org
Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds
The philosopher, who lives with her husband and her ex-husband, searches for what one human can be to another human.
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Cate Denial @cjdenial.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
If we were truly talking "top academic talent" a) Canada would be investing in the people who already work there and b) people who are teaching 5/5 at a community college and changing people's lives on a shoestring would be top of the list.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Why does everything feel like this nowadays?
It's the Scooby Doo meme revealing the face of the dastardly villain, and the villain in this instance is Peter Thiel.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I've rapidly gone from "wait, what?" to doing a bit of googling to find out that this is real to asking "how many tenure-track jobs could have been spent on this instead?"
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Annie C Burman @anniecburman.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Everyone's favourite little guy (actually very large guy), the Volsinian cippus shaped like a warrior's head. Ink drawing by O.A. Danielsson, based on Perali. The inscription is CIE 5000 = ET Vs 1.113. The illustration board has yellowed from the envelope it's been kept in. #etruscan
Ink drawing of a carved stone head wearing a helmet, with an Etruscan inscription.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
ngl i'm real mad right now
In Silksong I just spent a very long time after multiple failed attempts to successfully traverse an extremely long platforming challenge with no save points along the entire route (except for the one that was a trap, i knew it was a trap and I sat on that bench anyway) only to finally die in a boss arena that was at the end of it.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
This is a good take.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Happy American Labour Day.
Triptych:

Scene 1: 3 Hours for Work
Scene 2: 6 Hours for Rest
Scene 3: 15 Hours for Posting (Pictured: Beavis at a Computer)
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Professor Nutella @jpnudell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I would love this. I also remember a moment at the start of COVID when I was asked to change modalities to fully remote over a weekend.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Just got my hard copy of a little summer project that I helped out a bit with: In advance of this Fall's Cambridge Greek Play, Antonia Ruppel organised the creation of a basic student reader of Euripides' Ion using the play's performance text.
Cover with the branding of this year's Cambridge Greek Play (Euripides' Ion)There are two ways to learn how to read ancient literary texts well. One, slowly read short bits of text and  nd all the needed information yourself, with the help of a grammar and a dictionary. Two, read a lot, at much higher speed, with all the needed information already provided in a systematic, easy-to-access way. This Reader aims at letting you do the latter. It presents the text of Euripides’ Ion as performed at the 2026 Cambridge Greek Play. The text on each left-hand page is complemented by three elements on the right: a set of notes that help with syntactic di*culties and o+er stylistic and other relevant background information; a running vocabulary which also identi es forms that perhaps are not straightforwardly recognisable; and a translation that aims at being literal, not literary, and thus at helping you understand how the original text says what it says.
The best teaching materials are those you know well: so do take a moment to  nd the list of abbreviations and the reference vocabulary list (which includes all those words not in the running vocabulary because they are rather frequent – consider memorising those words on the list that you do not know yet). Should you  nd any mistakes or have any other feedback on how to improve this Reader, please do send an email to ion.reader.2026@gmail.com. Thank you! Sincere thanks go to all those who made this project possible by giving signi cant amounts of their time and expertise to each create the commentary, running vocabulary and translation for a passage of the play: Anthony Bowen Patryk Bratuś James Clackson Nicholas Denyer John Gibert Richard Hunter Rebecca Lämmle Krishnan Ram-Prasad Richard Rawles George Robertson Matthew Scarborough Jo Willmott Should this Reader have made you want to know more, take a look at the editions of the Ion
by Gunther Martin (De Gruyter 2018) or John Gibert (Cambridge University Press 2019). Antonia Ruppel, August 2026
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Martin Haspelmath @haspelmath.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
100 years of the "morph(eme)" – Bloomfield's foundational article came out in September 1926. dlc.hypotheses.org/4485
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I love Werner Herzog so much.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Watching a Guy Fieri video on Scandinavian cuisine in Chicago and the absolute butchering of Danish and Swedish pronunciation by the restauranteur himself is absolutely killing me.
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ὣς φάτο Ἡσίοδος @hesiod-bot.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
217 καὶ Μοίρας καὶ Κῆρας ἐγείνατο νηλεοποίνους, /kaì moíraːs kaì kɛ̂ːras egéːnato nɛːleopoínoːs/ And she gave birth to Fates and and pitilessly punishing Dooms | – – | – – | – ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ | – – |
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Mia Mulder @miamulder.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
So I've suddenly started seeing a TON of videos and content pushed in my algorithm about some city council meeting or administrative meeting in a Canadian city with the shared vibe being "Canada's government is poorly run" I am a Swedish woman in the eu and I never see this shit before yesterday
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Casey Dunn @caseywdunn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
My new book, Phylogenetic Biology, is now published. Available online for free at dunnlab.org/phylogenetic... . Physical copies can be purchased at shop.lightningsource.com/b/085?params... or your favorite bookstore.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
*taps the sign*
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Reading something on calculating the size of the 1600s French army (...yes, I am somewhat behind) and it is really funny as a Romanist the sort of, "but if we use THIS evidence, we get this number, but this OTHER pile of evidence." Look, Tacitus told me there were 25 legions. He seems trustworthy.
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ὣς φάτο Ἡσίοδος @hesiod-bot.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
211 Nὺξ δ᾽ ἔτεκε στυγερόν τε Μόρον καὶ Κῆρα μέλαιναν /nùks d é̞te̞ke̞ stuge̞ró̞n te̞ mó̞ro̞n kaì kɛ̂ːra mé̞lainan/ And Night gave birth to dreadful Fate and black Doom | – ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ | – ⏑ ⏑ | – – | – ⏑ ⏑ | – – |
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
*taps the sign*
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
I just found this out from the Indogermanische Gesellschaft Facebook page that The Speakers of Indo-European And Their World. Proceedings of the 17th Fachtagung of the Society for Indo-European Studies (Basel, 9–12. September 2024) is finally out, and in Open Access! (huzzah!)
medialibrary.reichert-verlag.de
The Speakers of Indo-European and Their World
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David Stifter 🍵📄🦊 @davidstifter.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
New publication: The article "Caland verbs in Celtic" by Stefan Höfler and myself has just been published in: L. Grestenberger, V. Reiter, M. Malzahn (eds), Deadjectival Verb Formation in Indo-European and Beyond. Berlin: Language Science Press 2026, pp. 83-113
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Andrea Mann @andreamann.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
"By writing, you are literally firing up your brain and therefore stirring up your conscious thoughts and something new emerges. You are not, or at least not always, transcribing something already present in your conscious thoughts.“ LOVE this piece. www.historians.org/perspectives...
historians.org
How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around) – AHA
Writing is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Honestly this just sounds like Dream Theater wrote it in 1991.
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David Stifter 🍵📄🦊 @davidstifter.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Some more snippets from my recent holiday in Austria. We visited the mighty Benedictine monastery of St Paul im Lavanttal (Carinthia), world-famous for keeping the only copy of the poem of the Irish scholar and his cat Pangur Bán (lower part of the left page). Above Messe ocus Pangur Bán,... /1
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
Well, as a lifelong collector of old weird books that was a really upsetting 404 Media story to wake up to today.
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Dr Victoria Austen @vickyausten.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
“Despite their compromised positions, adjuncts still win teaching awards, publish books, and contribute widely to scholarship, literature, and the arts. And they do this even though their academic research and writing—meant to be supported by a tenured position—has been relegated to unpaid labor.”
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Dudes rock.
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Harrassowitz Verlag @harrassowitz-v.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Niya Prakrit, a Central Asian Gāndhārī dialect, was the administrative language of Shanshan (3–4 c. CE). N. Schoubben shows the strong Iranian (Bactrian) influence, but rejects a “Tocharian C” substrate, and argues Kushan officials shaped it. #openaccess www.harrassowitz-ver...
Cover of the advertised book.
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波鴻漫錄 || Sven Osterkamp @schrift-sprache.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
"Such a formidable word as Staatsschuldenverwaltungshauptkassenoberrechnungskommissar can be most faithfully rendered by Kokusai-Seiri-Kyoku-Kaikei-kwancho [国債整理局会計官長]." 🥴 < Nitobé 1927 Japanese Traits and Foreign Influences @ archive.org/details/japa...
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depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
not to be confused with quesadilla
Ķ
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Quesadilla.
Ķ (k-cedilla) is the 17th letter of the Latvian alphabet.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
This is something I'd like to see vigorously investigated instead of endless 'is college woke!?' pieces in The Atlantic and the NYT - because my sense is this is correct, humanities courses subsidize more expensive fields. But that prompts further questions about decisions being made to cut them.
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beetle moses @beetlemoses.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Two year anniversary of when I first posted this comic
Two panel comic. Panel 1: an anglerfish is washed up on the ocean shore, laying in the tide. It thinks to itself, “it’s so beautiful.” Panel 2: wide shot of the beach, rocky cliffs, and sky at sunset, with the anglerfish still laying in place. The anglerfish continues thinking to itself, “I might have never known.”
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Bad Ancient/ Owen Rees @badancient.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
In my life time? Gladiator, 300, Troy, and Alexander all come to mind and all since the year 2000. What happens each time is people say it will save the study of ancient history, it is loved for a bit before the next big thing happens: all while ancient history depts across the world shut.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
One of these days I'm gonna sit down and watch The Phantom Menace for the second time since I saw it exactly once in the theatre and I will find it a revelatory experience.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Stumbling through head-over-heels through the Albanian internet trying to figure out whether some Greco-Albanian periodicals published in 19th century Alexandria have ever been digitised while still not *really* knowing how to read this stuff has been one way to spend my evening, I guess.
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Logeion Greek-Latin @logeiongklat.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Greek verbs always have nice surprises: (ὀρύσσω, deep into the entry) "of a wrestler, dig into, gouge a tender part, τὠφθαλμώ Ar. Av. 442, cf. Pax 899, Philostr. VA 8.25; gouge out, ὀφθαλμὸν ὤρυττέν τις ὥσπερ ἰχθύος Antiph. 119." ==> Ready for anything the day may bring. 😎
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I wrote a Lycophron joke but nobody knew what it meant.
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Matthew Scarborough 𓀀 @mattitiahu.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
So weird being an out of work Hellenist watching all of this.
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