Fun fact: "then" and "than" were basically not distinct in 17th century English. Both /e/ and /a/ were used for both senses of the word. (The quarto print of Shakespeare's sonnets uses in both senses almost exceptionlessly.) In 17th century poetry, either "then" or "than" may have either sense, and the choice between the two in spelling as in sound was basically a matter of rhyme and personal preference. For example in John Donne's ending to his famous elegy:

To teache thee I am naked first, why than
What needst thou have more cov'ring then a man Speaking of Donne, here’s a poem by him written in his own hand (the only poem so preserved). Note the lines:

"So ys the Blood sometymes; who ever ran
To Danger unimportund, hee was than
No better then a Sanguine vertuous man."

Here again the adverb is spelled rhyming with "man" and "ran". On the other hand, when Donne intends the comparative at non-rhyme (as in the very next line) he spells it () whereas we would use in spelling today.

My reading of "The Dark Night of the Soul" ("La Noche Oscura del Alma") by St. John of the Cross in a reconstruction of 16th century Spanish pronunciation (followed by my English translation) is now available publicly For this reading I chose to use a type of pronunciation reflected by the testimony of San Juan's contemporary López de Velasco, for whom all the sibilants were fricatives but a voicing distinction nevertheless existed.

https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1525976568077639680

It never ceases to amuse me that people listening to my readings of Camões (in a reconstruction of the pronunciation recorded by his contemporary Fernão de Oliveira) think it sounds Brazilian. Because not only did I not try to sound Brazilian, but I don't even know much about Brazilian Portuguese. Almost all my exposure to Portuguese has involved Europe.

Neither Dante nor anybody else in the Late Middle Ages seems to have had any idea that the Romance languages were the descendants of Latin.

One of those things that just seems so obvious in retrospect, but they really had no idea. During the 9th-11th centuries, people gradually came to think of Romance and Latin as separate languages, rather than simply different registers of the same language (as they had been thought of before).

Wolfe's argument that Gil's DUE vowel may have been /iu/ is utterly incoherent. First, because had he used a pronunciation /iu/ this would be easy to represent with <iu>, parallel to the <eu> that he uses in "beauty" <beuti>. But he manifestly does not do this and criticizes Hart for so doing. This cannot be an objection of the same type as <wið> for <with>

Redid my reading of Numbers 21:26-30 in Tiberian Hebrew. Available now publicly

patreon.com/posts/ballad-o… This may or may not be a very old text. Scholarly opinion is much divided as to what exactly it is

Short thread with my thoughts on medieval Chinese tones

In any language that has lexically contrastive tones, if it has any kind of rising tone, it will also have a falling tone. In both pitch-accent languages and full tonal languages, it’s possible for falling tones to exist without rising tones but there is AFAIK no tonal language (and only a handful of pitch-accent languages) that has ever been discovered where a rising tone existed w/o a falling tone.

I once was sitting in O’Hare airport reading a book of Latin poetry when a guy looking like a monk walks up to me looking utterly lost and asks “Loquerisne Latine”? (Do you speak Latin?) To which I answer “Ita, possumne te adiuvare?” (Yes, can I help you?.)

https://twitter.com/GrammarTable/status/1370246373728206848

Turned out he was indeed a Polish monk and knew only Polish and Latin. Had never been outside Poland before, or even seen the inside of an airport, and needed help finding his way.

That is my personal story of Latin as an auxlang.

Fun fact: We can reconstruct the proto-Germanic word for "Caesar". It's *Kaisaraz. It's one of the most securely datable loanwords you could possibly ask for in an ancient language. Thread... First, it can be no earlier than the 50s BC at the absolute earliest (when before then would the Germanic peoples have had reason to care about an obscure Roman cognomen?).

Ah yes the story of the priestess whom Apollo cursed never to have her prophecies believed, as retribution for refusing to have sex with him. What's the moral of the story? Is it that when a god gives you superpowers and expects sex in return, you better put out? Obey the gods or you'll end up like that wayward prophetess who got raped by Ajax in Athena’s temple and then forced into Agamemnon’s sexual service before being murdered by the latter’s wife, and deeply regretting her mistake of not having spread for Apollo.

A harder question to answer is "when did people start believing that Romance wasn't a single language but multiple different languages?"

Now we get into some real murky business. What I give in this thread is my opinion. I agree w/ people like Roger Wright on this

(Thread...)

https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1316355615686447104

Apart from Romanian and other Eastern Romance varieties, that process may — in my view — not have been complete until the early 13th century.

If in the 9th century somebody from Spain traveling in Gaul heard the vernacular Latin form of the Strasbourg Oath, they would probably have understood it more or less. Just as they might have had at most only moderate difficulty communicating with people there. Take the oath as we have it:

Pro Deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun saluament, d'ist di en auant, in quant Deus sauir et podir me dunat, si saluarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in adiudha et in cadhuna cosa si cum om per dreit son fradra saluar dift.

This lament for King Ricartz Còr de Leó, known in English as Richard Lionheart, was composed in 1199 when Ricartz died. (Thread...) Specifically, he died of an infected wound during an incident involving a crossbow, a pissed-off teenager, and a field medic who, as Aufretz l'Estranhs put it, was:
"com uns surgentz obrant
per prima vetz trencant "
(like a surgeon cutting for the very first time.)

I decided to translate the opening of the "Lay of Igor's Campaign" as if it were Germanic epic, using an adaptation of Germanic alliterative meter. Somewhere along the line this triggered the impulse to give the heroes' names in their de-slavicized Germanic forms. And, really, why not? Yngvarr was part of the Hrøriksson dynasty after all. Or rather Igor was part of the Ryurikovich dynasty.

Friendly wishes of Milusha for one Marena in a 12th century Novgorod Birchbark letter:

"Marena, may your cunt and clit drink well" (or: "get drunk")
(Маренко пеи пизда и сѣкыле) The letter also discusses the dowry for the upcoming marriage of a man named Snovid to some girl dubbed "Big Bride". Russian profanity has a long and illustrious history. There is almost certainly some kind of ritual context that we're missing here.

I have always found it incredibly weird that Latin learners approaching "real Latin" (god I hate that term) for the first time are generally not given appropriate texts.

(Thread...) Even if you restrict your choices to texts from the Republic and Empire, even if you avoid texts with any Christian coloring, there's still plenty to work with.
I've never understood why Caesar of all things is traditionally what learners have started off with.

When people ask "when did people stop speaking Latin as a native language?" I like to answer: “Well, it was still spoken into the 9th century, though at that point spoken Latin had become pretty different from the written language.”

(Thread...) The right question is not "when did people stop speaking the Latin language?"

It's "when did they start believing that the language they spoke wasn't Latin?"

And the answer to that is: not until pretty damn late.

Most of the time, I learn a language to read texts in it. The few cases where I've learned a language for conversational purposes have been a bit different. Learning to read is what I have most experience with. So here's a thread: 10 tips for learning to read a new language...

https://twitter.com/AhmadibnRachid/status/1314773484573261824

1) Proper motivation is key. Ideally there should be something in the language you really want to read. Note I said want, not need. If you just need to read something to satisfy external requirements, that is one thing. If you want to read something, that is another.

Recordings of me reading seven Old Arabic inscriptions with reconstructed vocalization, and translations of same, including a verse-rendering of the "Baal and Mot" fragment, which I believe is the oldest Arabic poetic text yet discovered. All are Safaitic, except for "Baal and Mot" which is in something weird, something apparently much older. I tacked the War Chant from Marabb al-Shurafa at the end. I include transcriptions in the South Arabian Musnad.

What era should we take our cue from, then, I wonder. Perhaps Classical Rome when Catullus could publicly call his enemy Mamurra a "fucked-out prick" (diffututa mentula).

https://twitter.com/sudharaniv1/status/1313757118286172160

A more civilized age when Martial could write:

Lesbia sē iūrat grātīs numquam esse futūtam.
Vērum est. Cum futuī vult, numerāre solet.

(She says you can't fuck her for free. It's true,
you wouldn't fuck her unless she paid you.)

I don’t know who needs to hear this but yes the bulk of Jāhilī poetry really is Pre-Islamic. It really does go back one way or another to those generations just before Islam.

Interpolated, recombined and possibly selectively remembered? Sure. Some material has probably fallen out, and some other stuff has clearly gotten sutured in. But there is zero reason to think there was any kind of large scale forgery.