Imagining an honest, genuinely inquisitive move to link the medieval to the "diverse" in historical linguistics—e.g. a study that examines to what degree British and American dialects preserve the morphological distinction between Old English -ing vs.-ende (today's -ing vs. -in) A redundant exercise, because linguistics is already inherently "diverse" in that it involves the study of difference and demands that you analyze human phenomena on their own terms—but nonetheless, wondering what it would mean if calls for "diversity" were made in good faith

Something that slightly bothers me is how the adjective "High" in language names is often misunderstood—and often used, in the names of fictional languages—to mean "high class", "high status", "refined", etc. This originates from two different places. The traditional dialect continuum of continental Germanic is divided into Low, Middle, and High German—a terminology that refers to elevation, like Upper and Lower Egypt. Low German is spoken on the plains by the North Sea and Baltic.

Jfc. 166k likes for a blisteringly awful misrepresentation of history. Medieval cathedrals and other buildings were quite famously built by free, paid, skilled craftsmen belonging to guilds, which were something vaguely akin to modern-day unions.

https://twitter.com/4eo/status/1825712470750646779

Also more likely than not the tweet is just inspired by dumb Monty Python "hitting boards on head" depictions of a miserable Middle Ages, but to be more cynical I feel like it's kind of selling a "We built these streets!" third worldist "African slaves in medieval Europe" message

What's more, when we were discussing how few Indians and Asians were in the area, I mentioned the lack of a local Jewish community—and he admitted he had no idea if or how Jews and Christians were different, and that most people in India had no idea, either.

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1816995981692448834

I explained that the main difference between Jews and Christians is that Jews don't worship Jesus—which I know is a terribly reductive way to put it, but if you're navigating American society and want to avoid a religious faux pas, it's probably the first thing you ought to know.

Thomistic Cowboy
Thomistic Minuteman
Thomist on Bunker Hill
Thomistic Pilgrim
Thomistic Frontiersman
Thomistic Jacksonian
Marian Goodwife
Thomistic Annie Oakley

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1807943797776461831

Basically all of the charm and American-ness of American Catholicism lies in how it's defined by old-time aristocratic colonial cultures or intensely prole-coded immigrant cultures

Lmao. Someone on Reddit wanted the /r/askhistorians take on my Middle East thread.

They assume that I am a "Western Supremacist" because, uh...? Very much "Your claims are false because you are X, and you are X because you made those claims" I don't think I ever said that the people of Islamic Egypt or Mesopotamia didn't think of themselves as the *physical descendants* of ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. I mean, maybe they did, maybe they didn't—I'm not informed on that.

Also, public service announcement: Please stop using "Bantu" as a synonym for "black African." It makes you sound like an idiot with a degree in race science from Twitter university. I'm really sorry to everyone involved but it is simply the case that linguistic categories are not isomorphic with genetic categories.

The "North Africans could have been black" thing is truly desperate and terribly annoying; the historians who do it will beg and plead with audiences to consider such-and-such individual North Africans who might be perceived as black by contemporary Americans... ...No matter that modern-day Arab and Berber North Africans consider themselves completely distinct populations from black Africans, and nobody in the US or anywhere else thinks of North African countries as "black countries".

Georgia and Armenia are the main geopolitical remnants of a formerly much more widespread Christian civilization in western Asia but they're often shunted into the cultural or even racial category of "European" or "White" just to simplify things The same goes with Greeks tbh. Like, the classification of the eastern Aegean islands as "European" is clearly political in nature, and Cyprus is obviously part of Asia. The ancient and medieval Greeks who lived in the interior of Asia Minor were certainly not "European".

Academic medievalists claim to be concerned with the misuse of medieval history to revive 19th century "racist tropes", but the main proposition they seem intent on quashing is the idea that Britain and Ireland's population was >99% phenotypically European until c. 1965. It's very funny that medievalists are telling themselves that they're bravely fighting a revival of 19th-century "race science" when they're actually just the rear guard for British community stakeholders who really wish it was true that Britain always looked like a Netflix show

Quite a few prominent contributors on /r/askhistorians have a vicious and ideological axe to grind on the topic of race in medieval Europe. Take the response to this question, which from the outset seems to set up a strawman (capital-w "White Europe") to be knocked down. (What does OP mean by "White Europe"? What will the academics in the replies take it to mean? Of course, they will take "White Europe" to mean the most extreme and uncharitable thing possible.)

Back in the classic era of Tumblr, normie social justice believers would occasionally discover that underlying the desire for recognition of black historical accomplishments was a widespread Yakub-esque belief that black people were the original progenitors of all human societies "Wait. You can't seriously mean that black people invented *literally all* genres of music?"

"When I say all I mean ALL!!"

"...do you think black people invented Peking Opera???"

"YES!!!"

An NPR-American locked in a Saw-style deathtrap that can only be escaped by recording oneself reading Byron's Don Juan—forcing the impossible choice of either using the uncouth and racist Anglicized pronunciations of Spanish words, or sounding like a dunce by ruining the rhymes.

Some of these are sooo good. Lopé/copy/shop—he; so fine as/Donna Inez

Some South Sudanese also wanted to do this, proposing "Azania" as the name of the country, a Greek toponym for regions south of Nubia

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1798886817137131976

I thought the Ambazonia movement also chose their name this way, but apparently it's of native derivation. Terrible name, in any case.

Users on /r/Ireland fight tooth and nail to dismiss claims of demographic change. "It's not statistically possible." "It's fearmongering by people with limited intelligence." "It's not true, but who cares, anyway?"





"Their descendants will be Irish. Children of immigrants born and reared in Ireland are Irish."

"No, it doesn't upset me."

Discussions of LGBT in Muslim countries is constantly hampered by the impression of casual commentators on both sides that "persecuted/killed for being gay" means a formal arrest and prosecution and a judicial execution in accordance with classical Islamic jurisprudence There is basically only one country in the world where shari'a executions of homosexuals are actually on the table as an outcome, and that is Iran. Afaik, even in Saudi Arabia it is an extremely unlikely outcome and "offenders" are normally handled through lower-level procedures

There are still plenty of Americans who don't know much about Islam. But a lot of Muslim and MENA online discoursers like to think that everything the average American knows about Muslims and the Middle East comes from Aladdin and 24, which hasn't been true for a long time. I think the more typical "lowest common denominator" type of misconception about Islam these days is not understanding that a lot of stuff about ISIS was genuinely aberrant and weird even to conservative and "radical" forms of Islam.

Two years ago I made a thread discussing these "Talmud quote compilation" memes. The nice thing is that the entire Talmud is available online for anyone to read for free at Sefaria, so we can actually follow up on these citations. Let's take a look at a couple more.

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1559967977860210689

Let's start with one of the ones that looks more weird and tyrannical than heinous and barbaric: The image claims that Eruvin 21b says "Whosoever disobeys the rabbis deserves death and will be punished by being boiled in hot excrement in hell." What does Eruvin 21b actually say?

The Near East underwent a timeline/periodization reset c. 500-300 BC. The Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian empires were "early modern" states that consciously built on a 2500-year cultural inheritance; the Achaemenid Empire was "modernity", ancient globalization in action. In my analogy I liken the Neo-Assyrian state to the Mamluks and the Neo-Babylonian state to the Ottomans; not only did the latter overcome the former, both states represented a highly sophisticated revival and culmination of a cultural tradition.

A funny example of this are the late Roman and medieval forgeries people wrote purporting to be letters between New Testament figures and prominent 1st-Century Romans, all written as if they all already knew Christianity was "a thing".

https://twitter.com/royllovians/status/1780449817182822867

Someone in the 11th century forged a letter from Tiberius to Pontius Pilate, in which Tiberius gets mad at Pilate "for crucifying Jesus", as if Tiberius already knew who Jesus was and accepted the same assumptions about the cosmological import of his life as a medieval Christian.

The caricature of "Ethnic groups who have always hated each other since forever" does the Balkans a disservice... It should receive more attention as a post-imperial region formed by migration, Roman/Byzantine (re)colonization, Western and Ottoman colonization, and decolonization Not to say that such a story doesn't involve lots of interethnic hatred—just that the pop culture narrative inaccurately naturalizes and flattens it, when some of it is basically 20th century in origin, while other aspects have their origins centuries ago in colonial domination