Mostly historical linguistics. Main focus right now is Nuristani (Katë). Otherwise Afroasiatic and everything from Tokyo to Timbuktu.

Cologne, Germany
Joined July 2010
яཀོب 半男 retweeted
FLI has announced the publication of Aruswari — meaning “tasty words” — the first-ever poetry anthology in the Kateviri language. #Kateviri Full Story Here: fli-online.org/fli-publishes…
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My review article of Zoller's "Indo-Aryan and the Linguistic History and Prehistory of North India" is now out in "Kratylos": kratylos.reichert-online.org…
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Now out in Bhāṣā (open access): My article on Gāndhārī orthography/phonology and how it relates to the modern Indo-Aryan languages of the far northwest: doi.org/10.30687/bhasha/2785…
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яཀོب 半男 retweeted
New Akkadian dictionary project at Leipzig: saw-leipzig.de/de/presse/pre…
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Now available for download from the publication server of the University of Cologne: The revised and expanded version of my dissertation “A Grammatical Description of the Katë Language (Nuristani)” kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/73732/ Proper book publication coming a while later.
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No more excuses. The international community must force Israel to end the occupation. Responding to the ICJ’s advisory opinion, B'Tselem says: Over the past 57 years, Israel has demonstrated it has no intention of ending the occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem...
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Proto Sarada writings: A new #Indology project @Uni_Wue & @unil is focussing on a hitherto little-researched period of ancient Indian history: the time of transition from #Buddhism to #Hinduism in the northwest of #India. Funded @dfg_public @snf_ch ➡️ uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and…
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яཀོب 半男 retweeted
"What I'm the most scared of is that the President is using us as justification for slaughter. That he's making Jews the face of the American war machine and I want my community to be clear-eyed and consider what that means for us.... it doesn't make us safe." -@LGreenbergCall
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Stellungnahme: Wir fordern, dass die Ausladung Nancy Frasers von der Albertus Magnus Professur an der Universität zu Köln zurückgenommen wird. Ihr findet den gesamten Text hier im Thread und auf unserer Webseite: criticaltheoryinberlin.de/in…
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A right-wing Israeli mob came to my family’s home yesterday to search for me, threatening close family members who fled to another town in the middle of the night. I am still getting death threats and had to cancel my flight home. This happened after Israeli media and German politicians absurdly labeled my Berlinale award speech - where I called for equality between Israelis and Palestinians, a ceasefire and an end to apartheid - as ‘antisemitic’. The appalling misuse of this word by Germans, not only to silence Palestinian critics of Israel, but also to silence Israelis like me who support a ceasefire that will end the killing in Gaza and allow the release of the Israeli hostages - empties the word antisemitism of meaning and thus endangers Jews all over the world. As my grandmother was born in a concentration camp in Libya and most of my grandfather’s family was murdered by Germans in the holocaust, I find it particularly outraging that German politicians in 2024 have the audacity to weaponize this term against me in a way that endangered my family. But above all else, this behavior puts Palestinian co-director Basel Adra’s life in danger, who lives under a military occupation surrounded by violent settlements in Masafer Yatta. He is in far greater danger than I am. I’m happy our award winning film, No Other Land, is sparking an important international debate on this issue - and I hope that millions of people watch it when it comes out this year. Sparking a conversation is why we made it. You can have harsh criticism of what me and Basel said on stage without demonizing us. If this is what you’re doing with your guilt for the holocaust - I don’t want your guilt.
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Good new commentary article from Piha, Heikkilä & Häkkinen on some common errors made in interdisciplinary research on prehistory; in particular on still-lingering echoes of equating languages, archeological cultures or genetic groups with peoples (or each other).
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Obsessed with this Nuristani folklore song 🏔 #Nuristan
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яཀོب 半男 retweeted
Good morning form cloudy and rainy Barge Matal, Nuristan 🇦🇫 @Nuristantribune
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A short etymological note on Bactrian λαδο 'law' and its likely descendants in Nuristani, which I wrote around two years ago, is now finally out in the Bulletin of SOAS (Open Access): doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X230…
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.@mashagessen for @NewYorker on Germany and Europe's perverse Holocaust memory culture, and how it frustrates discussion and understanding of Israel and Gaza: newyorker.com/news/the-weeke…
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My impression after 1 month of learning Sumerian: Sumerologists are doing something as routine practice that scholars of Chinese or Japanese have never attempted (probably for good reason): unambiguous transliteration of logographs while also indicating the pronunciation intended
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That would be like saying Japanese ki₁ 木, ki₂ 切 and ki₃ 着 might have been pronounced differently because they are written with different characters. Writing Sumerian ku₁, ku₂, ku₃ as ku, kú, kù as is common practice seems especially misleading to me.
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Maybe the issue is the multifunctionality of cuneiform signs both as phonographs and as logographs, which doesn’t exist in this form in modern Japanese, but nowadays it should be possible to just type the cuneiform signs as they are and transcribe below without index numbers
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