listening to the pronunciation samples wikipedia offers of different types of consonants and you know what, I don't believe some of these are actually different sounds. I think this is some audiophile shit like gold-plated cables.
Decades after saber-toothed cat bones were discovered in Oregon, two scientists realized they belonged to a previously unidentified species. Cayuse scholars helped name the feline, which they say shows their language persists.
Fossils of the massive feline were found in the 1950s on ancestral Weyíiletpuu (the name for Cayuse people in the Nez Perce language they later adopted) lands in today’s eastern Oregon, where the cat shared the earth with giant camels and giant sloths five to nine million years ago. Scientists only recently identified the fossils as a new species.
The full name of the new cat is Machairodus lahayishupup.
Cash Cash, who taught linguistics for 10 years at the University of Arizona, took on the task of finding a Cayuse name for the cat, searching through documents of the original language, looking for “any correlation to cat or cat species.”
He was able to compare Cayuse words from the earliest Smithsonian records in 1829 with later documents from 1888 containing similarities that allowed him to reconstruct a name.
The genus Machairodus comes from the Greek and Latin words for “dagger tooth.” The Cayuse words Lahayis Hupup (pronounced Leh-HIGH-ees-hoop-oop), translate to “ancient wild cat” or “old wild cat.” Taken together the full species name roughly translates to “ancient wild cat with dagger teeth.”
A ceremonial naming, a common tribal celebration in which a name in the Native/Indigenous language is given to an eligible tribal member, will be scheduled when COVID-19 protocols are eased for the community.
…
Since the 18th century, the norm has been to name new species using Greek or Latin, “but this cat didn’t live in Italy or Greece, and we wanted to give it a name in a language indigenous to the landscape in which it did live,” Orcutt said.
Working with Indigenous institutions like the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, he said, is a way for paleontologists “to recognize the importance of that context and of including Indigenous voices in our field.”
“It means a lot to me to be able to collaborate with the tribes on whose traditional lands I do my field work and to be able to give this amazing animal a name with real local significance, rather than some phrase from the dead European language,” Orcutt wrote in an email. “On a larger scale, I think and certainly hope that this name is just one part of a larger pattern in our field of recognizing that the fossils we study come — unless you’re working in Antarctica — from someone’s native land.”
“Science names the world,” Cash Cash said. “Indigenous knowledge can make a contribution, even when it isn’t cataloged or documented, and that is profound. I think the opportunity exists for Indigenous groups to make contributions in this way. … It provides a rare opportunity not just for paleontology, but for the world of tribal people as well. To name it in the way we did allows us to express ourselves and be who we are.”
…
The Cayuse language was an isolate that had no words and speech patterns in common with other Northwest languages. Its last fluent speakers died in the 1940s. Over time, the Cayuse people started speaking Nez Perce.
Tribal dictionaries contain no more than 400 Cayuse words, said Bobbie Conner, director at Tamastslikt. However, some old Cayuse words are still used to describe places, and tribal members still carry Cayuse names.
“Naming the cat is an opportunity for us to keep the Cayuse language alive, but it also recognizes fossils collected from our homeland over six decades ago still have stories to be discovered,” Conner said.
Cash Cash, who prefers the term “dormant” to “extinct,” said the language will never be revived, but it also hasn’t faded away.
“The ability to use what is in these sparse records really is astonishing when you think about it, because Cayuse language has been classified as extinct for quite a long time,” Cash Cash said.
Connecting the Cayuse language to ancient history “is its own kind of blessing” because it sustains the language and “also ties us to the ancientness and the landscape of our past,” Conner said.
“This is a unique opportunity to make the world aware of not only the fossil, but of the language,” she added.
Said Cash Cash, “Even if you are alone and speaking withoutanother person present, the words still have meaning and the words still are heard by the world around us. It’s kind of like the elders tell us that names echo across the earth and when they echo across the earth, the earth receives that and recognizes that those names are being spoken. So, the land and earth hears when we speak the language.”
“It comes down to a speaker uttering the words of a language,” he added. “The real value, at least in the perspective of our community, is that the cat species found and identified is in and of itself saying the language is alive in some way. It isn’t extinct. As our elders say, ‘The language hasn’t faded away.’”
when you think about it tho pliny the elder is kind of the funniest guy in the world like. he wrote all these books about natural history that he was wrong about where he confidently claims things like “some animals only have blood during certain parts of the year” and then when mt. vesuvius erupted and destroyed pompeii and herculaneum he said “oh mt vesuvius is exploding? let me go check it out” and then he died
A humanitarian and political crisis, with no clear resolution.
so.. this is not something i usually post about, but i see zero airtime regarding this. this is beyond a “humanitarian crisis”. this is a genocide. it is absolutely devastating to read about what is happening in Tigray and not be able to do anything about it. just.. please take a second to read about what is happening and sign this petition.
My advocacy for the preservation of minority languages has nothing to do with the fact that they are interesting/fascinating/any other adjective of that nature
Minority languages deserve protection because they are important, and they are valuable
The worth of a minority language is not determined by the entertainment it can provide to outsiders
While I believe that all languages are beautiful and unique, it shouldn't matter that a language is ugly, or boring or "useless"
Yes, Celtic folk music is beautiful, but that is not the reason for preserving Celtic languages
I fully agree that minority languages and their cultures should be seen as beautiful, especially as they're often treated as being ugly. I also agree that this should be on the terms of the speakers, not a label given by outsiders.
My main point was in response to people replying to my rant about language preservation, saying that minority languages are "fascinating" as if that's the only reason we should care about preserving them.
But yes, speakers of minority languages and the cultures they belong to should absolutely be able to say that their language is beautiful, and there is a huge problem of majority language speakers finding minority languages ugly, uneducated, uncivilised etc which desperately needs addressing
Frankly to me I almost see it the other way round - from a linguistic science point of view we want to maintain minority languages precisely because they're ordinary i.e. they provide just as much insight into language in general as say English and therefore by extension are equally worthy of attention and preservation; from a more general perspective, similarly, I think minority languages are worthy of preservation because fundamentally they are all worthy of respect because fundamentally it's about recognising the inherent worth of all human beings.
Languages are worth preserving because. they. exist.
Like with the protection of biodiversity, the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity must be detached from the capitalist notion that they need to be “useful” or “precious” to be worth the effort.
Yes, because when Trump dies and thinks he’s going to be king shit in the afterlife, ea-nasir is going to one-shot him with a shitty copper ingot upside his empty orange fucking head
Semitic Languages You Haven’t Heard Of — 16 Rajab, 1442 AH
(Before you read this, note that purple is important information, blue is not as necessary but good to know, and red is information that is otherwise wrong but may appear commonly online)
Sabaic, a Semitic language of Saba
What is the language called in English and in itself?
This is actually a wildly interesting question because there’s no evidence of what the speakers called the language, but plenty of evidence of what they called themselves. In specific theres literary “dialects” of Sabaic that have more specific names in literature such a Himyaritic, Radmanitic, Amaritic, and so forth but none of these written varieties have specific self designatory nomenclature—so essentially there’s no right or wrong here per say. There is one issue nomenclature wise specific to older literature, primarily in German and Italian, where it’s referred to simply as ‘Altsüdarabischen’ (Old South Arabian) or ‘subarabiche’ (South Arabian) because there was yet to be a distinction made between the epigraphic Sayhadic languages of southern Arabia; but just know that Sabaic and/or Sabaean are pretty uncontroversial names regardless of the specifics of the time period.
Where was the language spoken?
This is a rather interesting question because the two languages (Razihit, Faifi), and single speech variety (Rijal Alma‘), most well known for plausibly being linked to Sayhadic and Sabaic in specific happen to all be outside of the heartland of where Sabaic was written. Sabaic was clearly the written Lingua Franca of the Yemeni highlands for the majority of antiquity prior to the advent of Islam but as will be discussed later, written Sabaic and spoken Sabaic might’ve held a lot of differences in many cases—this may include our understanding of its distribution of native speakers. Being Sabaic was used in writing on both sides of the Red Sea it’s safe to assume that native speakers and people using the language in written contexts don’t exactly correlate, but regardless I did find a map of Sabaic’s distribution in Multhoff (2019):
How many speakers does it have?
Well, none, of course. Sabaic and the script it’s written in have been out of usage for well over a millennium albeit Razihit in specific might be a descendant of the language—so for most speakers, they shifted to Arabic, while Razihit developed out of Late Sabaic as a rare offshoot that prevailed due to seclusion. But in its heyday Sabaic was the Lingua Franca of southern Red Sea trade to the point where its adoption by Pre-Aksumite elites in the northwestern Horn of Africa was seen as a mark of prestige (per Phillipson 2011). So while Sabaic has no speakers, it might have a descendant or two and in antiquity it’s speech population extended past the sphere of native speakers.
What language family does it belong to?
Sabaic happens to be the most widely known member of the Sayhadic sub-branch of Central Semitic—the issue here being the most well known member of a rather overlooked family isn’t really being well known. The Sayhadic languages are somewhat of a niche interest for Semitic enthusiasts and its part of the fact that most of the seminal work (in terms of data as opposed to uncontroversial insight) happens to be outside of English academia; hence why many English-speaking language enthusiasts have typically not heard much about the Sayhadic languages. This isn’t the first Sayhadic language of my post series of course, but it’s the one that there’s the most data on—it would so happen that the Razihit language of northern Yemen is likely a descendant of Sabaic, but given the fact of the existence of Razihit and the possible descendant Faifi there’s a likehood that there could be pockets of “Neo-Sabaean” languages all throughout Southwestern Saudi Arabia and Northern Yemen and they’ve simply been masked by adstrate influence from Arabic. I should clarify this before ending this portion that Sayhadic languages, although associated much with the existence of Afrosemitic in older literature, are not closely related to them and are not part of a “South Semitic” grouping. Both ideas are defunct, and our understanding of Semitic taxonomy is always evolving.
Does it have a writing system?
Well of course! Sabaic as an epigraphic language does have a writing system known as Muśnad (IPA: *muɬnad) and thus writing system would survive through the Fidäl script used in Ethiopia and Eritrea—its an abjad meaning it does not have graphemes for vowels and thus is purely consonantal. The writing system, both in monumental and in personal, cursive form known as Zabūr (IPA: *zabuːr) are listed in Stein (2011):
What is it like phonologically?
Well, Sabaic is a hit or miss phonologically in the sense that the reconstruction might have some issues. I have my own opinions on the sibilants, being I’ve sat down and done comparative work, but regardless the rest of the reconstruction is rather solid outside of the sibilants and in theory Sayhadic languages in general (minus of course Razihit and possibly Faifi) retain a number of phonological archaisms that can be assumed to have had been lost in the rest of Central Semitic. We know next to nothing about the vowels, but I’m sure eventual comparison to Razihit in particular may better inform the situation because as it is now it’s heavily assumed to be Arabic-like. The inventory of Sabaic is as follows, but I left the sibilants open because you know, reasons:
What are some grammatical features?
What’s rather interesting in this regard is we simply may not know everything about Sabaic—as mentioned in Avanzini (2014:6) it’s difficult to tell if we have a complete picture of any Sayhadic language and there’s things we surely don’t know about Sabaic due to writing styles and the written language likely differing from the spoken language. In Stein (2008) it’s mentioned that there’s features mentioned by Arab grammarians in the early Islamic period that we don’t find in monumental inscriptions but occasionally in minuscule inscriptions, such as evidence for the definite article *an- (which is still in Razihit). There’s other features we all together only have said attestation of, such as the existence of an existential verb *halla ‘to be’—which is clearly cognate with Ge‘ez *hallo ‘be, to exist’. There’s other features we not know about and may require careful consideration; if Faifi is a descendant of Sabaic we’d be forced to reconsider the importance of the past imperfect verb construction to membership in Central Semitic given that is preserved the ‘jV-qVtt(V)l’ form. In Sabaic noun gender can be marked, primarily for feminine nouns, but some nouns happen to be semantically feminine and are simply unmarked. Sabaic’s relative pronoun system is luckily attested outside of epigraphic records via Razihit, Rijal Alma‘ and possibly Faifi. Faifi in specific appears to preserve a relative pronoun, *ðj, that is otherwise not present in Razihit. A major distinguishing factor for Sabaic from the rest of Sayhadic is that the causative prefix *s- found in the other Sayhadic languages becomes *h- in Sabaic and this same feature is preserved in Razihit.
What personally interests you about the language?
Anyone who knows me well knows I’ve always held an interest in Sabaic but I didn’t intend on writing about it in this series—I asked @antioch-actius what he thought about me writing about Qatabanic, he mentioned he was gonna ask me at some point about Sabaic; and I mean, fuck it, we talk about Sabaic a lot so why not? I love Sabaic and it’s easily one of the Semitic languages I hold dearest to my heart; it’s wildly interesting and was even used by Himyarite Jews in their tombs in the Levant being they were at one point Sabaic speaking (and some were Razihit speaking too!). Sabaic is easily a language you should all check out, you won’t be disappointed.
Extra stuff:
So, most of the grammars are in German so I decided I might as well give you all a link to the second edition of “The Semitic Languages” (2019) where you’ll find plenty on Sabaic and Sayhadic—plus I chose a word that was loaned into Sana’ani Arabic from Sabaic, whereas in Sabaic it meant ‘to protect’ in Sana’ani Arabic it means ‘wife, female protectorate’:
#I have no one to talk about the possibility of cross contamination via time travel with Please tell us about this, it sounds amazing. How far back would you have to go for this to be a risk?
Our specific examples were kinda, our sense of humor is unique, nonetheless something like.... so say you went back in time to 7th century Aksum right? Chances are you could’ve caught plague. Imagine going on a time travel binge and you end up catching plague in Aksum of all places because no one warned you that plague was a thing in that area at that time.
Oh! Haha, I thought you meant cross-contaminating as in introducing features into the languages of the time. *Facepalm* Though given what’s happened with the Rona I can imagine universities sending researchers into the middle of a plague without warning...
Okay I. Good lord this is genius. Absolute genius. Imagine sending anthropologists through time to study the emergence of agriculture in New Guinea and they accidentally loan a word via unscheduled contact.
Iridescent clouds, looking like a rainbow in the clouds.
A diffraction phenomenon caused by small water droplets or small ice crystals individually scattering light. Larger ice crystals do not produce iridescence, but can cause halos, a different phenomenon.
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andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
