an old joke:

two brazilians are at a bar in argentina. the first says to the other, “cara, i don’t know any spanish, could you get me a soda?”

“no problem, velho, i speak spanish just fine :)”

the second man goes up to the bar and says, “che, me da una Cueca Cuela™?”

perhaps "intuitive", rather than "regular"; the differences (nasalization, reflexes of Lat. /ɛ ɔ/, some consonants) aren't consistent synchronically and would probably be perceived as greater than variation *within* Spanish or Portuguese

i suspect "very similar, but noticeably not the same". the 16th century is roughly when Spanish and Portuguese take their modern standard forms; then as now, both languages shared most of their vocabulary and morphology, with a few obvious and fairly regular phonetic differences

c'est à dire, the events narrated in the poem Beowulf can be dated to the mid sixth century. the dating of the work itself is much debated, though there's a strong case based on linguistic archaisms for the early eighth century.

in any event, if you draw the lines *just so* on the family tree, Queen Gertrude (Saxo's Gerutha) might correspond to Beowulf's Freawaru (maybe a name, maybe a title), a daughter of Hroðgar's, making Hamlet, in a manner of speaking, the last Scylding

the fragments we have of the cycle in later Danish chronicles are all closely associated with the site, and Beowulf itself can be roughly dated to the mid 6th c. (Beowulf's uncle Hygelac, king of the Geats, is likely the same Chlochilaicus that was killed raiding the Franks c. 520).

i wrote a paper senior year of high school on the Scyldings, the almost historical Danish royal family in the background of both Beowulf and the source materials for Hamlet (!)

Osborn and Niles suggest that the Scylding legends might have been inspired by the burning of the 6th c. hall at Lejre

the ⟨si⟩ here is just as interesting: “if” used as a conjunction to signal a strong statement of fact (typically correcting your interlocutor)

this structure (a content clause following an elided "I said") is common enough that it's used even when there is no explicit question, as anybody who's gotten into an argument in Spanish knows:

te vi con tu amigo anoche
no me viste, si anoche estaba en casa
¡que sí, que te vi!

Is this an abstract in Nahuatl

This chapter has now been out for more than six months and thus magically becomes #OpenAccess:

the early CA pronunciation of ض produces some genuinely cursed consonant clusters: /ʔaxɮˤaru, xaɮˤraːʔu/, “green”; /faɮˤlun/, “favor”; /waɮˤʕun/, “position, situation”.

i studied a little syriac a few months ago to familiarize myself with post-biblical aramaic, but i think i scratched that itch enough. might come back to it if there's ever a text i really want to read (maybe the zohar?)

i think i'm at 4 at the moment? my main focus right now is in reading fuṣḥà comfortably. taking a maṣrī 101 class, picking up some very basic persian, trying to maintain my classical hebrew (god willing).

Domestic dispute about whether the singular of magazine is migzane or igazine

fascinating, thank you for the write up!!

i am woefully out of my depth here, but could ʔēm–yʔīm be a reflex of CA form IV ʔaqāma–yuqīmu instead?

apparently modern Persian still preserves PIE laryngeals as a consonant in a few words, even where Avestan doesn't:
- خرس /xirs/ "bear" ← *h₂ŕ̥tḱos → Av. arša-
- خایه /xaːja/ "testicles (vulgar); egg" ← *h₂ōwyóm → Av. āem

nefarious. the typical Spanish system uses ⟨j⟩ for خ and ⟨ŷ⟩ for ج, which is a little odd but not hard to get used to. this, however, is an unmitigated disaster.

Martínez Delgado reconstructs a four-vowel system /a e i u/ (analogous to Sibawayh's Classical Arabic!) with a merged ḥolem–qibbuṣ vowel, based on Menaḥem b. Saruq and Hayyūj, at least up to the 12th c.

i won't die on this hill though :P

better yet, in the sound system described by the Andalusi Hebrew grammarians, a /ʃaˈna tˤuˈba umăθuˈqa/

cigarette girlie Ibn Ṭibbon wishes everybody a šānāh ṭōḇāh ūməṯūqāh!

22) The fact that the imperfect can be negated with mā but *only* when it is phrase-initial (lā needs to be used otherwise) is a beautiful leftover of the etymological origin of the negator mā as a question word mā "what?" (Arabic has wh-fronting).