Ola Wikander @OlaWikander Twitter profile | Pikagi

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Ola Wikander

@OlaWikander

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Ugaritologist/Hebraist/Semitist, part IE-ist, author. Reader, OT Studies (Lundensis; quondam Uppsaliensis Cantabrigiensisque). Let The Text Be Dead.

Lund University

https://t.co/pyeTJe45I5

Joined November 2013

Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

Updated list of my books, so far (thread)! First: Unburning Fame: Horses, Dragon, Beings of Smoke, and Other Indo-European Motifs in Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible (2017) and Drought, Death, and the Sun in Ugarit and Ancient Israel: A Philological and Comparative Study (2014)

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@shhsswim23

@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

8 months

Dating Biblical Hebrew texts linguistically is quite possible (it is for basically every other ancient language, so why not BH?). On the other hand, quite many BH texts are, in fact, rather late. But Deut 32 is old as dirt. And parts of Exod 15.

@datchughuy

Uncle Chu

8 months

What opinion about Dating will have you like this?

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Ola Wikander

1 month

Would that the English subjunctive were used more often.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 month

I'm here for the Elamite-speaking medical personel.

@deidrejowen

Deidre J Owen, Author

1 month

I’m filling out a medical form online and I’m curious who’s out there speaking Old English.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Please stop saying Language [X] is "the oldest". Please oh please.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

It's low-hanging fruit, but I'm still amazed at how Swedish and Danish, which were basically the same language 1000 years ago, and are still extremely close in most respects, now have phonologies that seem to be from different continents.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Q: "Why do Indo-Europeanists often start with Sanskrit?" A: "Because it's a RUKI language." I'm also available for weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and funerals.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 days

Why did the Proto-Indo-Europeans avoid prepositions? We asked them, and they declined.

@koutchoukalimar

Imar Koutchoukali 🌐

@koutchoukalimar

8 days

why was defenestration so popular in Prague? czech was always pro-drop

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

Akkadian word of the day: ḫalbu ("forest").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

Hittite word of the day: Nepiš ("sky").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

11 months

The man who taught me Latin and Greek, got me into Etruscan and Historical Linguistics, and basically showed my how to think like a historian - and taught me that being a scholar is about hard work, not about being "brilliant". And all this he did, being quite brilliant.

@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

11 months

Today, my honored father, Örjan Wikander, turns 80 years old!

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

May we guess that the books will cost around 20 000 dollars apiece?

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

11 months

Sumerian word of the day: An-šár ("sky totality, whole sky, sky side of the horizon"), name of one of a pair of primordial horizon gods mentioned early in the Enūma Eliš; the writing An-šár was subsequently used by Assyrian scribes to spell the name of their national god Aššur.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 years

Snowy words of the day: Hittite: ikunešzi ("becomes cold, gets cold"). Ugaritic: glṯ (exact meaning unclear, "storm" or "snow") Akkadian: šalgu ("snow") Hebrew: šeleḡ ("snow") Arabic: ṯalj- ("snow") Syriac: talgâ ("snow") Ancient Egyptian: srq ("snow", borrowed from Semitic).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 months

Hittite sentence of the day: DUB.ḪI.A-kan kue udanzi – nu [n]ešumnili ḫatreške! "The tablets that they bring here – always write them in Hittite!"

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

11 months

No, the X Dialect of language X is not "identical" to Old Norse/Latin/Qur'anic Arabic whathaveyou. Move along.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

8 months

Hahahah, I *just* realized that the "opinion about Dating" thing probably refers to the semi-sexual social interaction and not to dating texts or artifacts! I am quite honestly proud of having misinterpreted this.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

8 months

One of the weirdest things about this sort of statement is the persistent belief (yes, I've seen it on numerous occasions) that most languages have been consciously "created" by planning or by conscious change of another language. This idea is much more common than you'd think.

@arabic_bad

Bad Arabic and Hebrew Takes

8 months

Y'all need to stop

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Today, I was greeted by the news that I've been granted an award for Semitic linguistics from the Carlo Landberg fund (managed by Uppsala University)!

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

10 months

Petition to rename Twitter [ɧ], not [x].

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 years

Ugaritic sentences of the day (slightly adapted from KTU 1.2 I 31-33, from the second tablet of the Baal Cycle): L tštḥwy pḫr Qmt amrt amr ḥrb lṭšt lšnh "She does not bow before the assembly, standing, she pronounces her speech. A sharp sword is her tongue."

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

The notion that Etruscan is an "undeciphered", "unreadable" and especially "mysterious" language is one of the most irritating pop-myths in existence. It just isn't Indo-European, and has a limited known vocabulary.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Akkadian phrase of the day: Lā ittiqū - "they shall not pass". Or, if you prefer: No pasarán.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

Is the plural of "doofus" doofi or doophodes?

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 months

In honor of St Patrick's Day, let me just say that Old Irish is very, very hard.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Akkadian word of today: ibrūtu(m) – "friendship" or sthg like "alliance between people of a similar status". Or, as I'd like to modernize it for today: "solidarity". Thinking of you guys over there.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Ugaritic word of the day: / ʿurpatu / ("cloud").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 months

FINALLY got my hands on this beauty! @MWeissOHCGL

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Ola Wikander

2 years

When I teach Biblical Hebrew, one of the more important things is explaining that there is nothing inherently "religious" about Biblical Hebrew. When spoken, it was just like any language at all. It *became* religious due to its corpus, but that's something very different.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Fun fact: the word "tungsten" is Swedish (literally "heavy stone"), but the element is not actually called that in Swedish (the term used is "wolfram").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 years

My books, thus far. New one arriving in late May, 2019!

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 months

"The main difference between Israelite religion and 'Canaanite religion' is that the latter was a 'polytheistic fertility cult'."

@sewistwrites

Amy Colleen

6 months

Tell me about a common historical myth that makes your hackles rise. I don't mean actual disinformation like Holocaust denial; I mean stuff like "Napoleon was short!" For me it's probably "corsets were torture devices for the rich" and "romantic love is a very modern concept."

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 years

Akkadian expression of the day: šiṭir šamê ("the writing of heaven", a metaphor for the star-filled sky).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 years

Biblical Hebrew word of the day: ṭafsār/ṭifsār (טפסר) – "official, officer". Loan from Akkadian ṭupšarru ("scribe"), itself a borrowing from Sumerian dub-sar (literally "tablet-writer"). In Modern Hebrew, the word is used (as tafsar) as a title of high-ranking firemen (!).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

Cool Hebrew language history from Judean onomastics in Babylonian cuneiform: The name Amušê [thread]

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

Etruscan word of the day: θui ("here").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 months

Coptic word of the day: ⲙⲉϭⲧⲱⲗ (mekʲtôl), "tower", from Ancient Egyptian mktr/mkdr, itself borrowed from Northwest Semitic (cf. Hebrew migdāl, Phoenician *magdōl, etc.)

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 months

Ugaritic is cool. It has: * A fully functioning dual (not only for body-parts, etc.) * A highly conservative consonant set. * Preserved affricated samekh, later probably split into an affricated and an unaffricated sound, with different signs. [...]

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

Ugaritic word of the day: Qryt ("city").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 months

Every time somebody says "Buddhism isn't really a religion it's more like a philosophy", a Bodhisattva groans in pain.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

Here we go: a thread on my ideas on a Semitic word for “horse” as possibly being borrowed from Indo-European, based on my arguments in “Unburning Fame: Horses, Dragons, Beings of Smoke, and Other Indo-European Motifs in Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible” (2017)!

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

OK; a thread on the title of the Ugaritic storm god Baal and its possible background in calques from Indo-European, based on arguments from my book "Unburning Fame" (2017)! Here we go:

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 months

Off to teach both Akkadian (intro) and Hebrew (Genesis 15) today!

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Hittite word of the day: ḫuišwātar ("life").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 months

It is honestly baffling how many "internet atheists" there are that seem to think that (a) Jesus of Nazareth never existed (an utterly fringe position) And (b) that this would somehow constitute an important "own" against religious worldviews in general.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 years

Generally, my favorite linguistic traits of Swedish: (1) The pitch accent. (2) The definite form endings. (3) The supine for forming compound tenses. (4) The [ɧ] sound. (5) The vowel system, including the weirdish compressed /ʉː/. (6) V2 word order (not unique, but still fun).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Now that "Cops" is being cancelled, maybe they should replace it with "Copts", with daily readings from Shenoute and the Nag Hammadi texts.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Ugaritic word of the day: Kbkb (/kabkabu/) - "star".

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

No.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

I am now on the editorial team of Ugarit-Forschungen. So happy and proud!

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

Them: "All humanities subjects today are based on Foucault." Me: *looks at historical linguistics* Uhm... No?

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

Akkadian word of the day: Zisurrû ("magical circle").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 months

PSA: Paleo-Hebrew is not a language. It's a writing system.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 months

Ugaritic word of the day: ỉb ("enemy"), related to Hebrew ʾôyēḇ (also "enemy") which has been argued to be involved as a subtextual pun in the name of the biblical character ʾIyyôḇ ("Job"), a page of whose book is pictured.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 years

Some Ancient Near Eastern words for "heart", in honor of yesterday (given that Valentine's day is known as "all hearts' day" in Sweden): Luwian: zarza Akkadian: libbu(m) Hittite: ker (genive: kardiyaš) Sumerian: šà Hurrian: tiša

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

7 months

My translation into English of one of the greatest poems known to me, "Omkring tiggarn från Luossa" (thread):

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Supporting Putin is not anti-imperialist. Putin is not left-wing. Russia is not socialist in any way. Russia is not engaging in a national liberation struggle against anything. Russia is imperialist. Don't support imperialism. Dixi.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

8 months

If you're worrying that humanities scholars are "attacking" the Classics, biblical lit. etc, rather than "learning from them": understand that we live with these texts. We love them. They are second nature to us. That means: we don't have to say "they're so great" constantly.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Ugaritic word of the day: pʾid ("heart, feeling, emotion, benevolence, kindheartedness"). Occurs in the standard title of the god El - lṭpn ʾil d pʾid ("Gracious El, of Kind Heart"). Only known cognate is Arabic fuʾād-, "heart".

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

I have a Ugaritic joke, but 'its vwls 'ar smwht 'uncrtn.

@likethemagician

doug henning

@likethemagician

4 years

I have a Demotic Egyptian joke but it’s not in Unicode yet.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

8 months

New Indo-European Language Discovered

An excavation in Turkey has brought to light an unknown Indo-European language. Professor Daniel Schwemer, an expert for the ancient near east from Würzburg, is involved in investigating the discov...

www.uni-wuerzburg.de

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

This one, I like.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

27 days

Sorry to do this, but sometimes, Twitter is unintentionally hilarious. Thanks, @iskdin !

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 months

West Tocharian word of the day: Etswe ("mule"). Argued by Peyrot (2018) to represent a loan from an Old Iranian *atswa-, a version of the good ol' Indo-European "horse" word (which, btw, also exists in an actual inherited form in West Tocharian - yakwe, meaning "horse").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

Chanukka? Hanukkah? Chanuka? If you ask me: ḥănukkâ. Long live diacritics! Or, if you're feeling Yiddish: khaneke (khanike/khanuke).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

A hill I will die on: Stop calling the Swedish definite form of nouns a "suffixed definite article". It's a piece of morphology, not a separable suffix! It's as much a part of the inflectional system as the plural morphemes. Definite. Form. Thank you.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

Ugaritic phrase of the day: tủnt šmm ʕm ảrṣ ("whisper of the heavens to the earth").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

Hittite word of the day: Andurza ("indoors", from the same etymological material as the English word)

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 months

English.

@ChristianPunsOG

Christian Memes and Puns

@ChristianPunsOG

2 months

👀

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

Hittite word of the day: Kutruwan- ("witness [in a legal proceeding]", possibly derived from the old Indo-European word for "four", *kʷetwor, which was otherwise replaced in Anatolian - the idea being that the witness is the fourth part in a trial).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

Isn't it "hilarious" though that the people making these claims are often extremely hostile to the scholars actually working on and with said manuscripts?

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 months

Btw, this is one example of Indo-European languages not always getting "simplified" over time. Ogham Irish/Primitive Irish (and Gaulish for that matter) seem to have been pretty classic old school IE language, but when we reach the Old Irish period, all hell has broken loose.

@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 months

In honor of St Patrick's Day, let me just say that Old Irish is very, very hard.

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Ola Wikander

10 months

Luwian (and borrowed-into-Hittite) word of the day: Zilatiya ("in the future, from now on").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Hittite word of the day: Alwanzena- ("sorcerer, practitioner of witchcraft").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

He really went and did it ;-) (Yolo means "bad, evil" in Kuchean Tocharian/Tocharian B) Kudos to @MWeissOHCGL .

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

I do like the fact that one the Egyptian language made its great changeover and adopted a Greek-based script, becoming Coptic, the old Egyptian script(s) had already been in use longer than the Latin alphabet has existed.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 months

Ugaritic word of the day: yỉtsp ("he gathered/collected for himself").

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Ola Wikander

11 months

Ugaritic word of the day: Qrd ("hero", "warrior").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

7 months

Luwian word of the day: Nānaḫit- ("brotherhood").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

Wow. Just wow. Sure hope this works.

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Student solves ancient puzzle that baffled scholars for centuries

The discovery could 'revolutionise the study of Sanskrit'.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Hurrian is hard. Hurrian is imperfectly understood. Hurrian is badly attested. Hurrian has two dialects/varieties with totally different verbal morphology. I like Hurrian.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

Actually, the Ugaritic title of Baal, /rākibu ʿurpāti/, literally "Rider of the Clouds" (later applied to YHWH in transformed shape in Hebrew in Ps 68:5), could be construed (with a bit of creative imagination) as... Skywalker. Star Wars is Northwest Semitic mythology. QED.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

New arrival! @ait_kisou

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

9 months

Hittite goes all Depeche Mode on us: "Nu-wa-mu zik išḫaš ēš … Ammuk-ma-ddu-za ARAD-iš ēšlut!" "You be my master... and I'll be your servant!" (from the Hittite version of the Gilgamesh story).

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

5 years

My new intro/essay book on Semitic languages, just released! Feels so good to see it "in the flesh", as it were!

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Ola Wikander

2 years

If a Hittite verb switches from the mi-conjugation to the other one, it has, effectively, been ḫi-jacked.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

3 months

Hebrew word of the day: בְּהֵמוֹת (bĕhēmōṯ), "giant quadruped, Behemoth, chaotic giant cattle, possibly=enormous hippo". As seen in the Book of Job.

@AlisonFisk

Alison Fisk

3 months

It’s #WorldHippoDay ! 🦛❤️ To celebrate here are four adorable ancient Egyptian blue faience hippos made by artisans some 4,000 years ago. Photos my own. #Archaeology

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Ola Wikander

1 year

Ugaritic word of the day: Lbn (/labanu/, preserved syllabically as la-ba-nu), "white".

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

The honor is mine, dear friend!

@YOHIO_DISREIGN

YOHIO

@YOHIO_DISREIGN

4 years

Always such interesting and refreshing talks with my dear dear friend and mentor @OlaWikander . Almost 3 hours is nothing compared to how long we could actually talk 😂

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Ola Wikander

7 months

If the Hittites made do without a future tense (and, say, ancient Hebrew speakers, even though that is a whole can of worms), then so can speakers of English and Swedish.

@LinguistJosh

Josh /lɪŋgwɪsd͡ʒɔʃ/ 🙌🏻

7 months

I’ve become more and more perturbed over the years by English not having a future tense.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

1 year

研究室。 Ugaritic word of the day: Spr ("writing, inventory, document, tablet").

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Ola Wikander

4 months

I am now in the position to announce that I have been assigned to write a commentary to the Book of Joel in the series Historical Commentary on the Old Testament (HCOT)!

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Ola Wikander

5 months

Akshually, it's *h3e h3e h3e.

@rob_heighton

Rob

5 months

No one: Proto-Indo-European Santa: *h₁o *h₂o *h₃o

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Ola Wikander

5 months

Just read the first 20-ish lines of the Enūma Eliš with my Akkadian reading group, and it was awesome.

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Ola Wikander

4 years

Today, Swedish major newspaper Dagens Nyheter lists 89 books to read during the summer - and one of them is my first non-fiction essay book "I döda språks sällskap" ("Dead Languages' Society/In the Company of Dead Languages") that I published 14 years ago.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

6 months

When I suggested that knowledge of Biblical Studies (specifically, knowledge of the original languages) is needed for arguing about what biblical texts "plainly say".

@AyeYoD1Flem

Stepper Dan

9 months

What tweet made you the Twitter villain of the day?

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

7 months

Ugaritic word of the day: Khn /ka:hinu/ ("priest").

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

I have another Ugaritic joke, but it [15 lines missing] O Baal, send rains ... [continued in KTU 1.6 VIIII 13-23] ...

@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

4 years

I have a Ugaritic joke, but 'its vwls 'ar smwht 'uncrtn.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

10 months

Det är sorglustigt att människor som antagligen menar sig vara "konservativa" i någon mening har noll respekt för akademisk utbildning.

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@OlaWikander

Ola Wikander

2 years

My answer to the guy on Twitter saying language death is a good thing (thread):

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