Maitani

This is great! From new album... have you heard it? - Adrian

He is performing with great musicians. - Maitani

"I think I have already demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the Quechua people are a lost Nostratic tribe. Note that the semantic matches are impeccable and the similarity of the words is quite obvious to any open-minded observer. Indeed, the matches are much better than many of those in the LWED. The quality of examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9, in particular, is guaranteed by the fact that they represent statistically certified ultraconserved Eurasiatic vocabulary (Pagel et al. 2013). The famous items ‘mother’, ‘bark’, and ‘worm’ are among them. In many Eurasiatic languages the words for ‘bark’ and ‘skin’ are the same or look related (6, 7). This seems to be true of Quechua as well, but just in order to probe every possibility, I can offer an alternative etymology of qara ‘skin’ (8, from a different Eurasiatic root), in which case its homophony with qara ‘bark’ must be accidental. A nice match either way." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

LOL. - Victor Ganata

"Sibthorp and Smith's Flora Graeca, illustrated by Ferdinand Bauer and often described as 'Oxford's finest botanical treasure', is considered the most splendid and expensive Flora ever produced. The collections include not only the printed volumes but also the original hand-coloured drawings from which the printed engravings were made, the original botanical specimens they illustrate, unpublished drawings of the Fauna Graeca and a unique series of topographical Mediterranean Scenes, also never published. Accompanying these are diaries and notebooks from the two expeditions to the Levant in which Sibthorp set out to discover the wild plants described by Dioscorides in c.AD 60- and in doing so laid the foundations for modern botanical exploration." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Bess of Hardwick's Letters brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick. Bess of Hardwick (c.1521/2-1608) is one of Elizabethan England's most famous figures. She is renowned for her reputation as a dynast and indomitable matriarch and perhaps best known as the builder of great stately homes like the magnificent Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. The story of her life told to date typically emphasises her modest birth, her rise through the ranks of society, her four husbands, each of greater wealth than the last, and her ambitious aggrandisement of her family. Bess's letters bring to life her extraordinary story and allow us to eavesdrop on her world. The letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life as she weaves a web of correspondence that stretches from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"The Minoans, considered the first advanced civilization in Bronze Age Europe, left behind massive building complexes, stunning artwork and hieroglyphs—but few clues about their origins." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Update on nature.com: Minoan civilization was made in Europe http://www.nature.com/news... - Maitani

"The southern rim of the Himalayas is rarely mapped as a region, as it encompasses two independent countries (Nepal and Bhutan) and five Indian states.* As a result, maps depicting economic and social development of the area can be misleading, as they typically contrast the two Himalayan countries with India as a whole. To address this situation, I have made a per capita GDP map of the seven relevant states as if they were equivalent geopolitical entities. As can be seen, politically troubled Nepal lags behind the rest of the region on conventional economic grounds. The comparison between Nepal and both Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh is striking, as the three states have much in common in regard to both physical and human geography. If one were to map a variety of social indicators, the contrast would be even starker." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"“Bhutan has decided to go for a green economy in light of the tremendous pressure we are exerting on the planet,” Agriculture Minister Pema Gyamtsho told Adam Plowright of L’Agence France-Presse in an interview by telephone from the capital Thimphu. “Intensive agriculture requires the use of so many chemicals, which is not in keeping with our belief in Buddhism. We must live in harmony with nature.”" - Maitani

"The light is very dramatic in the mountains of the Eisacktal at sunrise and sunset and changes from minute to minute. Even at a given time the sky can often look completely different in different directions. Yesterday evening I took a walk from my house in Brixen to the nearby village of Neustift and took some photographs along the way. Here they are without further commentary:" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

These photographs remind me of a vacation I once spent in a village near Brixen, Onach. - Maitani

Fortunately, a couple of serious linguist have taken this on. - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Afonso, it is my pleasure. :-) - Maitani

"The Bronze Age of Scandinavia (1750-500 BC) is characterized by the sudden appearance of bronze objects in Scandinavia, the sudden mass appearance of amber in Mycenaean graves, and the beginning of bedrock carvings of huge ships. We take this to indicate that people from the east Mediterranean arrived to Sweden on big ships over the Atlantic, carrying bronze objects from the south, which they traded for amber occurring in SE Sweden in the Ravlunda-Vitemölla–Kivik area. Those visitors left strong cultural imprints as recorded by pictures and objects found in SE Sweden. This seems to indicate that the visits had grown to the establishment of a trading centre. The Bronze Age of Österlen (the SE part of Sweden) is also characterized by a strong Sun cult recorded by stone monuments built to record the annual motions of the Sun, and rock carvings that exhibit strict alignments to the annual motions of the Sun. Ales Stones, dated at about 800 BC, is a remarkable monument in the form of a 67... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Moving metals or indigenous mining? Provenancing Scandinavian Bronze Age artefacts by lead isotopes and trace elements" Science Direct http://www.sciencedirect.com/science... - Maitani

"Today, we're making it possible for you to go back in time and get a stunning historical perspective on the changes to the Earth’s surface over time. Working with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NASA and TIME, we're releasing more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space, compiled for the first time into an interactive time-lapse experience. We believe this is the most comprehensive picture of our changing planet ever made available to the public." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Built from millions of satellite images and trillions of pixels, you can explore this global, zoomable time-lapse map as part of TIME's new Timelapse project. View stunning phenomena such as the sprouting of Dubai’s artificial Palm Islands, the retreat of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, the deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon and urban growth in Las Vegas from 1984 to 2012:" - Maitani

"On a beautiful sunny day last week, the Turning Over a New Leaf project team decided to take a day off from the office to visit a spectacular chained library in the small town of Zutphen (located in the eastern part of the Netherlands). Built in 1564 as part of the church of St Walburga, it is one of only five chained libraries in the world that survive ‘intact’—that is, complete with the original books, chains, rods, and furniture." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Needless to say, it was a rather surreal moment for all of us to step into the little room to see the dark-wood lecterns, upon which were placed (in neat rows, side-by-side) beautiful 15th- and 16th-century books, secured in place by metal chains." - Maitani

"Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE. The corpus contains Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. The transliterations and the translations can be searched, browsed and read online using the tools of the website. Funding for the ETCSL project came to an end in the summer of 2006 and no work is currently being done to this site or its contents. For more information, see the About ETCSL menu or the site map." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Phonemica is a project to record spoken stories in every one of the thousands of varieties of Chinese in order to preserve both stories and language for future generations. We are a team of volunteers working within China and abroad." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Our mission: Bringing the richness of oral Chinese to a wider audience, through the words of natural storytellers, from every corner of the world where Chinese is spoken." - Maitani

Cool! - Jessie

"Other kids’ dads had hidden stashes of porn — we giggled and made sure not to get caught looking. My dad was a pornographer. He supplemented his income with freelance camera work, and in addition to shooting head shots for aspiring models, he took pictures of people having sex." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"I discovered this sideline a few years ago when I inherited hundreds of negatives that had been in storage since his death in 1977. My dad had spent his life trying to succeed as a photographer. He’d had some early achievements as a filmmaker in Trieste after the war; his short documentary about that city won an award at the Venice Biennale. But after immigrating to the States in 1958,... more... - Maitani

"Did he enjoy photographing cats? Was it aesthetically appealing? As appealing as snapping pictures of pussies? Or did freelance work really just add up to more money at the end of the week? I’ll never know. He died when I was ten; my memories of him are sweet and self-absorbed. Some days he’d bring me with him to his darkroom in the city. At Government Center we’d get take-away donuts... more... - Maitani

"The fourth-century calligrapher Wang Xizhi (王羲之, 303–361) became known in China as the 'Sage of Calligraphy' for his mastery of all calligraphic forms, in particular semi-cursive script (行书). His work was prized by calligraphers, collectors and emperors, both for its artistry and its rarity. As none of his original work is known to have survived, it was through rubbings, tracings and copies that his legacy was secured as generations of calligraphers tried to emulate his distinctive style." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Even in Dunhuang, on the opposite side of China from his native province of Shandong, we know of at least two manuscripts that have been identified as copies of Wang Xizhi’s work. One of these is now in the Stein Collection at the British Library and the other, first identified by Pelliot, is at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Dating back to the Tang period (618–907), these... more... - Maitani

"Every month or so, an old friend in England sends me a pile of clippings from British newspapers: things he thinks I’d like to read. They’re eclectic but mostly about wine and music. Two nights ago, making my way through the latest batch, I found a piece from the March 6 Times by Billy Connelly, “My hero, a quiet guitarist called Bert.”" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"The “Bert” is, of course, Bert Jansch, one of my own musical heroes. If you haven’t heard him or know about him, I have no time to fill you in. He was a Glaswegian and died too young—in 2011 at 67, from cancer. And his music was sui generis. His voice was nasal but somehow melded perfectly with his guitar, and his style of playing was haunting. Sometimes he’d put his fingers underneath the strings." - Maitani

"The Kingdom of Bhutan is sometimes overlooked, locked between Tibet and India, but the Land of the Dragon as the Bhutanese call it is home to some of the most exquisite Buddhist monasteries in the world. Here, we take a fleeting visit to some of the over forty monasteries in Bhutan – quite a number considering the population of the entire country is only around 700,000." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Several earlier GeoCurrents posts examined the history and geography of culinary vocabulary, particularly words for ‘cheese’, ‘onion’, and ‘tea’. It has become clear that the distribution of such words in European languages tells a story of both common descent and borrowing. The role of borrowing is nowhere clearer than in the map of the words for ‘tea’. But while borrowing must have also complicated the patterns of ‘onion’ and ‘cheese’ vocabulary, major Indo-European subfamilies typically share the same root. For example, while the Romance languages generally inherited the Latin word for ‘onion’, cepa or its diminutive form cepolla, French uses a different word, which has also been borrowed into some, though not all, Germanic languages. Scandinavian (North Germanic) languages preserve the original Germanic root løk, which was also borrowed by Slavic languages, though some of them later replaced it with Latin loanwords. But a completely different picture emerges if we examine words... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Nonsequiturs-Я-Us - Jkram|ɯɐɹʞſ

"With German-bashing now firmly established as a European Volkssport, Dublin Review of Books editor Enda O'Doherty turns to the semi-barbarous German language; only to find that in the right hands, or expressed through the right vocal cords, German is indeed a very beautiful language." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"There are nations which are endlessly, perhaps inordinately, proud of their language (the English and the French in particular) and those who are a little less confident or who will attribute to their native tongue only one pre-eminent virtue, as the Italians, not it would seem unreasonably, have attributed musicality to the Tuscan dialect that, rather late in the historical scheme of... more... - Maitani

"Germans have featured prominently among those who have sometimes had difficulty in believing that their native tongue is quite up to the mark, or, as we say in our barbarous contemporary jargon, fit for purpose. The German invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century was certainly to give a boost to the prestige of vernacular languages (at the expense of the universal language,... more... - Maitani

"This year marks the centennial of one of the most devestating weather-related disasters ever experienced in the United States. During the week of Mar. 21-26, 1913, a series of late winter storms formed over the Midwest, spawning tornadoes in Iowa and Nebraska. They were followed by 8-11 inches of rain, which led to massive flooding in Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania. By the end of the week, hundreds of people had died and billions of dollars worth of property and infrastructure lay in ruins." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"On Easter Sunday of 1913, an F4 tornado a quarter-mile wide ripped through Omaha at around 6 p.m. In its wake, some 115 people were dead and over 400 injured. More than 2,000 homes were completely leveled. Meanwhile, over 10 inches of rain hit the already saturated Great Miami River watershed in Ohio. The resulting runoff flowed into the Great Miami River, setting the stage for severe... more... - Maitani

"This blog is devoted to exploring and promoting the great diversity that exists in the study of language, in the past and today. Each blog post seeks to introduce a topic, idea or approach in language study — historical, current or completely new — with an invitation to all readers to engage in discussion in the comments. Everyone is welcome to contribute, regardless of academic standing, although there is an expectation that all contributions will be well informed. Controversial or unconventional views are not discriminated against, but polemical attitudes are discouraged. We want to maintain a scholarly atmosphere marked by reasoned argument, evidence and tolerance, and free of simple opinion-trading. If you would like to write a post for the blog, please get in touch with a one-paragraph description. All posts are informally reviewed before they are published, but always with the blog’s goal of promoting diversity of opinion and approach in mind. Our guidelines are very minimal:... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Das Ziel dieses Blogs ist es, die historische und gegenwärtige Vielfalt der Sprachwissenschaften aufzuzeigen und zu fördern. Jeder Blogbeitrag stellt ein Thema, eine Idee oder einen Ansatz aus der Geschichte oder Gegenwart der Sprachwissenschaften vor und lädt alle Leser ein, durch Kommentare in einen konstruktiven Dialog zu treten. Alle dürfen mitreden, ungeachtet der akademischen... more... - Maitani

Which city is this? - DvD

These people explicitly call themselves national socialists, partly using socialist vocabulary and paroles to turn against "international" corporations, immigrants, democracy, using the increasing poverty and lack of perspective of young people to lure them towards their highly militant group. There were about 400 of them from all over Germany, but the anti-demo had about 10,000... more... - Maitani

"Given a suitable context, if a farmer told you that her hand was under the knife, you would probably understand that this was a sentence about an employee and a surgical operation, despite there being no mention in the sentence of a person. There's also no mention an operating room, a doctor, a hospital, or any of the other props or venues associated with surgery. But you got the meaning in the phrase "under the knife" in the same way that you got employee from hand, a clipped version of hired hand. Your understanding of these phrases is probably not based on inferring the relationship of "hand" to employee or "knife" to surgery; chances are that you know these terms because you've heard them before. Maybe the first time you heard them you had to do that kind of interpretation; or maybe you looked up the terms in a dictionary or maybe someone glossed them for you. In any case, what hand and under the knife have in common is that they're both instances of meronymy, in which a part of something is used as an expression for the whole." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"English majors may already be raising their hands or racing to the comments section to protest that this isn't meronymy; some will say that we're actually talking about metonymy, and others may chime in with synecdoche. Well, everyone's right in this game, albeit in a slightly different way. The ways in which expressions substitute parts for wholes, or features for whole entities, is a... more... - Maitani

""This view looking northwest from Fukagawa Susaki, a spit of land along Edo Bay, toward Jūmantsubo, a tract of land named after its approximate area of one hundred thousand tsubo (about eighty acres), is one of the most dramatic designs of the series. Its appeal lies in the contrast between the powerful form of the eagle as it prepares to dive for prey and the desolate wintry marshes below. As in other views devoid of people, there is still a pervasive human presence—in the roofs huddled to the left, in the poles of the lumber-yards beyond, and, above all, in the lone wooden bucket floating at the edge of the bay, surrounded by water birds on which the eagle seems to have its eye."" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"The full-page miniature for May continues the theme of aristocratic courting, which may well be among the most pleasant of the 'labours' depicted in medieval calendars. In this scene, two boatmen are rowing a nobleman and two well-dressed ladies along a river; the three are playing musical instruments and are surrounded by flowering branches. On the bridge above them another aristocratic couple are riding on horseback, carrying branches and followed by their retainers. In the bas-de-page scene a group of men are practicing archery by shooting at a raised target (a popinjay?). On the following folio two couples are riding on horseback through a lush landscape, below the saints' days for May and a roundel with a nude man and woman for the zodiac sign Gemini." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

#yakebikeç - Terra Barselonevî

"Three peregrine falcon chicks have successfully hatched on the ledge of a city centre building belonging to Nottingham Trent University. Experts had been concerned about the effect of the cold weather on the eggs. The parent birds, now feeding their brood, have attracted a global following, as their lives are recorded with a live camera and are the subject of a blog. Sarah Thorp, Environmental projects Officer at Nottingham Trent University, said the chicks seemed to thrive in the location. ''Fingers crossed that all three will survive,'' she said." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Mark, any pics of them in flight/perched? - Halil

"A striking map depicting endangered languages around the world can be found at the website of the Endangered Languages Project (ELP), the public portal of the Endangered Languages Catalogue (ELCat) helping raise awareness of and gathering data on endangered languages. This data has been compiled by linguistic research teams at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and Eastern Michigan University in a project supported by a National Science Foundation grant. The catalogue contains comprehensive up-to-date information on all languages considered to be in danger, including the number of speakers, the age of the youngest speakers and the location of each language; the genetic affiliation to a linguistic family for every language; and an account of the documentation and data for all languages in the database. The ELP is an initiative of the newly formed Alliance for Linguistic Diversity, a coalition of international linguistic and cultural organizations, and Google. The Rosetta Project and... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Wow. I had to blink that the loss of language families. That's pretty striking. - Anika

It really is. - ᏓᏰ #team Monique from iPhone

"For years, psychologists thought we instantly label each other by ethnicity. But one intriguing study proposes this is far from inevitable, with obvious implications for tackling racism." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"For years, psychologists thought we instantly label each other by ethnicity. But one intriguing study proposes this is far from inevitable, with obvious implications for tackling racism. When we meet someone we tend to label them in certain ways. "Tall guy" you might think, or "Ugly kid". Lots of work in social psychology suggests that there are some categorisations that spring faster... more... - Eivind

"Did cities exist in the New World prior to the European conquest? Of course they did! If you have any doubt, take a look at some of my books or my articles as posted on my website (and much other work on Mesoamerica and the Andes). But according to a new reference work, the Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Peter Clark, editor, 2013, Oxford University Press), either there were no cities in the ancient New World, or else those cities were not part of "World History." Hmmmmmm. I don't much like either choice." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"The first section of that work, called "Early Cities," has five survey sections: Mesopotamia Calixtlahuaca, an Aztec-period city Cities of the Ancient Mediterranean Africa South Asia China Where are the cities of the Aztec, Maya, or Inka? What about the Zapotec or the Moche, the Toltec or Tiwanaku, the Mixtec or Chimu? Would it have been that hard to solicit some chapters on these... more... - Maitani

Didn't find this in my feed any more, so I posted it again. - Maitani