RNZ reports on yet another distressing development due to the “AI” craze: When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner Anne-Marie Thorby smelt a rat. A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Boo…
I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas’s LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh, but I have to give him a whack on the knuckles
Terry Eagleton is usually a good read, and his LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Frank Callanan’s James Joyce: A Political Life has some interesting thoughts on Joyce’s relations with politics and modernism; he starts by explaining tha…
GPC has a somewhat more lucid account of what rhupunt actually means, incidentally: one of the twenty-four strict metres of Welsh prosody, comprising a line with six accents divided into three sections of four syllables, the first two rhymi…
@Xerîb: I wonder what Shum is. The internet has a number of copies of the sentence referring to Solanum “The name Shum is derived from ndschum, used in Cameroon, and from the somewhat similar osun, used by the Yorubas in south-western Niger…
could easily go back to *kʊmb-; this is an odd shape for an Oti-Volta stem, and it suggests an old loan. Thank you. kūmara (apologies, I should have included the macron on the first syllable) isn’t ‘odd-shaped’ at all/fits pan-Polynesian ph…
As far as I have been able to discover on my phone, it was in the following article that S. aethiopicum was sorted into four cultivar groups (Gilo, Kumba, Shum, Aculeatum) and the names for these cultivar groups fixed in what seems to be ge…
what would the English word eggplant end up as if it were borrowed into any of these Oti-Volta languages? The English word doesn’t lend itself to the phonotactics of Oti-Volta languages … it certainly wouldn’t end up like *kumb- or *kan-, t…
What it doesn’t explain is why New Zealand, settled about 1200, which had a hierarchical society and kumara, never had platforms or monumental statues. I am guessing kumara was only a small part of explaining local resiliency and self-suffi…
Exactly Luther’s “das ist ein ander Ding”! Too exactly, in fact – today, at least, it’s quite unidiomatic (even if you restore the ending in anderes), so it looks like Luther calqued it. What you’d say today is das ist etwas anderes.
A few years later, NFL announcer Joe Buck, started opening his coverage a particular way: “This is Joe Buck, alongside the Hall of Famer Troy Aikman.” Again, just a touch ironic, especially as it became ritualized: Buck used the same langua…
Here’s a paper which I must have missed last year but which surfaced in my feed today. Wallin & Martinsson-Wallin: From ritual spaces to monumental expressions: rethinking East Polynesian ritual practices, Antiquity, Volume 99 , Issue 406 ,…