I have a new paper out in Science today with colleagues Damian Blasi, Marcus Hamilton, and Russell Gray. www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

Characterizing the factors that have shaped linguistic diversity is fundamental for understanding human history, culture, and cognition. In this study, we combined statistical and social computational...

science.org

This is so cool

Charcuterie

A visual explorer for Unicode. Browse characters, discover related glyphs, and explore scripts, symbols, and shapes across the standard.

charcuterie.elastiq.ch

Historical linguists of all persuasions: come join in us in Edinburgh for the biannual historical linguistics bash!

Linguist List@linguistlist.bsky.social · 3w ago

Calls: 5th AMC Symposium

So this Defence Universities Alliance thing… we do actually need defence capacity but it’s a bit insane that somehow the defence sector still has nothing to do with languages, area studies, history and suchlike. Complete loss of institutional memory. This used to be widely recognised!

The thread is entirely correct in that there aren’t any good options that anyone with the power to change things is remotely interested in.

Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · 4w ago

If students are simply uninterested in the core bargain of a class like this, it’s hard to know what to do. You teach the material because you think it’s important they know it; they don’t give a shit, but want the credential; and the university wants their money. Your main option is “pretend”.

The telling bit is that net zero or trans rights can be framed as ‘culture war’ issues but migration is just bloodless policy, number go up/down. This is a worldview where migrants don’t really count as people with dignity.

The Economist@economist.com · 4w ago

If the idea seems absurd, it is because Britain has drifted so far from the ideas and ideologies that dominated the country barely a decade ago

It really should be. There is such a disconnect between how we think students experience the transition to HE and what actually happens. (I say this as someone teaching first-years *and* as a parent awaiting S6 results…)

Will Tattersdill@tattersdill.bsky.social · last mo.

The article in question should be required reading for everyone in UK higher ed: www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/07/05/w...

Perhaps ironically, if you are in Edinburgh you can get a wide variety of excellent herbal teas and other such products from Bulgaria at Balkan in Goldenacre

Tanguy Solliec@kiminell.bsky.social · last mo.

A wonderful piece by the great Kapka Kassabova in @europeanreview.bsky.social about wild plant gathering in the Bulgarian Rodhope montains. It reminds me of so many fieldwork sessions with Breton speakers begging them for information. europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-plant-wh...

A wonderful piece by the great Kapka Kassabova in @europeanreview.bsky.social about wild plant gathering in the Bulgarian Rodhope montains. It reminds me of so many fieldwork sessions with Breton speakers begging them for information. europeanreviewofbooks.com/the-plant-wh...

The plant whisperers - The European Review of Books

If you know what you are looking for, you find edible and healing plants everywhere.

europeanreviewofbooks.com

One of the most crazy-making aspects of this saga, captured well in this report by @joshpizpom.bsky.social, is how a year on from the Gillies report at Dundee and the Aberdeen revelations, Edinburgh’s senior management is openly, and presumably deliberately, just railroading their agenda over Senate

Josh Pizzuto-Pomaco@joshpizpom.bsky.social · last mo.

Inside the escalating struggle for power at Edinburgh University @heraldscotland.bsky.social www.heraldscotland.com/news/2625100...

Homer's Odyssey has nothing to do with the Bronze Age. It's jam-packed with 8th-7th century BCE material; it has no Bronze Age material at all. This view is fairly standard among Homer scholars, but it's usually expressed cautiously. Sometimes it's a good idea to make it a bit more forceful.

History and the <i>Odyssey</i>

The Odyssey is not set in the Bronze Age. It is totally flooded with classical-era motifs, with a smattering of archaic touches.

kiwihellenist.blogspot.com

Apparently this morning’s discourse is the ‘autodidact tradition’. If the question is ‘who’s to say this isn’t just as good as university’, maybe start here before you then ask ‘what were the upsides and downsides’, ‘what infrastructure supported this tradition’, and ‘where did it go’?

Peter Whitewood@pwhitewood.bsky.social · last mo.

This misses the point. Self-education has become more accessible in the last 20 years than at any point in history, though not through ‘amateur reading’. The problem isn’t access to information but learning how to evaluate it critically - and that brings us back to universities (and Humanities)

Woodwind loot from Budapest (a Transylvanian flute in A and a book of Hungarian tunes mostly for the C flute)

that was… quite something

Doesn’t look like like there are many posts from #imm22 in Budapest, but here’s my handout, where I suggest that Slavic is just like Gurage and Low German is just like Western Nilotic www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8vrp1...

FWIW I see this bleed into students at uni. The anxiety levels are through the roof because they feel if they put a foot wrong they'll get chucked out of uni or not get a good degree therefore job. Then they do it all right & hit the job market & it might not matter anyway. Not a good recipe.

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Think it's part of a broader problem in British politics which is this expectation that nothing bad should or will ever happen to people, which is an admirable and understandable view that parents have of their own children, but you can't run a flourishing society or an economy on that basis.

I get endless cold-emails selling me something. Was wondering how many of them are human. The answer turns out to be: none. Updated my LinkedIn profile yesterday. 10 monastic messages today, of which this was the best.

Where will these best and brightest scientists work Wesley? In the shrinking higher education sector? The one your pro-growth plan mentions once, as a source of student loan debt? www.ft.com/content/83d1...

getting rid of grades entirely would be much more effective at curbing surreptitious use of genAI than any amount of surveillance, would do vastly less harm to the pedagogical relationship at the heart of education, and wouldn't be another massive economic windfall for the creepiest people you know

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2mo ago

“At UCLA, students in a recent sociology class said they were told in an email to ‘procure a mirror large enough to fully reflect your entire desk-area work space,’ and turn on their laptop camera so the professor could watch them during an online test.”

NEW TOLKIEN JUST OUT: delighted to see “JRR #Tolkien’s Soul’s Ward: A critical edition of his unpublished translation of the early Middle English homily Sawles Warde” edited by Andoni Cossio and Nelson Goering: academic.oup.com/res/advance-... Chuffed to have played a minor role in this 1/3

Every "World Languages" dept. that they cut anywhere leads us to a world in which our educated middle class is a little meaner, more nationalist, and less capable of dealing with complexity.

The ÈIST speech recognition system is now publicly available. This web app lets anyone submit a video or audio file with Scottish Gaelic speech and receive back a transcript. A hugely useful tool - congratulations to Prof Will Lamb and the rest of the team! huggingface.co/spaces/eist-...

ÈIST Demo - a Hugging Face Space by eist-edinburgh

This web tool lets you upload a video file (or paste a video link) and automatically creates Scottish Gaelic subtitles for it. You can edit the transcript, adjust timing, and then download the fini...

huggingface.co

That worked out really well for Scottish Labour! Keep at it lads.

Ben Phillips@benphillips76.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Labour imposes ban on working with Greens, forces Labour councillors to partner with Tories.

This morning’s annoyance. Even when being nicely positive about language diversity, why forget basic fact checks? Just counting national languages, we easily get four *families* in Indo-European, Uralic (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, plus Sámi), Semitic (Maltese), plus Basque.

Just misheard a colleague saying ‘I haven’t got any mail for months’ as ‘…an email’. Fabulously curséd syllabification (near-)minimal pair. (No email for months! What a notion.)

Fun thought: has any senior university leader actually acknowledged this? Either externally or in ‘we recognise how this is a difficult time’ staff comms? Because otherwise it’s all ‘the weak must suffer what they must’ rhetoric that just serves to divide.

Margot Finn@eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Actually, SHAPE subjects cross-subsidise STEM subjects in most comprehensive UK universities annually through differential central charge or 'contribution' models. It's another reason we're all in the current HE crisis together, whether our own particular discipline is 'at risk' at present or not.

Actually, SHAPE subjects cross-subsidise STEM subjects in most comprehensive UK universities annually through differential central charge or 'contribution' models. It's another reason we're all in the current HE crisis together, whether our own particular discipline is 'at risk' at present or not.

Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 3mo ago

‘I’m just so passionate about the arts and sciences being brought together… And I thought it was quite funny that the arts would sponsor the sciences — because it’s normally the other way around, right?’ Lovely @mikepeeljourno.bsky.social piece on a science inspired artist www.ft.com/content/54c7...

Christian Aid week. We are so back lads.

A depressing aspect of our present condition is that it is pretty directly downstream of a visceral, everything-is-gender rejection of correct but unpalatable solutions as ‘unserious’, which led to potential vehicles for them pivoting to something else when staying the course would’ve been right.

Stephen Bush@stephenkb.bsky.social · 3mo ago

This policy, the replies to this, Keir Starmer’s ‘the petrol retailers are being naughty’ statement, Ed Davey’s fuel duty tax cut, Kemi Badenoch’s fuel duty tax cut, John Swinney’s price controls…is there anyone in British politics who understands “the Iran war means we have less stuff”?

I guess it’s time for media and politics people to start learning how to pronounce his name! (I know how to pronounce his name and I’m a fellow sufferer of Io-, so I’m allowed to joke about it.)

YouGov@yougov.co.uk · 3mo ago

Who do Welsh people think would make the best first minister? Rhun ap Iorwerth vs Dan Thomas ap Iorwerth: 28% Thomas: 14% Rhun ap Iorwerth vs Eluned Morgan ap Iorwerth: 27% Morgan: 9% Eluned Morgan vs Dan Thomas Morgan: 23% Thomas: 15% yougov.com/en-gb/articl...