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Ola Wikander

@olawikander.bsky.social

Scholar of ancient languages, August prize-nominated author. Hebraist, Ugaritologist, Semitist, moonlighting in Indo-European. Ordained in a rare religion. Abyssum per Sapientiam Linguā Incarnandō. Ola-Wikander-eng.se

2003 Posts1952 Follower1157 Folgt
Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · 5h ago

Ugaritic word of the day: ybd ("he intones, he improvises a song"). Cf. the (rare in the Bible) Classical Hebrew word בדה or בדא, meaning something like "invent, devise, make up".

Yours truly's left hand at an electric piano keyboard, about to strike a chord.
Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · yesterday

Etruscan sentence of the day: Ei minipi capi ("don't take me!") The words are "spoken" by a bowl owned by a cetain Cupe Althrna; it's quite common for Etruscan objects with inscriptions to "speak" in the first person. Same with Latin inscriptions, sometimes.

Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · 2d ago

Feeling extremely stereotypically me - have spent the day reading Tocharian, a book on Masonry, and Rebecca Heineman's source-code to the 3DO port of Doom. Oh, and TvTropes. Also, laundry.

Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · last wk.

Nor are the Etruscans "mysterious" as such – the weird thing is not that non-IE languages existed in Europe. If anything, the weird thing is that there weren't more!

Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · last wk.

It so irritates me when some popular media keeps portraying Etruscan as "undeciphered", more or less. Its not – it just has a corpus that doesn't give us super much to work with. A lot of what we do have is quite understandable, and has been for a long time now.

Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · last wk.

It so irritates me when some popular media keeps portraying Etruscan as "undeciphered", more or less. Its not – it just has a corpus that doesn't give us super much to work with. A lot of what we do have is quite understandable, and has been for a long time now.

Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · 2w ago

Proto-Indo-European root of the day: *ǵneh₃- ("to know, to get to know, to recognize"), giving, amongst many many others, English "know, knowledge" and Greek γνῶσις, "knowledge, insight, gnōsis".

Man in a tie an waistcoat, with an ankh necklace with an ankh/neo-Valentinian cross.
Ola Wikander@olawikander.bsky.social · 2w ago

Proto-Indo-European root of the day: *ǵneh₃- ("to know, to get to know, to recognize"), giving, amongst many many others, English "know, knowledge" and Greek γνῶσις, "knowledge, insight, gnōsis".

Man in a tie an waistcoat, with an ankh necklace with an ankh/neo-Valentinian cross.