⭐ KANDIDATQUIZ ⭐ Se om dine fordomme om folketingskandidater holder stik! Prøv kandidatquizzen på: sproghistorie.dk/kandidatquiz/

Very glad that the volume ‘The Reconstruction of Indo-European Stop Systems: From the Traditional Model to Glottalic Theories’ (edited by Tijmen Pronk and myself) has now appeared. brill.com/display/titl... Looking forward to hearing reactions to it!

The Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, has announced a position as Full Professor of Indo-European Studies: jobportal.ku.dk/videnskabeli...

Professorship in Indo-European Studies at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen

jobportal.ku.dk

Job announcements: PhD position and postdoc position in Indo-European Studies in Copenhagen A PhD position (36 months) and a postdoc position (20 months) have been announced within the research project “The Indo-European Dark Ages Illuminated” (rootsofeurope.ku.dk/english/rese...).

Folk-etymological speculations aside, I would like to (once again) draw attention that in δεινόσαυρος the compound member δεινός often glossed as 'terrible' has semantics of 'fearful; awe-inspiring, awesome', so δεινόσαυροι are, in fact, etymologically 'awesome lizards'.

Sāmapriyavasuḣ@avzaagzonunaada.bsky.social · 9mo ago

If les Anglais were still an oral culture with no (or class-restricted) writing, you think pterosaur would be reimagined as terror-saur?

New Open Access Publication from my colleagues at UCPH! Power, Gender and Mobility: Aspects of Indo-European Society. Edited by Riccardo Ginevra, Stefan Höfler, and Birgit Anette Olsen (Copenhagen Studies in Indo-European Volume 10).

📘Hvordan følger man det danske sprog 6000 år tilbage i tiden? Det forsøger sprogforsker Thomas Olander bla at besvare i sin nye bog ’Dansk fra nutiden til stenalderen’ om det danske sprogs udvikling 👉 bit.ly/4gDmYcj #dkforsk @sproghistorie.dk

Just about ten years now in the making: The IE-CoR database paper has finally been published. C. Anderson, M. Scarborough, [ ... 96 further authors ... ], R. Gray & P. Heggarty. 2025. The Indo-European Cognate Relationships Dataset. Scientific Data 12:1541.

The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset - Scientific Data

Scientific Data - The Indo-European Cognate Relationships dataset

nature.com

A new book from Stockholm University Press, 'Indo-European Ecologies', is now available to read and download for free, completely #OpenAccess, here: www.stockholmuniversitypress.se/books/e/10.1... @sproghistorie.dk olander.bsky.social

Upcoming project conference: New Perspectives on the Early History of Ancient Greek (Copenhagen, 4.–5. August 2025). Link to the programme in the alt-text.

Matthew Scarborough 𓀀@mattitiahu.bsky.social · last yr.

Graphic design is not really my passion (but I think this turned out alright).

Do you like real books? Is an open-access PDF on your hard drive not committing enough? Is a hardback too inflexible (and too expensive: £88 😬)? Very good news: the paperback version of “The Indo-European language family” is here! You even get a discount with the code in the flyer 💸

Our Jenny Larsson reports: "Finally out: the book about Proto-Indo-European by science journalist Laura Spinney. She's been following our work with combining languages, archaeology, and aDNA for a few years now. Very exciting to see the result!" #indoeuropean #humanpast @cschlebu.bsky.social

Thanks to everyone who's read and engaged with my paper (🐐🪓 doi.org/10.1111/1467-968X.12308) 💙 I've summarised the comments, and there's now a little squib with the harvest of those fruitful discussions on philsoc.org.uk/transactions and doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Following a post by @linguisticdiscovery.com which claimed that "alligator pear" was specifically a british word for avocado, contrasting with what I had previously heard, namely that it was a US southern term - I started doing some digging. What I found was surprising and very interesting:

I wanna find those guys.

The Onion@theonion.com · last yr.

Rest Of Party Thanks Fucking God 2 Guys Who Like Etymology Found Each Other theonion.com/rest-of-part...

Tobias har skabt to nye stenaldersprog til dansk spillefilm #dkvid #dkforsk

Tobias har skabt to nye stenaldersprog til dansk spillefilm

Sproghistoriker Tobias Søborg er dykket dybt ned i uddøde sprog fra flere lande og æraer for at skabe nye sprog til actionfilmen 'Fremmed - det første opgør' om stenalderen i Danmark.

videnskab.dk

Italian is a bit of an outlier among the major Romance languages. Spanish has 'escuela', Portuguese has 'escola', French has 'école' - all starting with a vowel - but in Italian it's 'scuola'. Did it never get a vowel? It sure did: Old Italian had 'iscuola'! Here's the story of this little vowel:

Recently I was a guest on the Aegean Connections podcast hosted by Ester Salgarella. I had a chance to talk about my past research and also what I've been up to with my current MCSA project on non-IE substrata in Ancient Greek.

Episode 9 (Matthew Scarborough) - Greek & Pre-Greek: in search of loanwords (nearly) lost to time

Aegean Connections · Episode

open.spotify.com

Our papers, out today in @nature.com, show how ancient DNA from the Eneolithic and Bronze Age steppe points to a North Pontic origin of the Indo-European language family and a Caucasus-Lower Volga (CLV) origin of Indo-Anatolian (inclusive of the now extinct Anatolian languages). 1/

It's me, I'm the colleague, and I am now on Bluesky 🐐🪓💙

Matthew Scarborough 𓀀@mattitiahu.bsky.social · 2y ago

Now available in Open Access: My colleague Simon Poulsen has a new article in Transactions of the Philological Society "Loanwords and Linguistic Phylogenetics" with discussion of the problematic cases of IE *pelek̑u- ‘axe’ and *(H)a(i̯)g̑- ‘goat’ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thomas Olander @olander.bsky.social asks: "Was the Danish language invented by Big Language History to sell more sound change?" Anyone with even the slightest acquaintance with Danish will answer "Yes". As far as I can tell, the Danes looked at English historical change and said, "Hold my beer."

Was the Danish language invented by Big Language History to sell more sound change? That’s very hard to know. But now you can see for yourself¹ in my ⭐️⭐️⭐️ new book ⭐️⭐️⭐️: Dansk fra nutiden til stenalderen [Danish from the present to the Stone Age] upress.dk/vare/dansk-f...

I imagine the people who read my blog (blog? lmao what is this 2007?) know about the paper and the database etc. already but I've finally put out my own little public comment:

A new paper in Science… and introducing the IE-CoR database

It feels like it has been a very long time since I first met Paul Heggarty at the McDonald Institute in Cambridge during the summer of 2015 to chat about joining what was supposed to be a simple one-y...

consultingphilologist.wordpress.com

Big news!

Matthew Scarborough 𓀀@mattitiahu.bsky.social · 3y ago

Nearly eight years in the making, our paper "Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages" has finally been published today in Science https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818