Theo Nash
@theonash.bsky.social
Classicist and Archaeologist. PhD student IPCAA, MA and BA Victoria University of Wellington.
Did they accidentally send the April Fool’s post on May 1 instead? This is a terrible change.
Bluesky's censorship policies will never not be funny to me.
marybeard@wmarybeard.bsky.social · 4mo agoI love my publishers who have produced this cardboard cutout Aphrodite as or for my latest book “Talking Classics”. She’s looking great. But what shall I do with her afterwards. ?
I can understand, even if I dislike, arguments about the 'irrelevance' of Classics. Shutting down Middle East Studies when America is once again embroiled in a Middle Eastern war, however...
Andrew A.N. Deloucas@aandeloucas.com · 5mo agoIn line with discussion about the job market, the latest majors being closed at Syracuse University:
Thinking about this @brianphillips.bsky.social classic again as we start another Winter Olympics: grantland.com/features/cit...
» Citius, Altius, Frigidiores
grantland.com
Given that Odysseus thought the most beautiful man in the world was Memnon the Ethiopian, casting a black woman as Helen may have been the only defensible choice.
Nearest book, page 42, second sentence: οὐ at the end of a sentence: φῄς, ἢ οὔ; do you say or not? πῶς γὰρ οὔ; for why not? Also οὔ, no, standing alone.
Matthew Scarborough 𓀀@mattitiahu.bsky.social · 7mo agoNearest book—page 42—second sentence "εὐρύοπα (514, 884) is formed by analogy to these nouns in -τᾰ; see 514n."
Feel good about my AIA paper today, which means I will feel bad about it tomorrow, good again on Wednesday, and then inevitably bad on Thursday when actually presenting it.
A single word, even a single letter, can mean a lot more when it's in a classic work. A little papyrological rediscovery and some time-travelling detective work (literary rather than literal) by @theonash.bsky.social has unearthed evidence of medieval misunderstanding & meddling in Homer's Odyssey.
Marco Perale@mperale.bsky.social · 8mo agoNew issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, edited by @sofiatorallas.bsky.social , with contributions on literary papyri from @theonash.bsky.social and myself.
New issue of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, edited by @sofiatorallas.bsky.social , with contributions on literary papyri from @theonash.bsky.social and myself.
Real-world Quellenforschung: identifying which AI system a student used to write their essay.
Elite private universities are actually a pretty American phenomenon.
Alan Allport@alanallport.bsky.social · 9mo agoReally important to stress that the Crown Jewels of the US higher education system were never the Ivies or elite SLACs (other countries have equivalents of these) but the well-funded, large, cheap, and excellently staffed public state university systems bringing high quality education to the masses.
'sit' is, I believe, the only English word to preserve all of its original IE ablaut grades: 0: nest e: set long e: seat o: sat long o: soot
Yoïn van Spijk@yvanspijk.bsky.social · 11mo agoHistorically, the word 'nest' consists of two parts. The part 'ne-' is related to 'nether', while '-st' is related to 'sit'. The distant ancestor of 'nest' meant "place to sit down". 'Nest' is also related to Spanish 'nido' and its Romance relatives. Click my new graphic to learn more:
I am reminded, reading this, of the anecdote about Shackleton Bailey refusing to attend a conference entitled 'What is Philology?' on the grounds that he would rather be doing it. To its practitioners, the project is so self-evident that introspection becomes heresy.
R F Kennedy (not Jr.)@kataplexis.bsky.social · 11mo agoPhilology: the Best of All Possible Methods? A response to the apology. planudes.medium.com/the-best-of-...
Chicago Classics as Rorschach blot, and ‘divide and rule’ in the 21st-century university. thesphinxblog.com/2025/08/29/r...
Rats In A Sack
On the one hand, what’s happening in the University of Chicago – the (supposedly temporary) suspension of recruitment to PhD programmes in Classics as well as other disciplines that require s…
thesphinxblog.com
The American School of Classical Studies seems to have removed the traditional exam for the Regular Year, opting instead to interview students: www.ascsa.edu.gr/programs/reg...
What Big Grammar won’t tell you is that the semicolon has completely starved out the good old-fashioned colon, a much more interesting piece of punctuation.
Brian Phillips@brianphillips.lol · 12mo agoI will go to war for the semicolon, one of the most magical and unjustly maligned of all human inventions
The University of Michigan is now claiming that students have an ‘ethical responsibility’ to use AI.
More conservatively, it shows that the paradigm hadn't yet been levelled from /hen/, /hem-os/ to /hen/, /hen-os/. The fact that Mycenaean never writes final nasals makes this essentially unprovable, even with the possibility of future discoveries.
Matthew Scarborough 𓀀@mattitiahu.bsky.social · last yr.28. Mycenaean e-me /hemei̯/ 'one' (dat. sg. m.) *probably* shows that word final *-m hadn't yet merged with *-n in Mycenaean but since all we have is the stem of *hem- positively attested only in medial position it's not absolutely clear proof.
41. The reason we can likely be confident of this is because the Linear B syllabogram 𐀛 <ni> is also used ideographically for figs, and is also used in Linear A and so probably assigned by the acrophonic principle. This was first pointed out by Günter Neumann in Glotta 36 (1957) 156–158.
40. The only word in Ancient Greek that we know (in my opinion) that we can be *absolutely* certain to have been borrowed from a language related to the one the Minoans spoke is νικύλεον, a kind of Cretan fig according to Hermonax in Athenaeus's Deipnosophists 76e.
And Indiana Jones wept. A list of languages I've taken at the University of Chicago: Akkadian Aramaic Ugaritic Classical Hebrew Rabbinic Hebrew Modern Hebrew Ancient Greek German All of them were important for my work, and I wasn't in any those departments.
Theo Nash@theonash.bsky.social · 12mo agoThis isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.
People don't even realize the Oriental Institute's importance. Even in popular culture. They are murdering Indiana Jones. I knew things were bad when I read the mealy-mouthed stuff I get as an alumnus but this is just disgusting. So sad.
This isn’t an impoverished regional school – this is the University of Chicago. Devastating.
Hence my favourite opening sentence in a preface, from Woodman’s commentary of the latter half of Velleius Paterculus’ second book:
Dr Danny Bate@dannybate.com · last yr.'Preposterous', which English gets from Latin praeposterus, originally had the meanings of 'inverted, distorted, absurd' because it was literally the before (prae) coming later (posterus).
Sad to share the Penelope Mountjoy, the doyenne of Mycenaean pottery, has passed away.