I’ve been looking quite a bit at blackletter writing1 recently and I just randomly doodled around using Ayeri’s script, Tahano Hikamu, as a basis, today: A blackletter-inspired adaptation of Tahano Hikamu The letter ba is slightly difficult because it’s looking left whereas most of the other consonant characters are looking right. The difference between the placeholder consonant and ra is also very minimal, but that it is in the regular form (first rows) as well, plus similarity with ta. I’m not perfectly happy with that ha either. ...

I decided to port my site to the Twentythirteen theme for WordPress the other day, and the result is what you can see here. I didn’t want to go with the old Twentyeleven anymore because that’s not suitable so much for mobile devices, which a lot of people use to access this site, according to my server logs. Besides reducing big tables to something more manageable for small screens (there are still some glitches here and there), I especially tried to clean up the dictionary search interface, so I hope it’s more straightforward now. Also, you can now list all entries by their first letter, print dictionary style, at the touch of a button. ...

I came across a website called The *Bʰlog recently, a blog about Proto-Indo-European edited by a lecturer from the University of Kentucky’s linguistics department, Andrew Byrd. The *Bʰlog was started as a reaction to the success of an article on the website of the journal Archaeology, which featured sound recordings of two short texts Byrd made using a reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language, one of the texts being Schleicher’s “The Sheep and the Horses”. ...

This is in continuation of an earlier post I wrote on trying to construct a pangram in Ayeri. I just played around with my dictionary a bit again tonight and came up with the following sentence: Da-bahatang, sa akaya para vaga lamana. so=shout-3PL.M.A, PT= swallow-3SG.M quickly pig-TOP restaurant-GEN ‘So they shouted that the restaurant’s pig was quickly swallowed.’ This doesn’t make too much sense, but it’s grammatical (vaga ‘pig’ might better trigger neuter agreement on the verb, but whatever—let’s assume this is a boar), uses all consonant characters available in the Ayeri alphabet as well as the virama diacritic (gondaya) only once, and no other diacritics are involved. Also, I didn’t have to make up new words specifically tailored to use up remaining consonants like last time: I admit, I had to make up daga ’turtle’ in my previous article on pangrams for this purpose. ...

The other day, when I was reading io9, I came across an article about One of the World’s First Statements About the Scientific Method. The article is about a quote by Alhazen—Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab polymath of the 10th/11th cenutry CE—, the quotation from his book Doubts Concerning Ptolemy (Al-Shukūk ‛alā Baṭlamyūs). I don’t know how accurate the translation is, but I thought that it would still be nice as a Translation Challenge, so I’m basing the following translation off of this English translation, since I don’t know any Arabic. ...