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Alex West

Alex West

@ajw87.bsky.social

760 followers 660 following 930 posts

Interested in the Columbian exchange. Philology. Manuscripts. Plants. #OldSundanese #MedievalIndonesia #TupianLanguages Old site: https://indomedieval.medium.com/ New site: https://medium.com/@WestsWorld he/him Book: https://brill.com/display/title/68202

indomedieval.medium.com

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Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · Jul 10

Hard copies of my book arrived a few days ago, and I've finally found the time to write a bit about it and why you should read it (or get your library to buy it).
indomedieval.medium.com/bujangga-man...

Bujangga Manik: Or, Java in the Fifteenth Century

My book on Bujangga Manik has been published by Brill under the title Bujangga Manik: Or, Java in the Fifteenth Century.

indomedieval.medium.com

Reposted by Alex West

John McCafferty @jdmccafferty.bsky.social · 12h

Pumpkin/Squash [Cucurbita pepo], Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt, 1596 - 1610 (Rijksmuseum)

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 13h

You could do it! I'm sure someone's come up with ways to write European languages with it. At least one language in Indonesia uses it...

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 13h

What I like about Chinese is that you can look up characters in a dictionary fairly easily - when you've learned how, of course - and then you know the meaning and pronunciation immediately. A whole chunk of sound and meaning, (almost) no variation, no inflectional morphology. Nice and simple.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 13h

I should probably go back a few thousand years in time and take this complaint up with the Proto-Sinaitic folks

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 13h

Not unconquerable, certainly, but not very much fun. I'm familiar with a few scripts, and my BA was in Chinese, which is almost certainly more difficult than Arabic in this regard—but I find/found the process of trying to read Arabic text much more frustrating

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 13h

So you can get away with only transcribing the consonants and a competent speaker can figure out the rest. Okay. So? Is it really so hard to write down all the sounds in a word?

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 13h

If Semitic languages were written with alphabets rather than abjads, I'd have learned at least one of them by now. But.

kobayashi ḫamṭu @mattboot.bsky.social · 14h

why aren't we all learning Aramaic

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 17h

Austria really is the way forward on this, isn't it? Wish more countries would learn from them

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 18h

Theoretically, the solution to the housing crisis is... building more affordable homes. And there's plenty of *space* to do that. Portuguese population density isn't particularly high (105 people per square km, I think? compared to ~430 or so in England). I imagine it's a question of money & will.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 18h

Portugal's doing well on paper at the moment. The economy is growing. But it also has the worst housing crisis in Europe, mostly because of a lack of affordable social housing (makes up less than 2% of the market at the moment, iirc). Some people have taken to blaming immigrants.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 18h

Elections in Europe haven't been as bad as expected lately. D66 doing well in the Netherlands is good, ish—they're not who I'd vote for but they're better than Wilders and Baudet.

And Chega did far worse than expected in the recent local elections here in Portugal.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 20h

It got some awful reviews! But it definitely has something

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 20h

It's a film about sociopathic gym bros. Couldn't be more pertinent. We're all living in their world now.

It's that thing Werner Herzog said about WrestleMania: You have to know in which world you are living. You can't avert your eyes.

A screencap of a video of Bavarian film director Werner Herzog saying "the poet must not close his eyes".

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 20h

I know a lot of people hated it, I know it got terrible reviews, I know it feels really nihilistic and miserable, but I loved PAIN & GAIN

☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · 1d

also while we’re talking the rock, michael bay is a v talented director and i cannnot take your film criticism seriously if you think otherwise

Reposted by Alex West

Laura @lauropea.bsky.social · 1d

it is called a camberwell carrot because i rolled it in camberwell and it looks like a carrot

drawing of a woman in peasant costume holding long sheaves of wheat and holding a sickle

Reposted by Alex West

Adam Bremer-McCollum @acbm.bsky.social · 1d

Syriac word of the day
ܒ̈ܛܘܬܐ
/båṭwåṯå/
"wine-bowls/-cups"

as in Th. Marga, ed. Budge, 201.11
ܕܥܠ ܒ̈ܛܘܬܐ ܡܙ̈ܝܓܐ ܕܚܡܪܐ ܡܠܚܫܝܢ ܗ̄ܘܘ
"those who used to whisper together over mixed bowls of wine"

Of Iranian origin: cf. MP /bādag/ wine, Grk βατιάκη kind of cup; see also Ciancaglini, /Iran. Lws Syr/, 125.

Reposted by Alex West

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 1d

why would I write in a conversational tone when I don’t converse in one

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 1d

Yeah man! It's not as if the "good" publishers actually do anything anyway

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 1d

That's a good point!

Reposted by Alex West

James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 2d

Note to the universe of cable news people reporting right now on Trump/Xi Jinping.

For last name of PRC leader, just say SHE. As in "he and she."

That's close enough for English speakers.

(Not "gee" or "ji" or 'zhi' or something seemingly more 'foreign' sounding.)

Reposted by Alex West

The British Academy @britishacademy.bsky.social · 3d

A new volume in the Fontes Historiae Africanae series, The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms presents a new reading of West African history from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries based on close analysis of Arabic manuscripts from Timbuktu and other regions.

https://bit.ly/3Jeb8cm

Promotional graphic for a new book from British Academy Publishing titled "The Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tomb ibn al-Mukhtar of the Songhay Empire and the Tarikh al-fattash of the Caliphate of Hamdullahi," authored by Mauro Nobili, Zachary Wright, and A. Diakite. The image shows the book cover featuring an ancient manuscript page.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 2d

I've heard mixed reviews of the writing! Some people seem to love the writing specifically. But you could be right there.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 2d

Racists like it but people who aren't racists also like it. I don't suppose it's much deeper than that.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 2d

Hmm, yes. I do wonder why it's that book series and not another that has taken hold of these people, but I suppose that's unknowable.

Alex West @ajw87.bsky.social · 2d

I see! Interesting. I remember it being popular with other boys at school when I was about 11 or 12, and then not coming up at all until the Peter Jackson films were released. It never seemed like my cup of tea.