“#Egypt is my homeland, the land of my birth. There I grew up and was raised. She is my teacher and the source of my livelihood, the place where I wake and where I sleep. I have no other country to love.”

With these words by the #Cairo-born #Jewish #poet #MouradFarag, #NaglaaAbdelHaq opens her #book, #Jews and #Greeks in #Egypt and Their Economic Role until 1960. Tracing the careers of entrepreneurs from ethnic and religious minorities, the book focuses on the country’s two largest minorities at the time—its #Jewish and #Greek communities.

#Translated from #English and published in #Arabic by #DarAlKarma, the book grew out of a doctoral dissertation for which the #Palestinian-#German researcher received her PhD in #MiddleEastern Studies from #FriedrichAlexanderUniversity #ErlangenNuremberg."

https://en.majalla.com/node/332044/culture-social-affairs/how-egypt-lost-two-its-most-dynamic-communities

I thought this article might end up just being a somewhat tired regurgitation of the well known habit English speakers have of borrowing words from other languages (and enriching English). But it does bear reading - the delegitimisation of a language, Scots in this case.

http://archive.today/2026.07.16-082942/https://www.thenational.scot/politics/26284228.english-dictionary-took-scots-words-branded-slang/

#language #Scots #delegitimisation #slang #english

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From the linked article. A man reads part of the Oxford Dictionary of English with the text How the English dictionary took Scots words and branded them 'slang THE Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has delegitimised the Scots language by adding several new “Scottish” words. While English and Scots are sister languages characterised by mutual intelligibility, they are still very much separate languages with their own grammar, syntax and words. But decades of cultural oppression persist and Scots remains reduced to either slang, or, in this case, an offshoot of English. One of the recently added Scots words is “scaffie”, meaning “raggedy”. But writing as a Scots language author who spent nine years living in England, I never once heard an English-only speaker say scaffie (also spelled as scaffy). The other recent additions to the English dictionary – including “loup” and “gowp” – are even worse. READ MORE: Bòrd na Gàidhlig invites Reform for talks after attack on Gaelic language Fiona McPherson, the Scottish executive editor at the OED, said: “It’s always special when I get to work on Scottish words, and those included in this update of the OED are evocative and familiar. “While new to the OED, [others] have long established histories. Loup and gowp are found as early as the 16th and 18th centuries respectively, meaning ‘of the heart, blood: to beat or pulse rapidly or strongly’. The later sense of ‘to throb or ache with a pulsating pain’ has also been included.” There are many things wrong with this statement. The most glaring being that the dictionary’s Scottish executive editor chose to describe these words as Scottish and not examples of the Scots language – a year on from Scots receiving legal recognition and protection for the first time in history with the Scottish Languages Act. This emphasises how far we still have to go when it comes to having Scots recognised as a leid. Especially as it has legal recognition by Unesco since 2009 and the European Charter for Minority Languages since 2001. According to the OED, for a word to be included, its development needs to be researched using sources including “newspaper archives, online forums, academic studies, magazines, law tracts, recipe books, or social media for published evidence of the word”. But if the new additions are anything to go by, the Scots origins of these words have been ignored and/or reduced. While languages mix and evolve over time and a lot of words are “loaned” from one leid to another, their origins need to be acknowledged and respected, especially by an institution with as much linguistic respect as the OED.

Chris Reynolds, from Delaware, opened up his monthly PayPal statement and was astonished to find he had suddenly been handed a whopping $92,233,720,368,547,800 - roughly 1000 times as much as the GDP of the entire world, which was a relatively paltry $84.97 trillion in 2012, according to the CIA World Factbook.

A public relations boss briefly became the world's first quadrillionaire after a PayPal slip-up made him the richest man on the planet.

“I’m a very responsible guy,” he said. “I would pay the national debt down first," he told the local paper. "Then I would buy the Phillies*, if I could get a great price.”

Reynolds said he had generally used his PayPal account to buy vintage car parts, but the quadrillionaire quickly planned what to spend his newfound wealth on.

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2013/07/18/paypal-makes-man-1000x-as-rich-as-the-entire-human-race/789360

#Philadelphia #Phillies #Trillionaire #Quadrillionaire #GoPhils #GoPhillies #ThwRegister #UK #English #Baseball

I look at patterns in LLM output. The tell is more than simple orthographic tics.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/07/07/ai-language-patterns/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

#philosophy #language #llms #ai #artificialintelligence #patterns #comprehension #writing #training #history #english #learning #blog #video #critique #commentary #spelling #pronunciation #content

This morning I awoke thinking about sex – actually gender – of borrowed Latin words. Get your mind out of the gutter.

👉 https://brywillis634737.substack.com/p/we-still-bury-the-dead

I wrote a piece about it, but I was truly conflicted on my journey, especially as I compared English and French approaches, and a potential feminist rift.

#philosophy #language #sociolinguistics #etymology #english #french #latin #gender #writing #culture #feminism #linguistics #reform #administration

#TIL that "geek" used to mean a carnival freak.

(by watching Nightmare Alley (1947))

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/geek

#English

🆕 blog! “This blog is written in en-GB”

Someone left a comment on my blog recently asking if I'd mind making my language more inclusive. They didn't get some of the cultural references I'd used and suggested it would be easier if I used tropes which were more globally known.

Here's the thing. No.

All my blog posts start with a simple declaration:

<!doctype html>
<html…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/07/this-blog-is-written-in-en-gb/
⸻
#blogging #English #language

Les Années Vécues
https://philosophics.blog/2026/07/01/les-annees-vecues/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social
I’ve shared a piece of fiction writing meta content and the rôle of LLMs in my writing workflow, in particular, a punch list to track idea instantiation. I don’t, however, discuss my fondness for diacritical marks, especially those with no phonetic function.
#philosophy #writing #fiction #timetravel #LLM #scifi #process #author #time #blof #podcast #language #workflow #frnech #english #shortstory #method #ai #matrix #spreadsheet #google #claude #chatgpt

Rival Patrons in French and English
https://youtu.be/Yp-GxhOU0fc
#language #french #english #satire #patron #boss #restaurants #trivia

#TIL That Chaucer & Shakespeare were into the whole 6-7 thing.

"A similar phrase, "to set the world on six and seven", is used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde. It dates from the mid-1380s and seems from its context to mean "to hazard the world" or "to risk one's life".[2] William Shakespeare uses a similar phrase in Richard II (around 1595), "But time will not permit: all is uneven, And every thing is left at six and seven"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sixes_and_sevens

#etymology #history #English

It's strange how Americans tend to say pythON and amazON, where we tend to say pythin and amazin, but they tend to say recird while we say recORD (for the noun, I mean. The pronunciation of rhe verb is different again).

This stuff is so interesting to me. How different words are pronounced different ways in different places and how that came about.

#English #words

Hexlish Alphabet for English, Constructed Languages and Cryptography: Automatic, Structural Compression with a Phonetic Hexadecimal Alphabet

DOI : https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13139469

Hexlish is a legible, sixteen-letter alphabet for writing the English language and for encoding text as legible base 16 or compressed binary. Texts composed using the alphabet are automatically compressed by exactly fifty percent when converted from Hexlish characters into binary characters. Although technically lossy, this syntactic compression enables recovery of the correct English letters via syntactic reconstruction. The implementer can predict the size of the compressed binary file and the size of the text that will result from decompression. Generally it is intuitive to recognize English alphabet analogues to Hexlish words. This makes Hexlish a legible alternative to the standard hexadecimal alphabet.

#Hexlish #Conlang #Alphabets #English #Hexadecimal #Encoding #Cryptography #Ciphers #Crypto #Encryption #Compression #Papers #Preprints #Orthography #Language #Linguistics #Writing #Glyphs #Alphabetology #Technology

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Hexlish Alphabet logo. The word HEXLISH in rainbow colors on a black background with a hexagonal dot above the letter I. Beneat the logo in yellow reads the phrase, "English Text Compression & Encoding."