A.Z. Foreman

@azforeman
568 Followers
38 Following
686 Posts
Russian-American linguist, medievalist & 1st amendment nerd. Posts re: poetry, translation, and history of sundry Indo-European & Semitic languages
Patreonhttp://patreon.com/azforeman
Faculty pagehttps://nesa.osu.edu/people/foreman.230
Translation bloghttp://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com
Hebrew poetry is great because in what other language can a line like בִּלְשׁוֹן נִפְלָא נוֹפֵל עַל לְשׁוֹני ever exist?

If you were born in the 80s, science fiction authors mostly did not actually offer you a future of jetpacks, flying cars and 4-hour work weeks.

They offered you a messed-up cyberpunk dystopia.

Here you go, enjoy

Some people are normal. Others think that Jabberwocky would work better in Middle English.

@linguistics @histodons @medievodons

If I win the lottery I won't say anything but there may be signs like a giant stele in my yard containing a quinquelingual inscription

@histodons @linguistics

I wonder how much clearer people's thinking would be if they could all approach the news with clarity about the fact that a million is a thousand thousand, and a billion is a thousand million.

Autopsychography
By Fernando Pessoa
Tr. from Portuguese

The poet is a faker
so fake he will suceed
even at faking feelings
of pain he feels indeed.

And readers of his writings
feel in the pain they read
not the two pains he felt
but one they don't instead.

So on round its toy rails
the wound-up model train
called heart of man will run
to infotain the brain.

Wait so are all church organists gay? Is that just a thing?
"....We praise language like neolithic men
who pray to gods of a malarial fen,
though it will twist the tongue around and break
the mind and leave you ruins to remake.
I don't like language. I'm in love with it.
Why else would I put up with all its shit?"

You'd think short stories would be the way to go, but this is the genre I actually am comfortable writing in.

Somebody should probably stop me before I get the need to write about some society called the Ināš who spoke Proto-West-Semitic