One of the most puzzling questions in Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan is how word-final -ah turns into an -o.

Here's a new proposal that explains the super complex development of fricatives in Indo-Iranian, with a special focus on Avestan and Old Persian.

Also a cool fact: Ahura Mazda is written in Assyrian as as-sa-ra ma-za-áš.

Paper (it's been great to cite works from the 19th century, 1882, 1888, 1889 ...):

https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007911

What is uniquely human about our language is one of the most intriguing and consequential questions in science.

To answer how our language works, we need to study three players now—humans, animals, and AI.

https://youtu.be/BBtIxvqEx5Y?si=-IJY3GyiiwFg6d49

Linguistics is an unsung hero!

My reflections on:
- why studying ancient languages was important for my research in ML
- why linguistics is awesome
- how my education fully recapitulates the evolution of linguistics

And what I had learn from that.

Post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/begus/p/linguistics-is-an-unsung-hero

It was wonderful to give a talk at U Arizona.

Key takeaways:

- Amazing linguistics department

- Heat like I've never experienced before

- Cacti very sharp

- My talk

There are many ways to model language - with rules, exemplars, FSA, or Bayesian approaches. In this talk, I propose a new way to model language in a fully unsupervised way from raw speech: as a dependency between latent space and generated data in generative AI models called Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs).

A new Indo-European language is discovered!

It’s an Anatolian language, appears to be related to Luwian.

Its name is Kalašma.

I didn’t think another Indo-European language would be found within our lifetimes. This is so exciting. Can’t wait to read what the tablets are saying.

Read more:

https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/