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Honestly I used to be in favor of a three-state solution (with Gaza as its own country) before Hamas proved it could not be trusted with civilian lives. And of course once we're dismissing the possibility of Hamas staying in charge of Gaza, the next most reasonable option is giving Gaza to the West Bank government.

I think a peaceful two-state version is optimal for now, as long as it's got sufficiently free transit. The problem is actually making it sufficiently free. Yugoslavia and Ireland both seem to have managed that, though, so it must have been possible.

(Caveat, I don't know what to do with places like Modiin Illit and Ma'ale Adumim - which are functionally extensions of nearby Israeli cities across the West Bank border - and I really don't know what to do with Central Jerusalem. [I'll be fine with giving the Arab-majority eastern parts to the Palestinian state, but there's an approximate strip containing the Old City that is going to be awkward.] There's going to be a lot of border messes in any serious two-state version.)

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TIL that this is a thing - both in terms of "a thing that happened" and "a thing that people criticize Israel about". I very vaguely knew about the Ethiopian Jewish community, but not much more than "it exists I guess" and "the rules for who counts as Jewish enough to legally marry are even more strict for the Ethiopians for some reason".

(Is that second thing actually true? With the rules as I've seen them stated, and with what I expect the prevalence of actual paperwork in Ethiopia in the early 19th and late 18th century to have been like [i.e. approximately zero], I'd be surprised if any Ethiopian Jews actually have a sufficient amount of documents to legally marry in Israel at all.) [In practice the "almost no one can legally marry in Israel" problem - which is admittedly probably less of a problem for European Jews, whose documents "only" need to reach the late 19th century - is just gotten around by everyone going to Cyprus, or somewhere else if they're feeling fancy, and marrying there; Israel does recognize foreign marriages.]

There are actual big cases of actual ethnicities being effectively genocided by involuntary sterilization (and/or other methods of involuntary birth control), some of them inflicted by otherwise civilized countries! Just for a particularly major example, the Danish treatment of Greenlandic Inuit is absolutely abhorrent in this regard.

But it looks like this specific case was a lot less major than that, and it definitely does look like the mistreatment had 1) been mainly accidental in the first place, and 2) had since essentially stopped.

So, I'm Beta Israel, or an Ethiopian Jew. Many people only know that there are Ethiopian Jews in Israel because of that one headline:

"Israel forcibly sterilizes Ethiopian Jewish Women"

I would like to say that this story is a thorny and painful topic in the community, especially because it is used as a cudgel to demonize both us and Israel without actually allowing Ethiopian Jews to contribute to such discussions.

This point is brought up often when discussing racism in Israel. Newspapers have reported it, activists have brought it up, and it is all over social media. The narrative has even gone so far that some people claim that Israel is currently sterilizing Beta Israeli women.

First off, there was never any kind of attempt by Israel to get rid of us through sterilization or reduce our population. As of 2024, there are approximately 160,000 of us living in Israel. 8,000 arrived during Operation Moses, and 14,000 arrived during Operation Solomon. Again, massive population increase.

Additionally, said women were never sterilized. Birth control falls under 4 general categories. Natural birth control, oral contraceptives, long-acting reversible contraception, and sterilization. All except for sterilization are reversible. The birth control important to this discussion is Depo-Provera, which is temporary.

Depo Provera has almost no long-lasting effects, needs to be renewed every 12-13 weeks to be effective, and no matter how long you have taken it, you will be able to conceive after stopping the shot. These were the injections given to Ethiopian Jewish women. But why were they given the contraceptives?

Ethiopian Jews came to Israel through transit camps, which are temporary refugee camps. There are many reasons why a refugee camp has a need for birth control. High maternal and infant mortality rates, the absence of gynecologists, high sexual violence, and little to no postpartum care are just a few of them.

There was no evidence that women at the transit camps were threatened into getting these injections. However, they were almost certainly pressured into doing so, because, keep in mind, there just weren't enough resources to take care of these women if they did get pregnant. In most cases, the women were informed that they were getting these injections, but access to Amharic translators were in short supply.

Since many women didn't understand exactly what they were being given, as soon as they figured out, they complained. Israel immediately stopped giving the injections out and started new guidance to make sure that patients had a full understanding of all medicine given.

Was what happened a violation of rights that never should have happened? Yes. Was it a massive mistake on the part of the Israeli government? Yes. Was it anywhere near as evil as whatever people are trying to make it sound like online? No.

Stop using us to make your points when you clearly don't care about our issues. You can criticize the Israeli government, please do, without spreading misinformation and lies about us. You can criticize Israel without bringing up the 'sterilization' every time you see us on social media. When you do these things, you are being both anti Black and antisemitic. Try to learn about us past this controversy, in fact, try to learn about any of the many, many Jewish communities in different countries. I guarantee you'll learn something.

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...are we now going to say BDE Tom Lehrer the way we say GNU Terry Pratchett

(I see a few people in the other reblogs saying GNU Tom Lehrer and honestly that does feel surprisingly appropriate. His songs might not be quite as expansive as Pratchett's books, so they can't fit quite as much, but in proportion they are roughly similarly filled with major and minor references. Maybe a little more so.)

...might as well show a relevant song.

So Tom Lehrer was Jewish, and you will see a lot of Jews, and people who know about Judaism saying, may his memory be a blessing, or z''l, which is short for the same phrase in Hebrew. and, in fact, I said may his memory be a blessing on another post. but there is another saying that is often said by Jews to mark a death, which I feel is much more appropriate. That phrase is Baruch dayan ha'emet, meaning "Blessed is the true judge." Baruch dayan ha'emet is often abbreviated as BDE.

I can't think of anyone who would more appreciate the double meaning in BDE than Tom Lehrer, or anyone who embodied the other meaning of BDE more.

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I have a new sideblog

For the benefit of whatever followers I somehow have: I have now officially started my sideblog for classic Language Log commentary, at @language-log-twenty-years-later.

(...Not much to see in these very early essays, admittedly.)

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red blood cell girl bringing you oxygen on a cute little platter and then curtseying

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How the renaming of Chomolungma went down (oversimplified)

Sir Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India: This mountain is very tall, likely the tallest in the Himalayas. I propose to name it after my predecessor as Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest.

Sir George Everest: This is a very bad idea. Firstly, I have absolutely nothing to do with this mountain. Secondly, it probably has its own local name. Thirdly, with all due respect, no native Indian would be able to pronounce my surname correctly.

Sir Andrew Waugh: Firstly, you have done quite a lot for the study of India. Secondly, we weren't actually able to find out its local name, since the locals still wouldn’t let us get sufficiently close. Thirdly, why are you assuming that your surname would be pronounced correctly?

[original, slightly longer, post here]

I love how bad we are, as a society, at taking original discoverers' naming wishes into account.

Herschel wanted to name Uranus "George". The first choice for naming Pluto was "Minerva" and the second was "Cronus". Neptune was discovered by a guy who wanted to name it after himself, planet Le Verrier. The discoverers of the dwarf planet Eris called it Xena.

the guy who named Aluminium/Aluminum wanted to call it "alumium", but this was insufficiently Classical so the UK and US both picked different ways to spell it wrong.

George Everest:

didn't have anything to do with discovery/surveying that mountain

didn't want it named after him

wasn't even pronounced like the mountain. His name was "eve-rest", not "ever-est"

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sometimes I regret the many roads not taken or not available to me in the first place, but I think that feeling is misleading given that in a day you can easily read of a hundred different lives offering a panoply of experiences you will never share, yet each of those lives is also missing most of the experiences of the others; even if the world is overflowing with opportunities any individual is only ever going to see a vanishingly thin slice of them.

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Tiglath-Pileser is of course a wild way to transliterate what should really have been Tukulti-apil-Esarra

(I ignored the long vowel because that's generally commonly ignored in transliterations, and I ignored the diacritic on the š because AFAIK the modern consensus is that Akkadian <š> was probably just /s/ anyway)

Now the king of Assyria, named Thaglathphallasar,

Wild way to transliterate Tiglath-Pileser

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536870912: hold on this is too random to be real

18446744073709551616: wait are you pretending to list silly numbers now

(2147483648, 4294967296: powers of two you might know from discussions of 32-bit integer related messes) (that last one sure looks like a keyboard mash and not a real power though)

2, 4, 8, 16: powers of two that most people recognize

32, 64, 128, 256: powers of two that the computer-literate recognize

512, 1024, 2048: powers of two that 2048 players recognize

4096—16384: powers of two that people who recognize powers of two recognize

32768, 65536, 16777216: powers of two that professional computer touchers recognize

131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576: powers of two recognized by those who have walked the grounds of the wizard's tower

2097152, 4194304, 8388608: powers of two which advanced thaumaturges may once have espied...

33554432: what

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An interesting take from the opposite direction: sometimes it was an ancient text to original readers, such as, for example, because it was written by a Koine-era author deliberately composing in an archaic Greek dialect.

This does not mean it is a good idea to render the English translation of such a text in Middle English throughout, which is an actual thing that has actually happened.

(I think most famously with The Goddesse of Surrye - that is, the Loeb Library translation of the text more commonly known as De Dea Syria, a.k.a. On the Syrian Goddess, by Lucian of Samosata - but IIRC there are other examples.)

I feel like I've had the same experience several times now: someone does a new translation of a non-English literary classic, and all the critics praise it to the moon, so I go and try to read it, and it's turns out it's just . . . bad? Like, really bad? And weirdly bad?

A while back, I wrote about the case of Pevear and Volokhonsky. Here's another example, which I encountered while doing background research for my novel Almost Nowhere.

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One of my novel's major characters is a literary translator, famous for his rendition of the Persian epic poem Shahnameh ("Book of Kings").

To help me write this character, I tried to read the Shahnameh myself. I started out – where else? – with the translation that seemed to be the gold standard, and which was certainly the most critically lauded.

Namely, the 2006 translation by Dick Davis, in prose with occasional shifts into verse.

Here's how the Shahnameh begins, in Davis' translation:

What does the Persian poet say about the first man to seek the crown of world sovereignty? No one has any knowledge of those first days, unless he has heard tales passed down from father to son. This is what those tales tell: The first man to be king, and to establish the ceremonies associated with the crown and throne, was Kayumars. When he became lord of the world, he lived first in the mountains, where he established his throne, and he and his people dressed in leopard skins. It was he who first taught men about the preparation of food and clothing, which were new in the world at that time. Seated on his throne, as splendid as the sun, he reigned for thirty years. He was like a tall cypress tree topped by the full moon, and the royal farr shone from him. All the animals of the world, wild and tame alike, reverently paid homage to him, bowing down before his throne, and their obedience increased his glory and good fortune.

And here is the same opening, in the 1905 translation by Arthur and Edmond Warner (which I only discovered much later in the process of writing Almost Nowhere):

What saith the rustic bard? Who first designed To gain the crown of power among mankind? Who placed the diadem upon his brow? The record of those days hath perished now Unless one, having borne in memory Tales told by sire to son, declare to thee Who was the first to use the royal style And stood the head of all the mighty file. He who compiled the ancient legendary, And tales of paladins, saith Gaiúmart Invented crown and throne, and was a Sháh. This order, Grace, and lustre came to earth When Sol was dominant in Aries And shone so brightly that the world grew young. Its lord was Gaiúmart, who dwelt at first Upon a mountain; thence his throne and fortune Rose. He and all his troop wore leopard-skins, And under him the arts of life began, For food and dress were in their infancy. He reigned o'er all the earth for thirty years, In goodness like a sun upon the throne, And as a full moon o'er a lofty cypress So shone he from the seat of king of kings. The cattle and the divers beasts of prey Grew tame before him; men stood not erect Before his throne but bent, as though in prayer, Awed by the splendour of his high estate, And thence received their Faith.

Now, I can't speak at all about the source text. I have no idea how faithful or unfaithful these two translations are, and in what ways, in which places.

Still, though. I mean like, come on.

This is an epic poem about ancient kings and larger-than-life heroes.

This is a national epic, half myth and half history, narrating the proud folkloric lineage claimed by a real-world empire.

There is a way that such things are supposed to sound, in English. And it sure as hell isn't this:

What does the Persian poet say about the first man to seek the crown of world sovereignty?

Excuse me? That's your opening line? I thought I was reading a poem, here, not taking a fucking AP World Literature exam!

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Postscript

Some of the critical praise for the Davis translation, quoted on the back cover of my copy (emphasis mine):

"A poet himself, Davis brings to his translation a nuanced awareness of Ferdowsi's subtle rhythms and cadences. His "Shahnameh" is rendered in an exquisite blend of poetry and prose, with none of the antiquated flourishes that so often mar translations of epic poetry." (Reza Aslan, The New York Times Book Review) "Thanks to Davis's magnificent translation, Ferdowsi and the Shahnameh live again in English.” (Michael Dirda, Washington Post) "A magnificent accomplishment . . . [Davis’s translation] is not only the fullest representation of Ferdowsi’s masterpiece in English but the best." (The New York Sun)

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Honestly I'd be fascinated to find out what the "Early life and education" section of my Wikipedia page would have looked like if there was one. My education was an absolute glorious mess, and I'd love to see what Wikipedia editors would have tried to make out of that.

(My early life was slightly more normal, though it probably did also include some interesting stuff as well. Not sure which of it would have been considered relevant enough for Wikipedia, though.)

...OTOH I suspect that the "Career" section would actually be really underwhelming and I'd mainly be known for some random thing I happened to contribute to in the 2030s.

[Or, if I'm really unlucky, in the 2020s.]

I am not letting them put an "Early life and education" section on my Wikipedia page. No one needs to know that for anything. We are skipping right to "Career".

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me: I put out so much content, why doesn't anyone read it?

also me: yeah I'm super approachable as a poster!

also me: yeah you just have to be able to follow my code switching between the dialects of every single internet subculture to decode my vibes and references!

also me: but how do I pick which ones to omit

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>late Byzantine >anonymous follis

I know the Palaeologan coins are rare but go get at least a trachy or a Manuel I tetarteron or something

(/lh)

(unfortunately I don't think I have any pics of my own Manuel coins)

Coin of the Day #429 (7/7/2025)

A late Byzantine for today…

Byzantine Empire

AE Follis - 22mm 3.92g

Class I Anonymous (Attributed to Nikephoros III) 1078-1081 AD

Constantinople Mint

Obverse IC XC

Bust of Christ front, nimbate, right hand raised, holding book of Gospels

Reverse Latin cross with X at center, globe and two dots at ends of each arm, crescent at top left and right, floral ornaments at lower left and right

SB 1889

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It is strange that the supposed Russian word "razbliuto" [sic] apparently still shows up in sources as late as 2019 (!) when it had been thoroughly discredited as early as 2005.

(TL/DR: there are some similar Russian words that mean similar things, but that particular word does not exist and seems to have originated from a sequence of misreadings/typos.)

I found this in my current textbook for COMM 102. (Interpersonal Communications) The textbook is Interplay by Ronald B. Adler and Russel F. Proctor. I thought some of these were pretty interesting. If anyone has some words they'd like to add to this list, I'd be happy to learn about them.

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I've seen a really good comment about this a few weeks ago that went into some extensive detail on why it's a thing. Unfortunately I'm not sure how I could search for it (I apparently just read it without a like or a reblog). TL/DR is that smell receptors and their interactions aren't really the same for different humans, and also there's like a lot of them, so it's a lot harder to get consistent associations, and this is probably why there isn't really any specialized vocabulary that isn't just "this smells like familiar thing X".

(though now that we're discussing erotic fanfics, I guess the assorted variations of "musky" count as words-unique-to-smell these days because the original referent being technically compared to is increasingly obscure and most people using the word probably don't know it exists)

(also now that I think about it most color words, especially the nonprimary ones, are also about comparing things to something we know. it's just that for colors it's a lot easier for the comparison to switch from "it looks like this object" to "you probably originally saw it as a splotch in a book or something". and like something like orange or violet is obvious if you think about it for a moment but did you know about the common pink)

English needs more words to describe smells. The only smell words we have are ones where we compare them to something we know, we don't have any words unique to smell. Am I saying this because I think the erotic fanfics I read don't put enough emphasis on smells? Yes. Do I genuinely want our language to add to its vocabulary? Also yes.

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Silly hot take of the night: 🔣 should be the grawlix emoji.

(...I'm not sure if it's at all legible on your screen. I can hardly see it on mine.)