Lots of people study their own native language...

[dr_whom]

I went to a dissertation proposal defense today. The defending grad student is a Francophone from New Brunswick, and the language he's doing research on is ancient Babylonian.

…In other words, he's an Acadian studying Akkadian.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

long have i dreamed of such an eventuality.

[q10.livejournal.com]

related to this only in a ‘that irrationally reminds me ...’ sense: i feel that the universe suffers from the lack of a suitably comprehensive guide to the relationships and (more frequent) non-relationships between Sumerians, Sumer, Samaria, Samaritans, Sarmatians, and Cimmerians.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

This is incredibly delightful.

[dr_whom]

Similarly, can you tell how many of guitar, sitar, cithara, and zither are etymologically related? Because I sure can't!

[dr_whom]

His research is also pretty cool—applying variationist sociolinguistics to Old Babylonian inscriptions! I can't remember if I told you about it before, but here's the abstract from his NWAV talk.

[lord-codfish.livejournal.com]

Not to mention Samara, Russia and Samarra, Iraq!

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

Now I'm wondering whether the names of Vienne the Lyon suburb and Vienna the Austrian capital come from the same source. Wikipedia is vague on the subject.

[picklepikkl.livejournal.com]

:D

[q10.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

[q10.livejournal.com]

wikipedia suggests that Samarra has some connection with Sumer and the Sumerians, although it's not immediately clear whether the name similarity is coincidence or some genuine-but-remote etymological link (my totally uninformed bet is on coincidence).