Punic loanwords in Tamazight

Marijn van Putten lately uploaded his work on protoBerber roots. They are called "Berber" after the Greek mockery of those who speak poor Greek, I think starting with the Macedonians in their days (cf. Pherenike v. Mac. Berenice). Most indigenous Saharans tend to call themselves, er, the Fremen.

As others witnessed the Imazighen, so the Imazighen learnt from others. The Arabian dromedary must be a case in point (I don't think the old African camel was remembered). I have in mind here the stem əlməd. Van Putten sets this word first on his list, which is nonalphabetic; it boasts pride of place, for him. This əlməd means "to learn". Any Jew - who are just G-d fearing punici - can tell you lmd bore the same understanding in old Canaanite. An Arab would have his own terms like 'rf and 'lm.

Immediately to my attention is that əlməd isn't in Sanhaja / Zenaga. Van Putten uses Zenaga copiously elsewhere. Also the Zenaga in Mauretania today are proud scholars of (Islamic) literacy. They absolutely have words for learning, and van Putten absolutely would know those words. The Zenaga have simply chosen not to use this word.

I submit that the Sahara got əlməd from the incoming Canaanites, after the Zenaga went their own way. This would have happened during or after the Third Phase in Morocco. It is difficult to pinpoint further on account the Kabyle, who may have split during the Bronze Age, continued contact with the wider Med even where not with fellow Berbers. They could have taken the root on their own, as Syriac and Coptic will each take from Christian Greek.

I wonder how many other Punic words are hiding in the deep lexicon, ignored because they look Arabic so late.

The loonlike duck

On topic of the fowl of the Cretaceous, modern research has been pondering... Antarctica. As of 69Mya, Australia and Antarctica were separated by not-much; they both had territory inside the then polar circle. Zealandia also existed, I think.

Antarctica was famously not wholly frozen then, because that current was blocked by sufficient land the vortex wasn't strong. But the winters were just as dark. So these continents were seasonal; their forests still coniferous, like the southern Andes.

That means the continents housed a prime spot for the new migratory birds, like those South Pacific guano islands, except more so. We are now learning what sort of birds. The answer is not "penguin" - they had waterfowl. But not As We Know It.

It's more like a diving loon. So I guess these lakes had a lot of crawly crabs and shrimps, down where physics says nonfrozen water resides through the winters.

Sweeping away the debris

The HPV vax is a success-story. So is the measles vaxx.

In the interest of Fairness Doctrine, Dr Syed Haider asks us instead to normalize measles and other mild childhood illnesses that simply train the immune system. Haider goes on to include mumps(!) and rubella. I haven't asked the good doctor his ratings for polio or hepatitis-B. This feeds into a (selfish) narrative of too-many from the Baby Boom generation and older: they believe they are stronger for surviving what their peers did not.

Meanwhile, Amy Proal ponders corona spike proteins. Proal is talking the virus; some on the RFK side are more-concerned with spikes from the vaXxX. (Especially if they've been off on Slay News and/or Vox Popoli looking up the fake journals linked there. Or listening to Viganò on Hoft's site in between accusations of climate-tampering. BUT I DIGRESS)

My knowledge of immunology might not be on par with Dr Haider's (I'm more a math nerd) but I do recall that antibodies are not the spikes; they kill the virus bearing the spikes. So any vaxXXx will less-likely injure you than it will injure viruses like the one I contracted earlier this month. That the spikes do remain adrift is important. Cleaning those away, should be something all agree on.

The let-'er-rip crew should be something we all agree against. What does not kill does not, here, make stronger.

A habitable system's second wind

A few years ago a planet was found in the habitable zone of a... white dwarf. The usual A or F type would have expanded to delete everything out to, like, 2 AU. We have plenty of polluted dwarfs out there, even one in the act of gobbling pollution. But not all the disrupted matter would have become pollution. A planet this close to the star must have collected itself secondarily from the debris left over from the star's exit from main-sequence.

Last week UC Irvine asked after habitability prospects in a tidally-locked secondary planet. It might actually work. If somehow volatiles can be delivered down here.

Taproot

The Church tends to juxtapose its readings and psalms by shared theme; these are a mine for correlations. This Sunday's OT reading is from Jeremiah 17:6-8 and the psalm is the first. They share the similitude of the plant by a body of water. But more: the follower of the Lord is a tree rooted near a stream, and both texts compare him with something else.

Jeremiah 17 just has this as a follower of the Lord, alone; and the comparand is the bush in the desert. The psalm introduces the "Torah" and behaves like a wisdom-text. Classically the psalm is understood as the introduction to the Psalter as a whole; even Muslims have taken the time to translate it to introduce psalms of their own. It is general consensus that the psalm depends on Jeremiah to which it adds (Temple?) tropes.

Phil Botha posited about the same in 2005. He figured that Psalm 1's "Torah" was the general Divine wisdom vouchsafed to prophets, starting with Moses (in Deuteronomy) then Joshua, and most-lately Ezekiel and Jeremiah.

I think we are looking at a redactional layer of the Psalter, which went on to append or interpose sophiac matter to, for one, Psalm 19. This was done by the school of Baruch scribe of Jeremiah.

Trump and the GOP have endangered your children

To the surprise of nobody, least of all this blog (which stayed quiet lately), Robert F Kennedy's promotion is already sowing the wind. Louisiana is now off the vaccines - all of them. This when a measles outbreak is already ensuite (I'll spot you one and blame Biden).

Vaccine-injury for all its hype is not a thing. The crazy moms - their own word for themselves - swear up and down that they are arguing against interest: Do you think we want to blame the vaccines? We denied this until every other cause had been ruled out. You think we want to feel guilty? They are lying, first of all to themselves.

Yes, I say: you do want to feel guilty. You do want a world where you have answers that are not in your genes, but (somehow) in your own agency. You do want to reverse time and change a decision.

If you did change that decision and your kid ended up "damaged" anyway, you would now be a fanatic for the vaccine. That's the gene in yourself. As Calvinist as this sounds.

Now herd-immunity is going away and more infants won't have that reprieve before the first measle hits.

Mitch McConnell may well be the only Republican left in the Senate with integrity.

CROW 2/20: Vaccine injury is a thing for mRNA. How hard a thing, is now the question.

Permian neurodivergence

News here is that birds and other reptilians have different brains. By brain they mean the pallium, basis of the neocortex; the article has reptiles as an afterthought, but treats them as alongside us synapsids.

So the split happened during the Permian, each side developing its dinosaur or mammalian brain on its own. (Or turtles or snakes or whatever.) One imagines that the Permian fauna were all basic dunces.

This further aligns with news to lighten the Hard Steps toward sentience. Once life grunts itself off the swamps, that life enjoys several routes toward some degree of intelligence. The Chicxulub blast was a setback, but something found its way to be human-smart [insert political joke here]. Some form of clambering dino might have figured it out first.