Sugartongue

I must disclose I hate ending a title with a question-mark and I recommend that other authors not do it. In this case, I very nearly tagged the following "Elamite in Late Antiquity?". Because the Elamite language vanished after the Achaemenids fell to Alexander. Or maybe it didn't? (There I go again . . .)

Kevin van Bladel, the man who discovered the roots of (some of) sura 18 (yours truly figuring out the rests'), has published an article... somewhere. Its doi is 10.1017/S1356186321000092. I ain't read it; I cannot read it. But I can dump what I know about the general topic.

This looks into the Khuzestan language; "Khuz" being the Semitic word for "sugar", because under the Sasanians that's what the province was for. But the Khuz language, as the Arabs reported it, was not notably Semitic. Their linguists were good enough to tell if something looked like Arabic, Aramaic, or Hebrew; tho' not quite good enough to discern Mahra from Cushite "Berber". Van Bladel sees the Sugar Tongue as the last gasp of Hatamti-to-Elymais.

Much earlier Cyrus the Persian treated Elamite cuneiform as a language of imperial accounting, and the Achaemenid régime which usurped his line continued that cuneiform as a monumental language. But thereafter the Persian rules found as the Assyrians had found, that the Near East was most important and that the Near East did it in Aramaic. Under the Macedonians, Greek was added to the diwan. Something had to give. What gave, it seems, were Akkadian and the monumental Persian. Elamite gave, too.

The Persians survived and ensured that their Persian language did not give, not in Persia. "Middle Persian" came back under the house of Sasan. The Sasanians were likely some sort of borderland Medean group, many say Kurds. These neo-Medes decided to make the Empire Iranian again; not just Parthian. It turned out nobody but a Kurd wanted to speak Kurdish, even then. So: Persian made a comeback. The Sasanians did keep Parthian "Pahlevi" around. Using the Pahlevi script. Which got used for Persian too.

Meanwhile the 'Iraq remained thoroughly Aramaic, to which the Mandaeans provide a snapshot; and Iraqi Christians went for Syriac as the prestige-tongue. Next door there exists a Khuzestan Chronicle in Syriac. The Chronicler didn't seem even to know about old Elam.

There is talk in the Iraqi Talmud that the Jews in Susa owned a scroll of Esther in Susa's language. Esther is not precisely Biblical for the rest of us, but the Susians did appreciate a local book discussing a local story. Like the classical Arabs, most of us assume the Jews were smart enough to tell if something was "Semitic", "Aryan", or "other". Here is where we might trace Elamite's twilight.

This very-cursory research is telling me that, as Sogdians and Bactrians kept up a local literacy and maybe even a literature, so did the Susians. I mean - why wouldn't they? Who was going to stop them?

Our problem is that we haven't found this nonSyriac Khuz library, yet. So we cannot know - for a start - the alphabet: if they used Pahlevi like the Parthians or Greek like the Bactrians, or Estrangele like the east-Syrian Christians. I do assume the Susian Jews would have stuck with Imperial Aramaic script like the Judaeo-Arabs and the Yiddische.

I READ IT 2/22/2022: And I don't need to retract, anything. What a relief! Van Bladel didn't mention the Jewish take, which at the time I couldn't track, either; but I think we might check the Talmudic gemara to Megilla, which discusses the language in which to read Esther. This called out "Elamite" as one language local Jews used, whether or not they should. I get the impression the word the Talmud actually used was "Khuzi" and/or "Susi". Van Bladel notes that old Susa (Shush), exactly, got Muqaddisi's attention as a city where "Khuzites" held out, as against good (Basrian) "Iraqis".

Van Bladel does track even in Achaemenid times how Elamite was steadily attracting Persian loans. By the Talmud's time and certainly by the time Isho'yahb II sent Marammeh down there, this genos prakticos was probably speaking a creole with true Elamite not even a memory.

The QAnon antipapacy

OnePeterFive serves up some crow this Friday in the Easter season. There was, in 2016, a thought that Cardinal Viganò and those four "dubia" dissenters were going to blow the lid off Vatican heresy and corruption. I realised Viganò, at least, was off in the weeds by December. Now 1P5 has caught up.

It is all so wearyingly familiar to the Trump generation. Trusting The Plan. For The Storm.

Honestly, this should be a warning to the Fátima crew and maybe even to the Immaculate Heart set, generally. Apocalyptic movements can change the world. But they usually don't and, in the rare event they do, they never end up how you like. Islam, anyone?

The hydrogen-ion speed limit

Courtesy HBDChick, Ethan Siegel posts at Forbes a fine and informative article about the speedlimits for matter in intergalactic space.

Light in a pure vacuum has a speed: C, which is the limit for everything. Between galaxies, matter is so sparse that a particle traveling through it might not encounter another particle. Such might evade the particles in our own galaxy long enough to hit us down here - such is a Cosmic Ray. We've been talking about dodging those Cosmic Rays in the fortnight-long night of our Moon, where metals breed Bremsstrahlung. Since their speed is boring, some ridiculous fraction of lightspeed C, and since we've been assuming a rest mass, which is that of a proton, these 'rays are measured in energy, by the electron-volt.

Siegel explains that a cosmic proton should own a speedlimit meaning an energylimit. When such go through intergalactic space, not hitting more protons, they swim against a tide, a tide of photons-with-an-h. Between galaxies you can see other galaxies, by their photons. And the Cosmic Microwave Background bathes us all. A proton-with-a-r will hit photons, even low-frequency photons, and, if the proton is going fast enough, this interaction bleeds energy. At 5 × 10¹⁹ electron-volts, the proton hitting light should be spawning off some pions which are a major drain for it. Pions then decay into other energetic particles and of course much more light, but the proton doesn't care; it cares it's not exceeding the limit.

As the universe expands we can expect the photon count to lower and those photons left over to lower their frequencies, so this speed limit will increase. By extension, as it were, the speed limit is higher near us than it is - was - out by the most distant and visible-youngest galaxies.

Anyway we've been seeing some 'rays already in the 10²⁰ eV range, down here. Since they are coming from all over, like comets, that rules out protons from, say, the Sagittarius black-hole or the nearest galaxies which haven't had the time to lose energy to pions.

Siegel says the strongest 'rays must not be protons, by themselves; but whole atomic nuclei of protons and neutrons. Iron would do it. UPDATE 7/8: more on acceleration of nuclei.

The Phrygian nobility

Long piece on Helladic DNA.

Found here - I'd say, verified here - is that modern Greeks are, by ancient standards, northerners. Elati-Logkas is the site in question, Middle Bronze Age. I mean, we all pretty much knew that; the Dorian language (not-quite-extinct today) was spoken in Macedon and the Spartans sure weren't going up there. And north-to-south has been the historic pattern in Greece, as witness the Aromanians and Slavs brought in by (probably) the mediaeval "Macedonian" Dynasty at Constantinople (whom I suspect as full Yugoslavs).

What's new here is the marker for the Mycenaean nobility LHIII. They look like Armenians - partly.

When I think of Greek-like, Armenian-like crossovers I think of Iron Age Phrygia before the Cimmerians and Lydians dismantled it. Could it be that the Trojan War really was a war between cousins? If so the LHIII nobility was a high caste of Luwian-Thracian overlords, speaking [a form of] Greek, but not in much contact with the dâmos.

The bad news in this theory is that it takes away some of the evidence on what the dâmos was speaking. There have been some musings that the Dorians were already here, like the "ME-ZA-NA" in Linear B who may have been protoMessenians. The Arcadians kept Linear B's Greek but they were very much the minority by the Archaic Era.

At a guess, the local populace may have been Ionic. That language is kinda sorta close to Linear B. Last I looked it wasn't deemed a descendent like Arcadian is a descendent. But I could understand a High Speech / Low Speech situation over LHIII, with Doric (and Aeolic) ruled as Barbarian Speech.

UPDATE 5/14: Davidski calls shenanigans. They didn't even mention the later Slavic invasions, it seems. That makes the study useless in present form.

Fake news, real news

A well-deserved LOL to all the Right outfits that hawked this crap. Kudos to Richard Hanania for calling shenanigans.

A much more fitting target for book-related grift would be Amy Coney Barrett, but Team Red didn't wanna hear it.

I suppose internet traffic and donations kept flowing, so the fake news did its job. But - sooner rather than later, I think - the fundraisers and the fakery will be tuned out. And that's a shame, because our real rulers have real plans, affecting us directly.

In that spirit the Mail's "Hamburglar" meme is legit pace Associated Press. It's no secret that the soyfolk have had a crusade / jihad against human carnivores for some time, and that the past year or two has seen a move by the oligarchs to foist these "impossible" fakesteaks upon your Starbucks and your Burger King. Better, smarter.

The Biden Administration's poo-pooing of this, alongside oligarch media, is of a piece with the Obama Administration's disavowal of homosexual "marriage" until, you know, it happened. Or the Clinton campaign's promise that they're not gonna TAKE YER GUNNZ until they took your guns. This Administation has little direct effect upon us anyway since the oligarchy is running the score on D.I.E. and on which businesses get what loans. Biden just bends the knee to what he's told (perhaps not as skillfully as Harris).

The AP linking all this to the claim that the 2020 election was rigged only serves to make whose side AP is on, which is the side of those who "fortified" that election, and which side continues to "fortify" it today.

Trumpism discredited

The 1776 Report has now exited the Right, courtesy Brion McClanahan at Chronicles.

McClanahan is involved with the Politically Incorrect Guide series, which I don't endorse, since it went basic-b!tch srrvative on Darwin and, to be brutal, on the Civil War and Reconstruction. The P.I.G. line is however a barometer on American Right opinion. McClanahan knows well the Founding Fathers, as he demonstrates here.

This means that Trump's legacy is, ultimately, failure. Failure of a particularly Boomer strain, the failure of an overweight white retiree sputtering about "the party of the KKK" and "whaddabout muh Dream" on PJMedia.

The 1776 Report taints every thinker involved with it: of which names I recognise Carol Swain and Victor Davis Hanson. This is tragic for both, since I had appreciated their scholarship over the Bush II years as not being so basic as Bush himself (last seen voting for Condoleeza).

PJMedia commenters do buy books, or at least read reviews of books, so maybe they'll take it upon themselves to read better books, by better writers. I'm not hopeful about Trump's generation, but we can always hope for Posobiec's generation.

Cardio

Berenson is back. Now with an anecdote about a vaccin-ee dying a couple weeks later.

I read about this first from Hanania, who unfortunately prefaces his poast with a "LOL", a tell for insecurity.

Hanania does have a good point that vaccines are demonstrably doing their job. That is why India wants some, and why it is being considered a diplomatic failure that Biden's and Harris' Administration has been slow-walking this. A shift to the individual is what Scott Adams (and Joseph Stalin) would call a rhetorical kill shot. Millions saved in Israel is a statistic; one Israeli dead is Twitter.

All this said, vaccines might be a strain on the heart. The virus was a strain on the heart; a vaccine is by definition a nontransmissible virus-imitator; therefore, some cardio problems should be anticipated. It's been noted that we're doing a global Phase III. It's been deemed a hit on Trump (including by me) that his Administration didn't open up these 'cines earlier.

To offer some recent autobiography here, I'll disclose I walked probably ten miles on Saturday, and I felt absolutely miserable Sunday morning. Not just the ankles n' calves; I'm talking about lung function, fatigue, all of that. I wondered if I'd caught the Pooh Flu after all.

It's Monday and I ain't dead yet so I'll say - it was probably cardio. I could be more active than I have been, and I'm not. (I could also be younger, but, well.) I cannot rule out that the vaccine is a hit to the heart. But sitting around opens your heart to those hits, and to others. (Cernovich has been playing up elsewhere that booze is bad and so's weed, although he's also big on psychedelics, which I'd not recommend for heart patients either.)

To sum up I'll say this: the virus is worse, and unlike the vaccine the virus will spread. So, my advice is, get your steps in. If you can walk ten miles, do it. If you have a gym go to it.