Two Bits from Y.

Frequent commenter Y wrote me as follows: Two interesting bits. I don’t know if they are blog material but I hope you’ll find them interesting in any case: — First one comes from Pystynen’s Xitter (I don’t have an account there. I use nitter to browse it.) […]: Has there ever been work in something like documentary linguistics that was not downstream of the European missionary–colonial tradition? That is, someone producing a description/grammar at some detail of a previously unwritten language foreign to the writer? We find occasional snippets about foreigners’ languages for long time (Greeks writing down a handful of words of Scythian, etc.), but is going beyond that basically single-invention? Al-Kashgari comes sorta close (at least a dialect documentation pioneer), but he is both a native speaker and this is early enough that presumably most Common Turkic varieties would have been still intelligible with the centuries-extant Old Turkic literary language. I was curious about that,…