Welcome to To Wake the Dead — a public research journal by Theo Avedisian.

I study linguistics & archaeology at NYU, where I also run the League of Linguistics. I’m interested in how ancient languages and scripts evolve—how they’re shaped by material practices and continue to speak across space and time. This blog is a place for me to think aloud and document as I work across Greek, Akkadian, Latin, Phoenician, and French; build tools for studying writing systems; and reflect on the messier, more personal side of learning things slowly and deeply. Generally a record of mind, not of life.

All writing and research shared here represent my own independent work and views. They are not reviewed, endorsed, or representative of any institution with which I am, or have been, affiliated.

If you’re new here

These are a few posts that capture both halves of my project—how I think about things and what I’m trying to build.

Personal reflections:

• On the Texture of Dead Languages — what brought me to antiquity
• On Ambition — drive, discipline, and awe for the work
• On Diaspora and Scholarship — inheritance, distance, care, and studying what is already part of you
• The Art of an Opening — comparative poetics of Homer in Greek, French, and English

Research & method:

• The Geometric Mindset — culture before computation
• Glyph to System — building APEX from the ground up
• Designing in the Shadows — learning to code between epistemologies
• Data, from FAIR to FRAIL — a new paradigm of data frailty

Series

The Tritropic Line
Reflections on reading Homer’s Odyssey in three languages—Greek, French (Bérard), and English (Loeb series, Murray). This combines language study and comparative poetics with the slow joy of close reading.

Tablets and Tribulations
A record of my work with Akkadian, of which I’m now in my third semester. Named with as much reverence as chagrin.

APEX Updates
This is about my current research project on alphabetic transmission and paleography—mostly Greek and Phoenician. It includes progress notes, technical experiments, and the occasional map or dataset that cooperates. More process-oriented than the dedicated project site.

Adventures in Materiality
Here I document my experiments in carving, molding, inscribing, and replicating artifacts. The work is messy, and that’s the point.

Linguistics for All
Posts rooted in the events and conversations I help organize, especially through the NYU League of Linguistics. A mix of accessible theory, reflections on public linguistics, and notes on language’s role in community.

Tools of the Trade
Every so often, I write about a tool that has helped me read, write, map, or parse. This could be a corpus, a piece of software, or just a clever work-around I’ve devised. One upcoming project: online flashcards of Latin terms found in inscription commentary, making corpora more accessible for non-specialists.

The Close Read
Wherein I do a deep dive into a piece of literature, though some nonfiction as well. A fair bit of poetry, as it lends itself to my style.

Marginalia
A space for stray thoughts, reflections on studying dead languages as a living person, and the emotional archaeology that sometimes comes with long-term projects.

This site is where I work in public—testing ideas, gathering feedback, and learning how attention itself becomes a method. Thanks for reading.

—T

Picture: Athens, 2021. Birthplace of my epigraphic obsession.