To Wake the Dead

Author: Theodore Fitzgerald Avedisian Van de Walle

  • Linguistics for All, 3: How to Run a Linguistics (or Any Academic) Club

    NYU League of Linguistics logo

    This is a longer post, as I’m documenting my journey in running the NYU League of Linguistics. Herein I give some pretty extensive advice on how to do outreach and build an extracurricular community. When I first joined the club’s leadership team, it had gone quiet. There were myriad challenges involved that required tenacity, creativity, and a willingness to ask for help, and I want to pass on what I’ve learned. This post is aimed at undergrads who find themselves responsible for an academic club and want to deepen its impact.

    It was not a fresh start for us—it was a resurrection. The club had existed for at least 15 years, but by the time I got involved, it had gone relatively quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we were placed on probation for failing to meet the university’s minimum event requirement: three per semester. The bones were there—name, charter, social accounts—but the pulse was faint.

    What I wanted, at first, was simply a place to talk about language in the company of others who cared. So I asked around: friends in psych, econ, classics, CS. People said yes. So: we made flyers. Secured pizza. Helped to coordinate room logistics, the A/V, a slide deck. We opened with something light and collaborative, and the enthusiasm was immediate.

    This year’s schedule is the fullest in the club’s memory, and what’s emerged is more than a club. It’s a project in public linguistics: a way of gathering, questioning, and bringing language to the fore.

    A Year in Events

    Our calendar this year reflects the range we’re trying to cultivate. We’ve hosted discussion groups, lectures, mixers, and games—all with an eye toward accessibility and intellectual curiosity.

    Some of our events have been exploratory and collaborative, like our endangered language discussion series, which combined typology with revitalization ethics. I shaped the curriculum with input from several external linguists, including one whose fieldwork perspective framed the questions we asked. We’re still refining the discussion group format, but we’ve gotten strong feedback from attendees and are working to ensure each one invites curiosity and makes participants feel like they have something to contribute. We’re also developing a language revitalization simulation game, where players role-play as linguists trying to support an endangered language community—combining strategy, theory, and storytelling. We plan to launch that either this month or early next semester.

    Other events were more formal, like our public lecture with forensic linguist Robert Leonard, and our guest lecture + Q&A with Adam Aleksic (aka @EtymologyNerd) back in March. That last one was quite the logistical feat: over 300 people showed up, 130 of them from outside NYU. We got so much interest within 4 hours of announcing the event that we were forced to pivot fast—changing venues, coordinating multiple livestreams, and ensuring a high-quality recording. It worked. The room was packed, and people stuck around to talk with Adam and amongst themselves for more than an hour after the event ended.

    We’ve also leaned into social and community-building events—social hours, study sessions, and, upcoming on April 22nd, an IPA spelling bee. These are playful, but not throwaway: they keep people coming back.

    Across all of these, we’ve maintained steady turnout (10–20 people per event, usually), and have been lucky to host guest speakers who’ve generously agreed to visit—many over Zoom, some in person—just because we asked. Cold emails, it turns out, go a long way. Many have responded with striking generosity and curiosity.

    The Work Behind the Scenes

    Running a linguistics club isn’t just event planning. The role’s orchestration demands have taught me as much as the events themselves. It’s been a lot, but more than worth it to see the community grow.

    We’ve gathered feedback both informally and through structured surveys to shape our events around what people actually want: depth without gatekeeping, playfulness with genuine exploration. The results have been overwhelmingly positive. People have told us they’re enjoying the comeback we’re making. What was recently a dormant club is now, again, a hub.

    I don’t know exactly what the League will look like in five years. But I do know this: the appetite is there. For conversation, for community, for the kind of language work that feels alive.

    And if you’re thinking about starting—or reviving—an academic group at your own university, here’s what I’d offer: start small, but pitch a big tent.
    • Mix types of events throughout the term to maintain balance. Social events are more important than some club heads think. Don’t underestimate how much people crave intellectual community, especially at big schools and city campuses.

    Theo Avedisian hosting NYU League of Linguistics trivia night, September 2024.

    • Make your extracurricular extracurricular—broach topics that undergrads (and linguists generally) don’t get much exposure to in the ordinary course of their studies. This tends to attract more interest than, say, a rehash of the first lecture of Linguistics 101.
    • You can pick niche topics—but frame them with an inviting, curiosity-first question. For example, instead of “Historical Phonology in Armenian,” try “Why Do Some Languages Keep Letters No One Pronounces?”
    • Talk to clubs at other schools to get ideas and learn best practices, especially if they have similar contexts—e.g., same school size, size of program, campus type, region. We’ve gotten great ideas from looking at other clubs’ Instagrams and consulting their presidents, such as Adam Aleksic, a.k.a. etymologynerd. An amazing centralized resource is a list of clubs and their Instagrams by Josue Estrada-Cordoba. You can find that here.
    • Learn names and get contact info. This really helps people feel known and welcomed.
    • Be generous with food—undergrads love a pizza night, and seem unable to resist snacks.
    • Document reflections after every event. I use a spreadsheet, you can also use a text document—whatever you prefer. Record expenditure, turnout (projected and actual), and all feedback, positive and negative alike. I also recommend writing down what went unexpectedly well or what fell flat—things you’ll forget six months later but which are so helpful when planning the next iteration.

    My spreadsheet for the Spring 2025 semester documenting the status of various tasks and the outcome of events, as well as notes on what worked and what didn’t.

    • Another use for spreadsheets in running a club: track your tasks by event and keep your team in the loop. My template is available here—feel free to copy it and adapt to your events. I also recommend adding a column for who’s responsible, if you have formal delegation of tasks.

    Sample event workflow for our Arrival movie night, where linguist and consultant Jessica Coon Zoomed in to speak with us.

    • Part of the importance of documentation: the more you can demonstrate to your college’s club life board that you’re making an impact on campus, the more likely they are to increase your budget when you apply for the next year.
    • Learn your school’s bureaucracy. How do you book rooms, and which are you permitted to use? Who are your points of contact in the administration? What’s your budget? What are you allowed to expense? How often do you have to meet? How does the audio/visual tech work? Can non-affiliates attend, and what’s the process for them accessing your facilities?
    • A well-timed cold email holds great power. Aim for the least busy points in a term if you’re reaching out to an academic. This tends to be the first month, and then a few weeks before finals, once midterms are graded and final projects are in the works but not yet submitted. Consult their school’s academic calendar to find out when these points fall.
    • Similarly, time events with your own school’s pace, avoiding when turnout is likely to be lowest (midterms, finals, before spring break). The major exception would be hosting a catered study session ahead of an exam period.
    • Be sure to advertise: post on Instagram (and promote the account among your members to keep them in the loop), put up conspicuous flyers, and text your friends about upcoming events. You can also ask the department head to circulate events via their email list, and ask professors to tell their classes about upcoming events if it connects to the course they’re teaching.

    NYU’s resources helped us with a coherent visual identity.

    • For design, two tips: 1) Canva Pro ($15/month) has been a godsend for quickly making attractive and attention-getting promotional materials. If it’s in the budget, it’s worth it. 2) Your university may have a design package with a precise guide to logos, colors, proportions, and fonts. Here’s NYU’s. Brown University’s is here, as another example. As the one handling event promotion, I’ve found it invaluable, as it gives something to start from rather than requiring I do everything from scratch.
    • Consider making a website like we did, as it’s a great place to centralize your resources, calendar, and follow-up content such as reflections and recordings. However, always ask if all participants are comfortable with both the recording and the posting—transparency is essential. If possible, make events accessible afterward—through recordings, transcripts, or even just slide decks. It lets people engage on their own time, which really matters at large or commuter-heavy schools, or when you have significant alum or non-affiliate interest. I’d recommend WordPress for a clean and accessible template; we upgraded to the personal plan ($36/year, plus a free domain name for the first year) to unlock features such as advanced analytics.

    Our homepage.
    The analytics for our website.
    A sample of a resource-heavy discussion group.
    Our folder with pre-event resources.

    There are also some things we’re considering:
    • Making a central onboarding document to build a sort of institutional memory. This would help future board members understand the workings of the club and broader university. I had a protracted learning curve because I didn’t know the answers to the types of questions I listed above in the advice section. I hope to avoid that for next year’s board members, as half of our leadership is graduating.
    • Structuring roles clearly. This should prevent anyone from taking on too much responsibility and burning out. It also helps with the awkwardness of more junior members having to delegate tasks to other board members. Defined roles also help newer members know where they can plug in and feel like their contributions matter.
    • Having a cleaner system for tracking our budget. We currently don’t have a spreadsheet or any centralized document. Also, this will help with onboarding the event coordinator and treasurer the following year, as they’ll have a sense of what an event costs to put on, and can budget accordingly.

    But the most important thing, I think, is to keep asking broad questions that people can relate to—help them connect language to life. Language belongs to everyone, after all, so this is eminently possible. As such, our second discussion group asked: What makes a language worth saving? What languages has your family lost, and why?—questions that sparked conversation across majors, backgrounds, and personal stakes. Many, for example, had grandparents who refused to teach their children their native languages, so no one in the room spoke their ancestral tongue, and many felt a sense of loss for it. Building personal connection to language is a great avenue for exploration, reflection, and discovery. Best of all, everyone is capable of it, no matter who they are or where they come from.

    And from there, if the ground is good, your community grows.

  • Adventures in Materiality, 2: Carving the Flood: An Amateur Attempt

    Image of the Flood Tablet as stored in the British Museum: accession number K.3375.
    Lineart of the Flood Tablet as documented in the CDLI: accession number P273210..

    0. Prologue: Why Copy the Flood Tablet?

    Replication has become one of my favorite hobbies. I love artifacts, but as any archaeologist or collector will tell you, the barriers to actually owning them are steep—financial, legal, and ethical. How do you store them? protect them? justify having them at all? But when you make something yourself—when you replicate an ancient object by hand—you bypass all that. You get the closeness—a heightened closeness, I’d say—without the risk.

    That’s what drew me to recreate the Flood Tablet. Buying a cast would’ve set me back about a hundred dollars. But I wanted to see what I’d learn if I made one myself. Not just held it, but shaped it. Because creating a replica doesn’t just mimic an object—it stages a kind of encounter. You begin with a clean surface, unlike the fragmentary originals, or those replicas that emerge fully formed, and fully unformed, from the get. But when you make it yourself: every crack, every slip, every flaw is something you have to introduce yourself. You get to know the object from the inside out—not just what it looks like, but how it resists you.

    I picked this Flood Tablet precisely because it’s ambitious. It’s one of the most iconic inscriptions in the ancient world—a kind of cultural Rosetta Stone, linking Mesopotamian, biblical, and classical traditions. In fact, upon its discovery in the nineteenth century, its similarity to the later Abrahamic tradition sent shockwaves through the scholarly community—truly, its impact cannot be understated.

    What’s also beautiful and moving about it is its subject: survival, memory, and catastrophic loss. And it’s been copied, again and again, across centuries. To replicate it now is to take part in that long chain of transmission. It’s not just a story of a flood. It’s a story about what writing saves.

    1. The Original: Tablet XI and Its Aura

    A tablet subsequently discovered, containing the same story, approx. a millennium older than this tablet. Now in the Morgan Library: accession number 225906.

    Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh is arguably the most famous cuneiform text in the world. It tells the story of a great flood, a chosen survivor, a divine warning, and a boat filled with life—centuries before the Book of Genesis recorded a similar arc. In the narrative, Utnapishtim recounts to Gilgamesh how he escaped destruction, was granted immortality, and ultimately became the bearer of a knowledge that even kings could not command. It is one of the clearest points of contact between Mesopotamian myth and later Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions. Read a translation here.

    Found in Nineveh (in the north of modern Iraq, on the Tigris River) on May 7, 1873 by archaeologist George Smith, the tablet is a large, convex slab of clay, its surface densely packed with tight, disciplined cuneiform lines. The edges are broken, some signs lost.

    But it’s not a draft or a throwaway. It was meant to endure. To try to recreate it is, in a small way, to step into that intention. The curvature, the spacing, the subtle tilt of each wedge: all these formal features speak not just to aesthetics, but to the technical mastery of the scribes who made them. This isn’t just a myth we inherited. It’s a craftwork that once held it.

    2. The Process

    I started with two pounds of grey air-dry clay and rolled it out to a thickness of about ¾ of an inch. I wanted enough depth to accommodate firm impressions without risking breakage—a balance between durability and responsiveness.

    Once I had a smooth surface, I printed a to-scale lineart of one side of the original tablet and laid it directly over the clay. Using a potter’s knife, I cut around the outline to form a proper slab.

    I then scored the signature cleft line that bisects the original tablet. That line helped me rule the text. After that, to mark where each line of writing would begin and end, I took a needle and, with the paper still on top, pricked small bounding dots at the start and stop of every line. This gave me a grid of sorts—not formal ruling, but a subtle framework for spacing. I used actual cuneiform signs from the standard text, fitting in as much as I could per line (which, as I’ll tell you shortly, turned out to be not very much at all).

    For the inscription itself, I used a homemade stylus made from a square wooden dowel. I had sanded down one corner to create a slightly beveled edge that let me grip it more naturally—pinching it between thumb and middle finger, with my index finger guiding from above. In the course of things, I ended up using two styli. The first began to dull mysteriously partway through, possibly due to the water I kept brushing onto the clay to keep it soft. The wood was porous, and the repeated wetting may have softened or blunted its edges. I hadn’t expected tool fatigue quite so early in the process.

    3. Difficulties: Scale, Fatigue, and the Limits of Enthusiasm

    What surprised me most was just how big my signs ended up being. Between the bluntness of my stylus and the limits of my own control, I found I could only produce cuneiform signs that were two to three times the height of the original inscriptions—and at least twice the width. The clay itself wasn’t the issue. If anything, it was a pleasure to work with: I kept smearing water across the surface with my fingertip, especially over unused areas, and that seemed to make the impressions cleaner and more precise. The medium was surprisingly forgiving, an example of an erasure using this technique is given above, in the green circle. My hands were not as pliant.

    I started at the top of the right-hand side of the tablet, and you can tell. My signs grew noticeably larger over time as fatigue set in. I spent around two hours just pressing wedges into the clay, and by the end I was feeling it. Not just in my hand, but in my attention span. I’d wildly underestimated how much text I could fit on the slab at the scale I was working—I probably would’ve needed to double the size to get anywhere close to the full line count of the original.

    By the end, I had learned what I came to learn—and felt ready to let it rest. I don’t plan to do the other side or fill in any missing fragments. This was enough to teach me what I wanted to know: how hard it is, how slow it is, how deliberate every single wedge has to be. The work left me with admiration, exhaustion, and just enough satisfaction to call it finished.

    4. Why It Was So Hard—And What That Tells Us

    This was the smallest scale of replica I’ve ever attempted, and still, my signs were roughly 2.5 times the size of the originals. And even at that inflated scale, I’m not confident I could accurately draw what I carved just by looking at the replica. That tells me a lot. It explains, viscerally, why there was an elite scribal class in Mesopotamian society, and why their training was so extensive. It wasn’t just about memorizing hundreds of signs—though that alone is a feat, especially for scribes working in multiple languages. It was about navigating a medium that added layers of challenge: spacing, shaping, texture, tool wear, and fatigue.

    I’ve long wanted to understand what made cuneiform so difficult—not just as a writing system, but as a practice. Even after studying the language on paper, I didn’t fully grasp the physical demands until I tried it myself.

    I wish we had spent even a single thirty-minute session in Akkadian I making tablets, especially at a small scale like this. The pedagogical value would’ve been enormous. You suddenly understand not just the abstract difficulty of the writing system, but the labor infrastructure around it—the apprenticeship, the specialization, the patience. This little experiment gave me a glimpse into that world, and for that, I’m genuinely grateful.

    5. Closing: A New Kind of Knowing

    I ended up with a lopsided, oversized, and incomplete tablet. But also: textured, hard-won, and deeply instructive. In the end, as it turns out, this wasn’t really about copying Tablet XI. It was about spending time inside its logic—its weight, its line spacing, its forgiving-but-not medium—and learning something I couldn’t have understood from a textbook.

    If you’re studying cuneiform, or even just curious about ancient writing, I can’t recommend this kind of tactile experiment enough. Make a stylus. Roll some clay from your local art-supply store. Try a single line. Your respect for those scribes will double. And you’ll probably come away, as I did, with something small and slightly ridiculous to keep on your shelf—a cracked echo of something monumental. Decidedly not a replica. Rather a kind of conversation.

    Here’s the “finished” product:

  • APEX Updates, 3: Encoding Decisions

    Process for entering the metadata of a given inscription in the GUI I’m designing.

    Before APEX can tell us anything about the shapes of letters, we have to tell it what those letters are—where they came from, when, how confidently we know that, and why we think so. Each traced form in the database is embedded in metadata, and each metadata field is a choice. Or, more accurately, a battleground between competing demands: standardization vs. specificity, precision vs. honesty, completeness vs. clarity.

    This post is about how those choices get made.

    Metadata is Never Neutral

    In paleographic projects, metadata is often treated as scaffolding: a tidy column of site names, dates, scripts, and references that supports the real work of analysis. But metadata is also where the most important theoretical decisions live. Is this letter from “Attica” or from “Athens”? Is it dated to “c. 750 BCE,” to “the mid-8th century,” or to “LG I”? Is the script “Euboean” or “Eubo-Cypriot” or just “Greek”? And what happens when those terms carry more ambiguity than certainty?

    Each of these choices folds a story into the dataset. A story about geography, chronology, authority, and classification. And once the data is encoded, those stories begin to function as fixed facts—however uncertain or contingent they might actually be.

    The Problem of Uncertainty

    Uncertainty is endemic to early alphabetic evidence. Sites are excavated unevenly. Inscriptions are fragmentary. Provenance can be speculative. Paleographic dating relies on a mix of typological comparison and stratigraphy, both of which are prone to revision.

    But digital systems, including APEX, are uncomfortable with uncertainty. The data model wants a number, not a range; a site name, not a narrative; a script label, not a conditional. This means encoding decisions often involve collapsing complexity into legibility. The trick is to do this transparently, and to leave enough of a trail that the uncertainties can still be seen.

    To that end, I’m building out APEX metadata with fields for:

    • Date (range + confidence + reason for): e.g., “750–725 BCE (medium confidence) (archaeological strata)”
    • Provenance (text + category): allowing freeform notes alongside structured site-region-place data
    • Script classification (source + variant): to distinguish between modern typologies and how scripts were likely conceived by ancient users
    • Notes: a catch-all for uncertainty flags, alternate readings, or disputed attributions

    This structure still imposes a frame, but it tries to make the cracks visible.

    Metadata as Narrative

    Every field in APEX is a decision, and every decision reflects a point of view—whether archaeological, linguistic, technological, or historiographic. That makes the metadata not just a scaffold but a narrative: a set of assumptions about what kind of thing the alphabet is, how it moves through space and time, and how we can know what we know. As the project scales, that narrative will shape what kinds of conclusions are possible. So I want to make it visible now, while it’s still under construction, as part of the work.

    In the next update, I’ll cover the baseline nature of the pipeline and what makes it so difficult—but also so precise.

  • The Tritropic Line, 2: Driven Far, Still Moving

    A passage, translated from Bérard, that I found particularly moving. In it, Athena pleads to Zeus, asking that he find mercy in his hardened heart for Odysseus.

    Reading for friction, not fluency

    In the first week of Tritropic, I found myself reading the same passage in French and Greek on the same day. It seemed like a good idea: reinforce the meaning, triangulate expression, hold the line up to two kinds of light. Instead, once I’d puzzled out the syntax and meaning in one language, the second version became trivial. All the work had already been done, particularly because Bérard’s French hews so closely to the original—here a gift and a curse, since the shape of the sentence had already been laid bare.

    What should have been a second act of discovery turned into a performance of memory. And that, for me, is a dead end.

    So I’m revising my approach for the next month to see if a new structure works. I now read a Book of the Odyssey in French across a week, then return to the same section in Greek for the next two or three weeks. This reintroduces mystery—just enough forgetting to force me to re-earn my understanding. Each version remains itself so I can’t lean on one to carry the other. However, there’s just enough closeness, I think, for comparison of translation choices. Theory of translation is something I quite want to pursue through this—it’d be a shame to lose that aspect.

    Scaffolds and Syntax

    In these early days, I’ve learned to be wary of digital tools—pop-up glosses, online parsers, translation extensions. There’s a difference between using scholarly supports and just outsourcing thought. Too often, I found myself parsing without learning. Clicking my way through a passage gave me the answer but not the understanding.

    To counter that, I’ve built what I call a “Reading Ladder” for the French. It begins with a cold read—no tools, no support, just me and the text, making guesses about syntax and structure. Next, I pass through a deeper parsing stage, using only a grammar and a basic dictionary to confirm key unknowns, not every minor term. Only after this do I allow myself to consult a translation or ask my fluent friends, not as a crutch but as a corrective.

    I plan two final stages once I get my bearings more. These are expressive exercises: retelling the passage in my own French, rereading it aloud for rhythm, and briefly stepping outside the text to engage with something stylistically adjacent—a short piece by Gide, a 19th-century abstract on epic poetics, anything that stretches my sense of what French can do.

    Throughout this process, I plan on keeping a syntax journal. Each week, I record one sentence I understood without help, one that tripped me up (with notes on why), and one that delighted me. The journal is to be a miniature Grammaire Bérardienne. It also is meant as a reminder that joy is a form of comprehension.

    Greek and Joyful Tedium

    Greek, with its distance from both English and the Attic I’m familiar with, is a harder beast—and all the more rewarding because of it. I’ve adopted a multi-pass system here as well. The first time through, I read aloud without stopping. No dictionary, no notes, just the text and the shape of the sentence as much as I can discern it. I underline words I don’t know, try to guess at their meaning from morphology, meter, or context. Only after that do I allow myself to return and parse each word carefully. By then, I’ve already begun to intuit some of the patterns, and the parsing feels earned rather than imposed.

    Twice a week, I do blind parsing drills. I take a short passage, cover any translation, and write out the morphological analysis of each verb and noun—tense, mood, case, number, person, source verb or noun. Then I translate from scratch. It’s humbling, but it builds exactly the muscles I’m trying to train.

    Every month, I’m going to try to reread an entire Book in Greek with no aids. It’s the closest this kind of study gets to strength training. My professors have told me one of the best things you can do for your Greek (and language skills generally) is to reread, since you’re no longer in just decode-mode. This very much helped me last semester in my Lucian class. The sense of fluency that emerges—halting, but unmistakable—is worth every hour.

    I also keep a personal lexicon, noting each unfamiliar form, particle usage, or idiom that gives me pause. And every few weeks, I’ll try my hand at short Homeric compositions—just five or six lines using words and constructions I’ve encountered. In the meantime, I’m studying from two Quizlets: one of the 500 most common Homeric vocabulary items, and one with 70+ important ‘small words.’

    What the Text Offers

    What I hadn’t fully expected was just how well-suited the Odyssey is for this kind of iterative, interleaved learning. Its repetitions are pedagogical for me. Vocabulary recurs with slight variations, idioms reappear in altered contexts, and the syntax is often rhythmic enough to imprint itself on the brain. Bérard understands this, and he mirrors Homer’s scaffolding with care. His French extends Homer’s use of anaphora, his vocabulary choices build on one another, and his ceremonial tone reinforces structure as it elevates the prose.

    In both languages, challenge ramps up at a manageable pace. I’m only a few pages in, but already I can sense the increasing complexity—more embedded clauses, trickier participial constructions, and richer metaphor. But nothing feels unearned. The text supports you even as it stretches you.

    Perseverance, Not Performance

    There’s a line at the beginning—one I have reached in both languages—that keeps echoing in my head: ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη. It’s often rendered loosely as “he who was greatly tossed about,” but the Greek is more literal than that, and stranger: he who was driven off far or much. It conjures not just aimless wandering, but compelled displacement—someone pushed off course by forces beyond his control.

    Bérard translates it as celui qui tant erra—“the one who wandered so much.” Murray’s version is starker: “the man who was driven far astray.” Murray evokes motion without agency, but Bérard is softer, more open to interpretation on whether this wandering was chosen or forced. Yet they both understand that πλάγχθη is not just travel, but deviation.

    The line isn’t just about Odysseus, however. It describes what it means to read a difficult language honestly. You’re driven, sometimes astray, but still in motion.

    Difficulty, for me, is no longer something to overcome. I recognize it now as an essential condition for progress. Every time I misparse a participle or mistake a clause boundary, I get a little closer to understanding—not just the sentence, but the langauge system that generated it. That’s the rhythm of the tritropic line: wandering with purpose.

  • APEX Updates, 2: What is the Transmission Problem? A Brief History of My Research Question

    Nestor’s Cup (Pithekoussai, modern Sicily) & Dipylon Inscription (Athens), both dated just after 750 BCE.
    Three famous Phoenician inscriptions, of various dates, to compare letterforms to the above.

    If the first APEX post was about tracing letters, this one is about why those traces matter. Underneath every variant alpha or eccentric epsilon is a deeper question: when, how, and under what conditions did the Greek alphabet emerge from its West Semitic predecessor? This question, which is known in the scholarship as the transmission problem, lies at the core of alphabetic studies, and despite over a century of scholarship, it remains fiercely contested. To map alphabetic transmission is not just to track graphical similarity, but to reckon with how cultures borrow, adapt, forget, and reimagine the systems by which they make language visible.

    At its simplest, the transmission problem asks: When did the Greeks adopt the Phoenician script? But the real terrain is messier. Did the transfer happen once or multiple times? Was it sudden or gradual? Coordinated or ad hoc? Which region of the Greek-speaking world was first? Exactly which Semitic script was the donor—or was there a confluence of models? And what kind of evidence—linguistic, paleographic, archaeological—should we privilege when our sources conflict?

    Historically, the debate has followed disciplinary lines. Scholars trained in Semitic philology and Near Eastern studies tend to favor a high date for the transmission: sometime in the 11th or 10th century BCE, before the traditional Greek Geometric period (in older scholarship, referred to as the “Greek Dark Age”). This camp emphasizes the strong formal similarities between early Greek and Phoenician letterforms, arguing that Greek epichoric scripts most closely resemble Phoenician forms from around 1050 BCE, not the later shapes one would expect if transmission occurred in the 8th century. Joseph Naveh, for instance, in his landmark Early History of the Alphabet (1982), argued that the Greek system must have branched off before major innovations appear in the Phoenician script, such as the angular mem or evolved forms of shin. Naveh saw the Greek alphabet as a snapshot of an earlier Semitic system—evidence, in his view, of early contact and early borrowing.

    On the other side of the debate, Classicists and archaeologists tend to argue for a low date, favoring the 8th century BCE. Their reasoning draws primarily from stratified archaeological contexts: the earliest securely datable Greek inscriptions—such as the Dipylon oinochoe and the Nestor’s Cup from Pithekoussai—belong to the mid-to-late 8th century. Rhys Carpenter was among the earliest and most forceful voices in this camp. In a 1933 article, he wrote that “the argumentum a silentio grows every year more formidable and more conclusive,” referring to the continued absence of any Greek alphabetic inscriptions predating the eighth century (“The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet,” AJA 37 [1933]: 8–29, at p. 27). For Carpenter, the lack of material evidence was not a gap to be explained away, but itself a powerful datum: if earlier use had existed, we would likely have found traces by now.

    This school is generally skeptical of typological comparison, pointing out that letterforms evolve unevenly and can be conservative in certain contexts. Archaeological absence, while never conclusive, is taken seriously—especially when paired with the sudden, near-simultaneous appearance of inscriptions across disparate sites in the 8th century, suggesting a relatively rapid uptake of a recently acquired script. Later scholars, such as Barry B. Powell, built on this foundation. In Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (1991), Powell controversially argued that the Greek alphabet was deliberately invented for the purpose of recording Homeric verse, dating the invention to around 750 BCE. Though widely criticized for its teleology and lack of evidence for such a top-down design, Powell’s theory exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary crossfire that defines this problem: where linguistic function, archaeological data, and cultural ideology all collide.

    Roger D. Woodard, in Greek Writing from Knossos to Homer (1997), pushed back against Powell while still supporting a relatively late date. Woodard views the alphabet’s adaptation as a process shaped not only by contact with Phoenician traders but also by internal Greek developments—especially the memory of Linear B and broader shifts in literacy practices. He emphasizes the complex interplay between tradition and innovation, seeing the Greek vowel system as a structural solution that could only emerge in a linguistic environment receptive to phonological precision.

    The question remains open, but APEX offers a different kind of approach. Rather than anchoring the debate to a single origin point, I focus on regional trajectories and graphical evidence: how letterforms vary, travel, and settle. If the Semitic party line reads the Greek alphabet as a photograph of Phoenician forms from 1000 BCE, and the archaeological model sees it as an emergent public tool of the 8th century, then I want to understand how specific graphemes move through space and time. Which forms remain stable across centuries? Which mutate rapidly? And what can that tell us about the process of transmission, rather than the moment of origin?

    In fact, the most immediate goal of the APEX project is to evaluate whether the Greek letterforms do, in fact, most closely resemble the Semitic models from around 1000 BCE—as the high-date camp maintains—or if their nearest parallels lie elsewhere in the Phoenician typology. The intention is to move beyond qualitative comparisons and scholarly intuition, toward a quantitative, statistically grounded assessment of letterform similarity. By measuring and modeling these visual relationships systematically, APEX aims to provide a more objective foundation for dating the moment of greatest resemblance between the Greek and Phoenician scripts.

    Rather than jumping straight into letterform similarity metrics, though, the next update will take a detour—one that’s no less crucial. Before the vectors can speak, they must be named, contextualized, and organized. APEX Updates, 3: Encoding Decisions will explore how I’m structuring the metadata that surrounds each traced letter: what counts as “context,” how information is tagged, and why every dataset is also a narrative. As it turns out, deciding how to describe a letter may be just as revealing as deciding how to compare it.

  • Marginalia, 2: On Diaspora and Scholarship

    The Parthenon/Elgin Marbles as in the British Museum, London.

    Diaspora means a scattering—but not just away from. It’s also a scattering into: people of yours wherever you go. There’s dislocation in that, but also a strange kind of belonging. You’re never quite at home, but also never entirely foreign. We are at home wherever we are, as the Jewish Bundists say.

    I come from the Armenian diaspora. Much of the history I now hold came to me late, in fragments I had to gather myself. So much so that when my family went to Armenia for the 100th anniversary of the genocide, I misunderstood the purpose of our trip. I didn’t yet know what had been left unsaid. I learned the truth online months later. A strange inheritance: delayed, then all at once.

    That moment formed something in me—something about responsibility, memory, and the ethics of knowing. I now see myself as a banner-carrier of the diasporic experience—not just for Armenians, but in solidarity with all displaced and fragmented peoples. Diaspora isn’t a single story but a way of listening, noticing, and asking better questions.

    Ironically, none of the languages I study are mine. I never learned Armenian. I was meant to attend an immersion program in Yerevan in 2020, but it didn’t happen for the obvious reasons. The language now feels like an island—real, reachable, and still far away. It’s typologically unusual and hard to access. And emotionally, I’ve kept it at a distance—not for lack of interest, but for fear of doing it harm.

    Still, the connection shows up. It’s in the care I bring to other people’s histories, in my reverence for displaced traditions, in my work with Semitic languages—speech communities so often marked by rupture. I haven’t yet studied heritage material from my own background, but I carry the stakes of diasporic scholarship into every archive. Distance doesn’t cancel care, it clarifies it.

    My sense of scholarly ethics—especially around archaeology and epigraphy—grows directly from this. I believe in repatriation, in collective self-determination and the right of communities to steward their past. Yes, nations are imagined, but so are all our systems of meaning. So long as national identity structures the world, its claims must be taken seriously.

    Museums, of course, complicate things. Scattering brings both access and erasure. Greek artifacts in London, Mesopotamian seals in New York—these too live in diaspora. There’s value in broader visibility, especially for those who can’t travel. But there’s loss, too: of voice, of sovereignty, of situated knowledge. I think about this often. I haven’t resolved it.

    I don’t just want a life in the library. I want antiquity to be for everyone. I want the past to feel shared, common, alive. I want to show people that our inheritance—linguistic, cultural, intellectual—is truly ours. The more we realize that, the more fully we can meet the present. That’s the gift of diaspora: a way of being scattered that still insists on connection.

    The Parthenon Marbles as in the Acropolis Museum in Athens. Every time I’ve visited, it’s struck me as a monument to loss.
  • Linguistics for All, 2: Rare Features of Select Endangered Languages

    Linguistics for All, 2: Rare Features of Select Endangered Languages

    Though this is technically Linguistics for All, 2, this post is about NYU League of Linguistics’ first discussion group of the semester—I’m posting it now because a few people asked for the recap, and I’m more than happy to oblige.

    The conversation focused on typological features found in endangered languages—many of them rare in the languages of the world and very unexpected (to English speakers, that is). We took a fast but focused world tour: Austronesian syntax, Mayan phonology, Bantu morphology, and more. The goal wasn’t comprehensiveness, but curiosity. What kinds of things can human languages do? And what’s at stake when we lose examples of those things?

    Some of the questions that came up:

    • How do syntactic constraints shift when the verb comes first? When the object comes before the subject?
    • Why might a language have a vast and highly irregular consonant inventory? Why might sound changes that are quite unique cross-linguistically emerge?
    • What’s it like to speak a language where every noun has to fit into one of twenty classes, each with its own agreement pattern?

    The point was to slow down and marvel at the extent of linguistic diversity, and just what we’d lose if those languages went extinct. These features are beautiful, in my opinion, but they’re also systemically instructive. They tell us what’s possible in the “design space” of language, and how they resist the tidy models that formalists sometimes prefer.

    For those who couldn’t attend, the slides are linked here along with a short primer on the pre-event readings & videos, plus a folder of journal articles and book chapters in a shared Google Drive. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record the session, but I’m hoping to incorporate some of this material into future blog entries or curriculum tools.

    And if this is your first time hearing about the League, drop me a line at tfavdw@nyu.edu—we meet semi-regularly and welcome anyone curious about language in any form. NYU affiliates and non-NYU people can both attend.

    Stay tuned for our next session: a hands-on cryptography and forensic linguistic game using real linguistic data, running during midterms as a low-stakes puzzle night (with some surprise mechanics). It’ll be at 10 Washington Place, NY, NY, at 6:30pm on April 1st. More details are available at nyulol.org, and a recording of the presentation portion, delivered by a leading forensic linguist, will be posted shortly after the event.

  • Tools of the Trade, 1: Epigraphy: The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece by L.H. Jeffery

    Jeffery’s summary table of all epichoric scripts at the end of LSAG.
    It is foundational for any work on early regional Greek scripts.

    There are very few books I consider truly irreplaceable in my research. Lilian H. Jeffery’s The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece is one of them. First published in 1961 and revised in 1990 with A.W. Johnston, this book remains the reference for regional variations in the Greek alphabet during the archaic period. It’s where I first learned to read epichoric inscriptions with the eye of a paleographer rather than a Classicist alone.

    The book is very hard to find, and I only got my copy at an even remotely affordable price after months of scouring secondhand sellers. While copies still circulate among libraries and the used book market, I wanted to make it more accessible to others working in this area. So I hunted diligently before finding it on the Internet Archive. You can read or download it here:
    The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (1990 ed.) – Internet Archive

    Jeffery’s study remains foundational for any work on early Greek writing—not just in Athens or Ionia, but across the full spectrum of regional scripts: Corinthian, Euboian, Attic-Boeotian, Cretan, Cycladic, and others. It includes extensive commentary, maps, and an invaluable inscriptional catalogue organized by region, with drawings and typographic transcriptions. The 1990 revision added important corrections, expanded references, and additional illustrative material. For those of us studying alphabetic transmission, especially the Phoenician-Greek interface or the evolution of letterforms over time, this book is indispensable.

    What makes Local Scripts especially useful is that it bridges the gap between paleography, archaeology, and linguistics. Jeffery doesn’t just chart when and where a particular variant of alpha or epsilon shows up—she explains what those variations might imply for chronology, influence, and contact. And although her typology has been revised and challenged in places (especially with the discovery of new inscriptions), her system remains a critical baseline for almost every study that’s come after.

    Whether you’re interested in early Greek literacy, the transmission of the alphabet, the sociopolitical meaning of epigraphy, or just want to be able to tell the difference between Laconian and Euboian chi, this is the book to start with. I hope having it freely available will be helpful to others navigating this fragmentary and fascinating material.

    Do you have other resources you pair with Jeffery? I’d love to hear what we can supplement LSAG with.

  • Tablets and Tribulations, 1: Lapse and Return

    2023: Tablet replica I made from a drawing in Huehnergard’s grammar.

    I first took Akkadian a few years ago. Since then, the language has been sitting in a kind of suspended animation: just far enough away to feel unreachable, just close enough to make me feel guilty.

    This post kicks off Tablets and Tribulations, a new series chronicling my return to Akkadian. I’ll be using it to track my progress, share insights, and reflect on what it means to study something this complex, this demanding, and this strange.

    Why Akkadian?

    Akkadian sits at the intersection of my academic obsessions: Semitic linguistics, the history of writing systems, and the psycholinguistics of script. It’s a dead language, but not a fossilized one. The more you read it, the more it pulses: with bureaucracy, with poetry, with prayer. And the writing system—a sprawling, phonetically polyvalent syllabary riddled with ideograms—is completely unlike the tight alphabets I’m used to. It demands patience, pattern-recognition, and grit.

    There’s also no shortage of material, with estimates of the number of excavated Akkadian texts reaching as high two million—meaning it quite possibly has the most documents of any ancient language; in fact, according to my professor Ronald Wallenfels, more documents than all ancient languages combined. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

    I’m also drawn to it because I’m not naturally good at it. Greek and Latin came to me more intuitively, their logics familiar in a way I hadn’t expected. Akkadian doesn’t let me do that. It forces me to slow down, to wrestle with my perfectionism, to train my brain in new ways. And I love that. I want to get good at something hard. I want to overcome the mental blocks that have held me back before.

    What’s Changed

    Since that early study, I’ve broadened my exposure to Semitic linguistics and become more confident working with both the script and the medium. I’ve also made peace with how humbling this language is. Once, I even told a syntax class—confidently—that Akkadian had no demonstratives, only to moments later fact-check myself and discover that it had three distinct tiers of them. I then had to publicly correct myself and told them to pray for me… as I had a quiz on Akkadian pronominals the next period.

    I’m now studying with two grammars, Huehnergard and Caplice, using Labat’s sign list as my main reference. I’m also switching from just drawing signs to pressing them into clay, and my wax tablets—less sketchbook, more scribal. I’ll be posting more about that process (and my tablet replicas) soon.

    What to Expect from This Series

    Tablets and Tribulations will be part language log, part material exploration, and part meditation on what it means to study a language with no living speakers and a script that defies modern intuition. Future posts will likely include:

    • Syntax deep dives (word order, case, verb chains, etc.)
    • Close readings of texts (legal, literary, magical, bureaucratic)
    • Reflections on learning signs and navigating polyvalence
    • Notes on scribal training and cuneiform technique
    • My own experimental archaeology: pressing and firing tablets
    • Anecdotes from the museum and the classroom
    • Psycholinguistic musings on how syllabaries shape cognition
    • Occasional moments of crisis and triumph

    This is going to be hard. But I want that. I want to stretch, stumble, and get back up. That balance—rigor with joy—is what I’m working toward. Each week with Akkadian reminds me how study disciplines the self—not just the mind.

    So here’s to the first step. The tablets await.

  • APEX Updates, 1: Building a Dataset

    Every big project starts with a deceptively small question. For me, it was: how do you turn a carved letter into data?

    APEX (Alphabetic Paleography Explorer) is my attempt to map how the Greek alphabet developed and spread—first across Greek-speaking regions, then into other scripts entirely. But before I can compare, model, or visualize anything, I need something more fundamental: a dataset that doesn’t just record letters, but understands them. That’s where things get tricky.

    Step 0: Drawing the Inscriptions

    Most corpora don’t offer clean, high-res images. They give us facsimiles—drawn reconstructions, often made by epigraphers decades ago. I tried using automated skeletonization on those, but the results were messy and inconsistent. So I went manual: scanning documents and tracing letters by hand on my iPad.

    It’s slow. But it gives me clean, consistent vector forms that reflect how letters were actually drawn—and forces me to look closely at every curve, stroke, and variation. In a sense, this is my own kind of excavation.

    What I Track

    Each inscription gets logged with basic info: where it was found, what it was written on, when it was made (as best we can tell), and how damaged it is. But the real heart of the project is the letters.

    For each character, I record:

    • Visual traits (curvature, symmetry, stroke count, proportions)
    • Layout (spacing, alignment, writing direction)
    • Function (sound value, graphemic identity)
    • Notes on ambiguity or damage

    From this, I can start comparing how different regions handled the same letter—Did their rho have a loop? Was their epsilon closed?—and whether that tells us something about cultural contact or local invention.

    The Workflow

    The data entry pipeline looks like this:

    1. Scan + trace the letterform
    2. Enter the inscription’s metadata
    3. Manually mark letter positions and reading direction
    4. Extract geometric features automatically
    5. Save everything as structured, nestable JSON

    It’s part computer vision, part field notes, and part quiet staring at a very old alpha until you start to feel like it’s looking back.

    Why This Level of Detail?

    Because I want to ask big questions—how alphabets travel, which paths are innovations vs. imitations—but I don’t want to ask them fuzzily. Too much work on writing systems either leans purely qualitative or strips out the messiness for the sake of clean data. APEX is an attempt to hold both: interpretive richness and formal structure.

    This dataset—AlphaBase, soon to be expanded to other open-access museum collections and public domain corpora—is the scaffolding. It’s how I’ll test transmission models later on. But even on its own, it’s already revealing things—like which letterforms stay stable across centuries, and which are quick to splinter under pressure.

    APEX begins here: not with theory, but with tracing. With building a system that doesn’t just store letterforms, but actually listens to what they’re doing. That’s what this first trench is for. Now I get to start digging.