Alex West

@ajw87

Philologist. Hobby calligrapher. Cosmopolitan. Middle Ages in Afro-Eurasia; Columbian exchange. Old site: New site: he/him Book:

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Bluesky

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Alex West@ajw87· 16d

In Java there was a special script used exclusively on bronze mirror handles, consisting of offset rectangles with line incisions cast into the handles and read upwards, from bottom to top; AFAIK all extant examples end in swirly vowel-killers/virama/pangkon/pamaéh (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virama).

A side-by-side comparison of 4 bronze mirror handles from the island of Java, all inscribed with text in the form of rectangles stacked on top of one another, slightly offset, with incisions in them, representing aksaras or syllabic graphemes in extremely abstract, stylised fashion.

A black-and-white image of a bronze mirror handle with an inscription; the inscription has been marked up in red letters, and images of graphemes from another, much more legible, Javanese inscription have been placed alongside the abstract ones on the mirror handle. The text says: "pangawas".

Alex West@ajw87· 16d

I've been going through some old files. Java truly is a palaeographer's dream; there's so much interesting variation in the forms of written text from the island, especially before the sixteenth century

An image comparing 13 different forms of the aksara, or syllabic grapheme, "ma" in scripts from the Indo-Malaysian archipelago between the fourth and fifteenth centuries of the Common Era. The forms differ considerably. The first form, from Borneo in the fourth century, is an oval with two antennae. The final form, from Java in the middle of the fifteenth century, is a V-shaped blob with another blob placed into it. The two forms are very different but there is a family resemblance across the 13 shapes.

Alex West@ajw87· 18d

Currently reading:

The cover of John Eliot Gardiner's Music in the Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach. The Haussmann portrait of Bach makes up the background of the cover image; through a curious chain of events, the portrait hung in Gardiner's family home during the Second World War when he was a young boy, as he says in the introduction.

The cover of the I Tatti Renaissance Library edition and translation of the Latin Pastoral Poetry of Andrea Navagero and Marcantonio Flaminio, edited and translated into English by retired classicist Allan M. Wilson. The cover is a pale blue, the colour used for the entire I Tatti Renaissance Library series.

The cover of Contos de Fadas Turcos ("Turkish Fairy Tales"), a collection of Turkish supernatural stories translated into Portuguese with a brief introduction. The volume includes a large number of early modern manuscript illustrations from across the Middle East and Mughal India. One such image appears on the cover, showing armed men with muskets, others on horseback, outside the walls of a city.

Alex West@ajw87· 21d

The audience stats for my old blog are crazy, btw. Lots of AIs scraping the thing constantly, over and over again, with only 500-1000 actual readers per month. It's a bit depressing. The relentless march of the inhuman.

A line graph showing views and reads on my Medieval Indonesia blog. The views line shows huge peaks, representing tens of thousands of views. The line representing the number of people who have actually read a post is almost flat against the bottom of the graph. Only a few hundred posts have been read, as opposed to viewed, so far this month.

Alex West@ajw87· 29d

Goodness gracious me, find something else to talk about

A screenshot of me adding "Lindsey Graham" to my list of muted words and tags on Bluesky for the next 30 days.

Alex West@ajw87· Jul 12

I was going to buy a print from the Tate Shop (Turner's Golden Bough, in case you were wondering—would look good in the corridor leading to our bedroom imo) but it turns out that they simply don't deliver to the EU any more and haven't done so since... 2024. Ah Brexit! Ah humanity!

Text from a website: "International Shipping
Unfortunately our couriers are currently unable to ship orders to Iran and Israel. Customers may also experience delays with any orders to the Middle East region.

We ship to over 100 countries worldwide.

From 13 December 2024, we will be pausing shipping to the European Union, to update our details to comply with new EU General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR). We will restart shipping to the EU as soon as possible, thank you for your patience.

Restrictions
We can’t deliver to PO box addresses. These are restrictions imposed by our couriers."

Alex West@ajw87· Jun 29

There's some great brickwork there still.

A rectangular doorway surrounded by elaborated designs in the brickwork: Corithian columns; floral motifs, including roses; seashells; and above those a line of figures bearing tools and musical instruments, including a harp, some sort of keyboard instrument, and (probably) an oboe. There is a small sign at the bottom with brief text in Spanish, Guarani, and English.

Alex West@ajw87· Jun 29

Went there a couple of years ago. Bit of a magical experience tbh.

A ruined brick building with a long lawn in the foreground and blue sky with a few clouds in the background. The crown of a large tree stands over part of the ruins. There is a feeling of space, and of the land stretching off into the distance.

Red and white bricks making up a ruined archway, framed by bright azure sky. Some of the brickwork at the back is fully intact, with subtle line decoration.

Alex West@ajw87· Jun 18

Hmm.

Text from the Wiktionary page on the word "football": "Etymology
From Middle English fotbal, footbal, equivalent to foot +‎ ball, because the ball was primarily manipulated with the feet in early versions of the game (though some modern varieties involve more handling than kicking)."

Alex West@ajw87· Jun 17

Everything is gender, part n,

A post from Al Carns, MP. There is off-white text against a red background with faint impressions of roses on it. The text says: "Labour was chiselled out of the mines, hammered out of the shipyards, forged in the factories; that is the tradition I serve". "I serve" is underlined.

Alex West@ajw87· Jun 15

My cousin Bernadette lives in Galway, I used to visit Bath a few times a year with ESL students back in the day, Chicago's a big grey blotch next to Lake Michigan, etc. I got lucky with the Bay of Fundy though.

A screenshot from the Map Tag website, showing the perfect 1000-point score with today's date (June 15, 2026).

Alex West@ajw87· Jun 9

Hmm.

Text from a website explaining the results of a quiz: "Your closest counterpart: The Maskil.
circa 1770–1800 · Berlin & Königsberg · reason and enlightenment
Mendelssohn, the Jerusalem
You live in two worlds at once—the tradition you were raised in and the age of reason around it—and you mean to bring them together. Faith and philosophy needn’t quarrel. The old learning can open to science and the wider world, the law can be sifted by reason, and a person can be a citizen and a Jew at once—whatever the rabbis or the gentiles say.

Representative figures: Moses Mendelssohn, Naftali Herz Wessely, Salomon Maimon"

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 13

His work is really, really good - P. V. Kirch. Nice guy too. His book on The Lapita Peoples is old but excellent, and I don't think it's possible to do better than his On the Road of the Winds (last updated in 2017)

Cover of the revised and expanded edition of Patrick Vinton Kirch's "On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact". The cover shows the text in white against a photograph of several Easter Island moai and the stony lawn in front of them, with a blue sky in the background.

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 13

might have offended a few people with this take

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 13

From the paper (walkden.space/Walkden_2013...) :

Text from George Walkden's 2013 paper on the Old English word "hwæt": "So far, then, we have seen that the traditional view of hwæt as an adverb or interjection (Bosworth & Toller 1898) outside the clause and potentially extrametrical, possibly serving as a ‘call to attention’ (Mitchell & Robinson 1998), suffers from a number of problems, many already noted by Grimm (1837) and Stanley (2000). These are listed below for ease of reference:
(a) Hwæt must usually be analysed as being unstressed;
(b) no punctuation between hwæt and the following clause is ever found;
(c) a contemporary grammarian did not analyse hwæt as an interjection;
(d) hwæt is not exclusively found in texts connected to primary orality, and does not always serve to initiate speech.
To this list will be added facts from constituent order in section 3, making the case for hwæt as an interjection or extra-clausal particle untenable. In section 4 I propose an alternative analysis that has the merit of being consistent with the facts in (a)–(d) as well as with the constituent-order facts"

More from Walkden's paper, this time focusing on the first sentence in Beowulf: "We are now in a position to revisit example (1), the first sentence of Beowulf. Complications other than hwæt mean that the correct analysis of this sentence is disputed; indeed, whole articles have been devoted to these few lines alone (e.g. Bammesberger 2006). I repeat it, without translation, as (39) below.
(39) Hwæt we Gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon
(Beowulf, lines 1–2)
Here the verb, frınan ‘to learn by enquiry’, can straightforwardly be read as gradable.
The exclamative hypothesis suggests that this clause should be interpreted as ‘How much we have heard of the might of the nation-kings in the ancient times of the Spear-Danes’. Of the translations so far put forward, this interpretation has the most in common with Morgan’s (1952) rendering as ‘How that glory remains in remembrance’."

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 11

The origin of the 'cougar' = 'sexually predatory older woman' thing is more mysterious. Wiki says it originated in Vancouver at some point in the last few decades. In any case, the word itself is from Tupi.

A promo image for the American sitcom "Cougar Town", which is about older women who date younger men. Courteney Cox is standing in the middle of the image, below the words "Cougar Town" and the slogan "sip happens". She's wearing a red dress and holding a glass of wine. Four men and two women stand either side of her in a line wearing colourful outfits and sipping wine. The background is monochrome teal.

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 7

The hypocentre of the a-bomb explosion in Nagasaki. The atomic bomb exploded about 502 metres above this site, which is marked by a metal post and a memorial of inscribed black stone in the shape of an altar. Around it are concentric circles in white stone, and some trees, and some tall brick structures, which are the remains of the building immediately below the blast (which was a Catholic church, if memory serves).

The hypocentre at Hiroshima; the a-bomb exploded about 580 metres above this site. The site is marked by a memorial of twisted metal surounded by a low encircling bush. The sky is cloudy with patches of blue sky visible; it is near twilight. Trees are visible near the memorial, as is the entryway to Aioi Bridge over the Ōta River, which was used as a target for aiming the bomb. Two figures stand to the right of the memorial, facing away from the camera.

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 6

Anyway: Barry Kemp's 2012 book on Akhetaten/Amarna, THE CITY OF AKHENATEN AND NEFERTITI (Thames & Hudson), is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever read. The subject is absolutely fascinating and it's very well written. Can't recommend it highly enough.

The cover of The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People by the archaeologist Barry Kemp, published by Thames and Hudson. The cover shows a bas-relief depicting the androgynous Pharaoh Akhenaten (I assume) and others making offerings to the Aten, which is the great disc of the sun in the sky, whose rays reach down and touch the worshippers. There are hieroglyphic inscriptions above, and a dim twilight photograph of the remains of the city of Amarna below.

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 6

Mostly unrelated: later on I came across the character 麋 mí, the word for Père David's deer (*Elaphurus davidianus*), a deer species native to China. Interesting conservation story:

Text from the Wikipedia article on Père David's deer: "Père David's deer were hunted almost to extinction in their native China by the late 19th century, but a number were taken to zoos in France and Germany and the deer was bred successfully in captivity. In the early 20th century, the British nobleman and politician Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, acquired a few Père David's deer from the Berlin Zoo and built up a large herd on his estate at Woburn Abbey. In the 1980s, the duke's great-grandson Robin Russell, 14th Duke of Bedford, donated several dozen deer to the Chinese government for reintroducing the species to the wild. As of 2020, the wild population in China was an estimated 2,825 individuals, with a further 7,380 in various nature reserves in China. All Père David's deer alive today descend from Herbrand Russell's original herd."

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 4

Certainly the English ate Irish people—but the idea originally came from across the Atlantic

Text from the 1729 edition of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, page 6: "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust."

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 2

...and, implicitly, that the same animal was known as TEIVGVACU, or "teîugûasu", to other Brazilians. See the picture below, from Marcgrave's 1648 HISTORIA NATURALIS BRASILIAE (p.237). Linnaeus appears to have assumed that "Tupinambis" was a taxonomic name, whence the modern name for the genus.

A yellowed page of an old book, illustrated with an image of a large lizard with a curling tail and outstretched forked tongue. The text is in Latin, and describes the lizard, giving names for it in other languages.

Alex West@ajw87· Apr 2

I'm not a nihilist, though, personally. A real nihilist would be wealthier.

A two-panel comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: The first panel is captioned "COLLEGE NIHILIST" and it shows a man in a shirt and jumper surrounded by other young people; the man says "Don't you guys get it? None of this matters! It's all pointless! I know because I've written four essays about it. Four!" The second panel bears the caption "REAL NIHILIST"; a man stands alone outside a bank and says: "I'm gonna make as much money as I can, and spend it on more money".

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 31

Just to give you an idea of what my flashcards look like. (Forgive the mediocre penmanship; these are supposed to be practical, even disposable, objects.) I've got similar sets of cards for Latin, Quechua, and a few other languages. I used to have a really big set for Malay/Indonesian.

A photograph of four sets of ruled cards bound by metal rings; each set contains about 100 cards. On the faces of the cards are Chinese characters, three or four words or phrases per card. The cards are pale blue, red, green, and white.

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 21

There were quite a few rare and experimental weapons in the collection, including this prototype flintlock repeater. There are also some early repeating rifles (Vetterlis) and loads of medieval and early modern breech-loading cannon. It's well worth a visit if you're into this stuff.

A prototype gun from the eighteenth century. The gun uses a flintlock mechanism with several rotating compartments. Each one would be filled with powder and ball and rotated as needed to fire multiple shots without reloading.

A piece of paper showing the original set of drawings and an explanation of the mechanism of the prototype repeater.

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 21

I tried to capture the sights of the peep-sight arquebus above, but they don't show up very clearly. I'd never come across such an early firearm with a sighting arrangement like this but apparently peep sights started showing on guns, including smoothbores, four centuries ago or so.

A view of the peep sight from the rear, showing a battered and worn buttstock. The circular hole in the peep sight is visible next to the pan, which is on the right.

Another view from the rear of the gun, showing a little of the barrel in front of the peep sight.

The rather primitive front sight of the same gun. The muzzle flares out, and a thin section of it is raised ever-so-slightly above the rest of the metal.

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 21

I love the yassified live-laugh-love hand used in the inscription on this sword ("VIVA PORTUGAL").

A close-up of part of a sword blade, fairly near the hilt. The steel is bright and polished. An inscription says "VIVA PORTUGAL"; the text is swirly and ornamented with stars.

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 21

The Military Museum (Museu Militar) in Lisbon is very cool. I went there a few weeks ago and thought I'd share a few of the more interesting objects.

A bronze cannon in the courtyard of the Lisbon Military Museum. This one was manufactured in the Hague by a man named Niepoort, mentioned in an inscription near the touchhole. This is probably Johannes Niepoort, who was active in The Hague in the 1640s. The cannon also bears a large and well-cast image of the coat-of-arms of Holland, alongside the region's motto ("Vigilate Deo confidentes", "watch, trusting in God").

The muzzle of an Indian cannon reportedly captured by the Portuguese during the siege of Malacca in 1511. The muzzle is decorated with a moustachioed face.

A Chinese sabre or dao from the court of the Qing emperor Qianlong (who abdicated in 1796). This is a single-edged sword with an elliptical guard at the hilt. A hole near the pommel allows a cord to be threaded through, though this absent.

A seventeenth-century matchlock arquebus, which is interesting because it has an aperture or peep sight in the rear and a post front-sight. Quite unusual features for an early gun like this.

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 21

THOMAS·OWEN·MADE THIS·PECE·ANNO·DNI 1571

An inscription on a copper alloy cannon made in England in 1571 by Thomas Owen, gunsmith in London. The gun is now in the Lisbon Military Museum.

Some decoration on the same bronze cannon; there's a decorated text box bearing the words "ELIZABETH REGINA XIII" beneath a Tudor rose and the motto "Honi soit qui mal y pense". These decorative elements appear just behind the trunnions.

A view of the same cannon from the rear, looking along it to muzzle. Part of the courtyard in which the cannon is located is visible, as are some of the decorative blue-and-white tiles in the background.

The muzzle of the same bronze gun, which is decorated on the exterior with a twisting pattern of lands and grooves (the gun itself is not rifled).

Alex West@ajw87· Mar 20

Tucana's in the bottom-left of this chart. I suppose all the others come from Latin and Greek.

A colour-coded rectangular plot of the IAU constellations, with declinations and hours of right ascension the Y and X axes respectively. Tucana is in the bottom-left corner of the chart.

Alex West@ajw87· Jan 1

Pretty good!