istanbul bishops rohingya and tamezret

Istanbul, bishops, Rohingya, and Tamezret

For this week, I thought I'd share two curiously parallel reanalyses

I've come across recently:

* Istanbul, apparently, derives from the Greek phrase eis ten polin,

"in the city";

* 'usquuf, "bishop" in Arabic, which apparently derives from a

Coptic reinterpretation of Greek episkopos "bishop" as e-pi-skopos

"to the skopos", due to which skopos was reanalyzed as meaning

"bishop".

And a couple of interesting language sites I've come across:

RohingyaLanguage.com is a speaker's effort to promote the Rohingya

language. The Rohingya are a Muslim minority group of the western

coast of Burma. Like virtually all Burma's inhabitants, they have been

seriously mistreated by the government. Apparently, their language is

most closely related to (a dialect of?) Chittagongian Bengali. If

anyone figures out what the acute accent is meant to indicate, do tell

me...

Atmazret.info (in French) is all about the endangered Berber language

of Tamezret in southern Tunisia, written by a descendant of speakers.

Though he's not a trained linguist, this qualifies as quite an

important documentation effort in its own right; as far as I know, the

only other thing ever published on the Tamezret dialect was M�rchen

der Berbern von Tamzratt im S�d-T�nisien in 1900, more than a century

ago.