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There’s a new writing system on Omniglot this week called Yezidi, which was used to write Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) possibly from the 12th century AD. Recently efforts have been made to revive it, and it is now used to some extent by the Spiritual Council of Yezidis in Georgia.

New language pages on Omniglot this week are:

• Somrai (bii gə chibne), an East Chadic language spoken in the southwest of Chad.
• Chadian Arabic (تشادية), a variety of Arabic spoken mainly in Chad, and also in Nigeria, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Niger, Sudan and South Sudan.
• Libyan Arabic (ليبي‎), a variety of Arabic mainly in Libya, and also in Egypt, Tunisia, the UAE and Niger.

There’s a also new numbers pages in each of these languages: Somrai, Chadian Arabic and Libyan Arabic

The Celtiadur post this week is about words for Ditches and Trenches in Celtic languages.

This week on the Omniglot blog there’s the usual Language Quiz, and a post called Pocket Hedgehogs, which is about ways to say that someone is careful with their money in various languages – what’s that got to do with hedgehogs? You’ll have to read the post to find out.

The mystery language in last week’s language quiz was Miami (Myaamia), an Algonquian language that was spoken in parts of Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio and Oklahoma in the USA until 1962, and which is currently being revived.

This week’s Adventure in Etymology looks at the origins of the word ladder.

I also made improvements to the Javanese numbers page.

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