More Ghent Ostraca: New Insights into the Belgic Language

Sober, data-first epigraphy with just enough linguistic synthesis to make it more than a catalogue. I appreciated the side-by-side paleographic plates and the transparent appendix: transcription, normalization, and a concordance keyed to the OCV dataset. A few bold claims on contact features may age out, but the corpus foundation will be cited for years.

I wanted to like this more, but the Bayesian clustering of graphemic variants felt like a sledgehammer for a small, noisy dataset. The tree visualizations look impressive, yet the posterior labels drift with minor priors, which the book acknowledges and then largely proceeds as if they didn't. The leap from tally marks to a full ordinal paradigm, and then to substrate influence in Ghent dialects, was a bridge too far for me.

There's valuable groundwork here—the images are great, the diplomatic transcriptions careful—but the interpretive arc overshoots the evidence.

Heldere en rustige studie, met respect voor onzekerheden. De koppeling tussen de markt-tellingen (op de scherven uit Oostakker) en de voorgestelde ordinale morfologie is overtuigend, al blijven enkele toponymische claims aan de Schelde voor mij speculatief. Prachtige fotoplaten; de RTI-sequenties zijn een meerwaarde.

Absolute catnip for historical-linguistics geeks. Clear argumentation, clean transcriptions, and the imaging workflow is explained so a non-epigrapher can follow. I bookmarked the concordance and already used the OCV dataset in a seminar.

Methodologically rigorous and genuinely exciting. The multispectral plates of the Oostakker sherds, especially Figures 12–14, resolve strokes that decades of hand-copies muddled, and the proposed reading of RIGION in the Zwijnaarde cache is persuasive without being overconfident.

What impressed me most is the balance between archaeology and linguistics. The stratigraphic notes keep the corpus grounded, while the phonological argument for a Belgic lect with early Latin bleed-through is carefully staged. The hydronymic excursus along the Scheldt ties everything together with admirable restraint.