Language Log

New book by Luke Waring:

Writing and Materiality in Ancient China:  The Textual Culture of the Mawangdui Tombs (Columbia University Press, December 2025)

Since 2001, the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (SJEAS) has been playing an increasingly prominent role in scholarship on East Asia, especially language aspects. Sponsored since 2001 by the Academy of East Asian Studies (AEAS) at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea, SJEAS is an international, multidisciplinary publication dedicated to research on pre-1945 East Asian humanities. SJEAS presents new research related to the Sinographic Cosmopolis/Sphere of pre-1945 East Asia, publishing both articles that stay within traditional disciplinary or regional boundaries and works that explore the commonalities and contrasts found in countries of the Sinographic Sphere. SJEAS is particularly keen to highlight new research by scholars from China (broadly conceived), Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that engages with Western scholarship in this field.

(source)

Today is (not very officially) World Linguistics Day, celebrated on the birthday of Ferdinand de Saussure. It started with "National Linguistics Day" in the UK, noted by LLOG in 2024.

I have observed the author working on this 749 page volume for many years, so it is with great rejoicing that it is available in time to send to friends, colleagues, and students as a Yuletide gift:

South Coblin, Common Shē and Common Hakka-Shē: A Comparative Study
Language and Linguistics Monograph Series 68

Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica (Taipei:  November, 2025)

Introduction

The present work is divided into two parts. Part I is devoted to the reconstruction of the phonology of Common Shē, the ancestral form of the closely related Sinitic dialects spoken by the Shē ethnic minority of China. The approach applied is the classical comparative method, in which modern data from seventeen modern dialects are subjected to comparative reconstructive analysis. Data from additional Shē varieties are also adduced as needed. The end product of these procedures is a hypothetical phonological system, which for the sake of brevity we call Common Shē, though this term should more precisely encompass not only phonology but also syntax and lexicon.

Fritz Newmeyer suggested that I post this.

The Linguistic Society of America will be offering a quasi-hybrid registration option for the 2026 Annual Meeting, to be held January 8-11, 2026.

For those of you who cannot travel to New Orleans in person, attending remotely through the quasi-hybrid registration option will give you virtual access to all plenary talks, plus access to four concurrent session rooms where a continuous schedule of sessions selected to reflect the full array of disciplinary subfields will be offered across all four days of the meeting.

As a virtual attendee, you will be able to see the speakers, ask questions, and hear questions from the live audience. This year’s virtual option is a pilot test for a cost-effective approach to hybrid meetings. If it is successful, we will expand the number of hybrid rooms in coming years. Please tell your international colleagues or anyone who is concerned about traveling for any reason about the virtual registration option and encourage them to join us!

You can filter the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting Program for the Track "Hybrid" and see the 45 sessions that virtual registrants will be able to attend, which includes all plenaries plus four continuously scheduled concurrent session rooms.

The links to access the sessions will be in the meeting app, which everyone who registers for the meeting will be able to download.

A pathbreaking, new book from Brill:

The Vernacular World of Pu Songling
Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China
Series:  Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 173 (2025).  xix, 312 pp.
By Zhenzhen Lu 

Following up on our previous post, "Sakas, Kushans, and Hephthalites: the sources in Greek, Latin, Persian, and Chinese" (9/24/25) by Taishan Yu, we turn now to Étienne de La Vaissière's "A Military Origin for New Persian?", which was published lightning fast by Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae.

Received: 26 April 2025 • Accepted: 3 July 2025
Published Online: 5 August 2025

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-sixth issue:

“Relations between Persia and Central Asia in Antiquity: An Examination of the Written Sources,” by Yu Taishan. (pdf)

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-eighth issue:

“Demetrios of Bactria as Deva Gobujo and Other Indo-Greek Myths of Japan,” by Lucas Christopoulos. 

We've been inconsistent recently in our annual celebrations of Talk Like A Pirate Day, so here's our favorite image, with a couple of past post links below the fold:

"Active Use of Latent Tree-Structured Sentence Representation in Humans and Large Language Models." Liu, Wei et al. Nature Human Behaviour (September 10, 2025).

Abstract

Understanding how sentences are represented in the human brain, as well as in large language models (LLMs), poses a substantial challenge for cognitive science. Here we develop a one-shot learning task to investigate whether humans and LLMs encode tree-structured constituents within sentences. Participants (total N = 372, native Chinese or English speakers, and bilingual in Chinese and English) and LLMs (for example, ChatGPT) were asked to infer which words should be deleted from a sentence. Both groups tend to delete constituents, instead of non-constituent word strings, following rules specific to Chinese and English, respectively. The results cannot be explained by models that rely only on word properties and word positions. Crucially, based on word strings deleted by either humans or LLMs, the underlying constituency tree structure can be successfully reconstructed. Altogether, these results demonstrate that latent tree-structured sentence representations emerge in both humans and LLMs.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth issue:

“Horses and Humans: A Consequential Symbiosis,” edited by Victor H. Mair.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fourth issue:

“Mythologies, Religions, and Peoples Outside Ancient China in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” by Xiaofeng He.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp364_Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas.pdf