Language Log

Thanks to the productive, enlightening discussion we had in the first part of this post, I could not help but think of "speed" as a category of modern life.  That led me to remember a book buried in my dungeon (downstairs study) that I had read about a quarter of a century ago.  It wasn't anything like William S. Burroughs Speed.  It was more on the order of a history of science work.

So I descended the stairs to my basement library.  It wasn't long before I found it:

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick 

• • Topic: This popular book explores the modern, tech-driven obsession with speed and how it affects nearly every aspect of life, from our work habits and communication to our personal time.
  • Summary: Gleick discusses the "hurry sickness" of modern life and the paradox that even with time-saving devices, we feel more rushed than ever. 

 Philip Taylor noticed a new (to him) tendency of Vietnamese youngsters to watch on-line videos at 2x speed.  He writes:

My wife recently "imported" four members of her family from Vietnam (her sister, the latter’s husband, and their two children aged 11 and 13), and both children can be routinely heard watching/listening to online videos at 2x speed.  When I asked Lệ Hoa (my wife’s sister) about this, she said that in her experience it was pretty normal amongst Vietnamese youngsters.  I now wonder if the same is true for other cultures and what the motivation might be …

[This is a guest post by Elizabeth J. W. Barber]

A linguist friend specializing in Iranian linguistic reconstruction has a word that means weft, but also has something to do with a boat and weaving.  To me, that immediately meant the "boat shuttle"–Gm. Schiffchen, Fr. navette, etc.  Once the horizontal treadle loom was invented, the (flat, horizontal) shed could be opened wide enough that you could flick the weft bobbin all the way across the loom, catch it, change the shed, and shoot (shoot > shuttle) it back.  HUGE time-saver!!!

The treadle loom seems to have been invented in China during the Han dynasties (206 BC-220 AD) — I can find no more than that.  Don't know when some genius added the boat-shaped shuttle that floats the weft bobbin across the loom, riding atop the lower half of the warp.

When I was a wee lad and went to bible school each week, I had a hard time comprehending just whom were all of those epistles in the New Testament addressed to.  Of course, there are many other books in the New Testament, a total of 27, but the ones that intrigued me most were the 9 Pauline letters to Christian churches that we refer to as "epistles".  I was most captivated by these 9 books and I wanted to know what kind of people they were, what their communities were like, what their ethnicities were, and, above all, even way back then, what languages they spoke.

These communities were called:

Romans
Corinthians — Paul wrote two epistles to them
Galatians
Ephesians
Philippians
Colossians
Thessalonians — Paul also wrote two epistles to them

Cuneiforms: New digital tool for translating ancient texts, University of Würzburg, ScienceDaily (March 26, 2025)
   
Summary:    Major milestone reached in digital Cuneiform studies: Researchers present an innovative tool that offers many new possibilities

We usually associate cuneiform (Classical Latin cuneus [“wedge”] + fōrma) with Sumerian and Akkadian, but this logo-syllabic script was actually used for many languages in the ancient world:  Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Urartian, Palaic, Aramaic, Old Persian.  In this post, we focus on its use for writing Hittite, the first Indo-European language, as described in the article cited above.

Curse tablet found in Roman-era grave in France targets enemies by invoking Mars, the god of war
Excavation of a Roman-era cemetery in France yielded nearly two dozen lead tablets inscribed in Latin and Gaulish.
By Kristina Killgrove, Live Science (January 15, 2025)

It's interesting precisely where they positioned the curse tablet:

A skeleton found during excavations beneath a historic hospital in Orléans, France,
has a curse tablet between its legs. (Image credit: Service Archéologie Orléans (SAVO))

There is a discussion on Linguistics Stack Exchange whether wristwatch in Chinese came from the French:

There has been an enormous turbulence over the simultaneous explosion of Hezbollah pagers (some call them walkie-talkies) at 3:30 PM on September 17, 2024, involving as it does actors in regions as far flung as the Middle East, Europe, and East Asia.  No one could be closer to the center of the turmoil than the gentleman in the middle of the doorway in this photograph:

Perhaps as early as 1640, decipherers have tried practically everything to decode the maddeningly frustrating Voynich manuscript.  So far it has resisted all efforts to identify the language in which it was presumably written.  About the only way to make further progress in cracking the code is to apply some new technology.  As described in the following reports, it seems that a type of digital enhancement has become available and been used to fill in some of the gaps in the manuscript.

The first is the primary document, "Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript", which appears on Lisa Fagin Davis' blog, Manuscript Road Trip (9/8/24).  She begins with an explanation of what the technology consists of.

"Not Lost In Translation: How Barbarian Books Laid the Foundation for Japan’s Industrial Revolution", by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution (July 22, 2024)

I am grateful to Alex Tabarrok and his colleague Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution University of George Mason University's Mercatus Center for introducing me to what is one of the most mind-boggling/blowing papers I have read in the last decade.

First, here is Tabarrok's introduction, and that will be followed by selections from the revolutionary paper to which I am referring.

Japan’s growth miracle after World War II is well known but that was Japan’s second miracle. The first was perhaps even more miraculous. At the end of the 19th century, under the Meiji Restoration, Japan transformed itself almost overnight from a peasant economy to an industrial powerhouse.

After centuries of resisting economic and social change, Japan transformed from a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural economy specialized in the exports of unprocessed, primary products to an economy specialized in the export of manufactures in under fifteen years.

Exchange between VHM and Chris Button:

VHM:

I just heard a lecture on Tocharian by Gerd Carling, and she said that the word for "enter" in Toch. is something like "yip".  That jerked me to the edge of my seat, since it is identical to the pronunciation of 入 ("enter") in many Sinitic topolects.

The verb is well grounded on the Tocharian side.  This is from the etymological section of Doug Adams dictionary or Tocharian:

  ■TchA yäw– and B yäp– reflect PTch yäp– (though at least the preterite participle yaiwu in A shows the influence of B [VW:605]). PTch *yäp– is from PIE *yeb^h– ‘go, enter (into)’ seen in Hieroglyphic Luvian iba– ‘west’ (for a discussion of the latter word, and different conclusions, see Puhvel, 1984:375-377) < *ib^ho– and Greek zóphos ‘dusk, gloom, (north)west,’ and Greek zéphuros ‘(north)west [wind]’ (< *yob^h– and *yeb^h– respectively).  For the semantic development of Hieroglyphic Luvian iba– one should compare Greek dúsis ‘west’ from dúō ‘get, get into’ and the TchB kauṃ yäp– ‘set [of sun]’).  The Tocharian and Hittite words are to be connected with *yeb^h– ‘futuere’ [: Greek oíphō (< *o– + ib^h-), Sanskrit yábhati, OCS jebǫ (P:298; 508)], the meaning ‘futuere’ coming from ‘penetrate’ (Winter, 1998:349; cf. Beekes, 2010:1063-1064).  The connection with yábhati is VW’s (1941) but later (1976:605) he suggests a phonetically impossible development from a PIE *(e)ieu-.  Malzahn (2017:283-284) adds, on the basis of Cheung, 2007:213, an Iranian cognate *ya(m)p/b-‘move, wander, rove, crawl’ and takes the antecedent Proto-Indo-European to have meant ‘go, move (slowly) inside.’

This is what the device looks like and how it is made:

Jun Chen Lab/UCLA
The two components — and five layers — of the device allow it to turn muscle
movement into electrical signals which, with the help of machine learning,
are ultimately converted into speech signals and audible vocal expression.

In an off-topic comment (4/27/08), DDeden requested an English translation of the subtitles of a video about "Cotton: from fluff to dyed cloth the traditional Chinese way" (the video is embedded in this tweet).  It seemed a worthwhile endeavor, since the film itself was visually quite informative, though the subtitles looked rather sketchy.

I asked Zhang He, who is familiar with this kind of traditional technology, if she could transcribe the subtitles and give us an idea of what they say. She kindly obliged us by writing the following, extended comment, which I give in full with transcription and translation, both because of its innate value and because of the extraordinary circumstances under which she did it (described at the bottom).