Language Log

A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions of Traditional Medicine".

This is a richly detailed article with many links and citations.  I will not attempt to cover, much less extensively quote, lengthy portions.  Instead, I will begin with the authors' general introduction, note the main sections of the article, refer to the graphs, and quote one typical section to show what the authors' approach can accomplish.

Yesterday in one of my classes, a female student from China said that she didn't like to exercise in the morning because she felt "wet".  At first, I couldn't believe my ears, so I asked her, "Did you say 'wet'?"  "Yes," she said, "wet".  I couldn't understand in what way she would feel "wet" in the morning and how that would prevent her from doing exercises.

We wouldn't use the English word "wet" to describe a morning condition that would discourage us from doing exercises, so I tried to think of other related words (synonyms or near-synonyms for "wet") that would work better.  "Logy"? "sodden"? "heavy"?  But I couldn't come up with any equivalent words that would fit the bill.  I specifically was disinclined to choose the word "shī 濕", which literally does mean "wet", but didn't believe that's what she meant because it would signify something like "drenched", "dripping", "soaked", not a systemic condition of the body, unless it means something in traditional Chinese medicine that I'm not aware of.

I puzzled over this conundrum for a while without making any significant progress, so today I sent her an e-mail asking the following question:  "What Chinese word / concept did you have in mind when you said you felt 'wet' in the morning"?

From Markus Samuel Haselbeck, responding to Egas Moniz-Bandeira on Twitter/X:

As the discussion of polysyllabic sonography goes on, I want to add a character that I recently discovered in a Chinese restaurant, here in Leuven. I guess it is pronounced Zhōngguó (中國), China? https://t.co/1cc65vq4fC pic.twitter.com/UveFSHK3dz

— Markus Samuel Haselbeck (@CiaoCiaota) April 8, 2024

[Prefatory note:  The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018.  She has been employed for several years as an adviser to  students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) in high school, college, or university.  Her statement will be followed by the remarks of a long experienced, well established practitioner of that profession (application counselor) in China who explains its aims and modus operandi.

The author (TCI) emphasizes what she considers to be a lack of logic in Chinese thought.  It is ironic that her focus is very much on the gender of personal pronouns at a time when many people in America are trying to do away with or downplay that aspect of personal pronouns.  Before dismissing what she says out of hand, bear in mind that for TCI it is a cri de coeur.  She grew up in China learning one system of thought, came to America and struggled to learn another, and now she has gone back to China and is trying to teach the next generation of students who want to come to America and think like Americans how to be less fraught in learning this new way of thinking.

[This is a guest post by Matthew Marcucci]

The topic of this post is one that deeply fascinates me personally, but also has a bearing on many of the main concerns of the denizens of Language Log:  information, efficiency, density, complexity, meaning, pronunciation, prosody, speed, gender….

It was prompted by this new article:

What’s the Fastest Language in the World?
Theansweriscomplicated. [sic]
by Dan Nosowitz, Atlas Obscura (April 2, 2024)

The article is based upon the work of François Pellegrino a senior researcher in linguistics and cognitive science at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris and Université Lumière Lyon II, France.

Francois Pellegrino is mostly a quantitative linguist, meaning his work often includes measuring differences among languages and hunting for explanations behind those differences. He’s worked on language speed a few times, including on one study that compared 17 different languages in a variety of metrics.

Ioanna Sitaridou's "Crowdsourcing Romeyka" project has been getting some coverage in niche media, and in at least one widely-read publication: Esther Addley, "Endangered Greek dialect is ‘living bridge’ to ancient world, researchers say", The Guardian 4/3/2024.

Mogholi is a fascinating language – Mongolic spoken in Afghanistan with strong Perso-Arabic influences. It was already in decline in the 1960s and we don't know if/how many speakers there are left now
Pics: A poem (a qaṣīda) in original script, transcription and translation pic.twitter.com/9Mrct9DaAI

— Egas Moniz-Bandeira ᠡᡤᠠᠰ ᠮᠣᠨᠢᠰ ᠪᠠᠨᡩ᠋ᠠᠶᠢᠷᠠ (@egasmb) April 6, 2024

If we come upon a glyph that we don't recognize and can't find in any dictionary, especially if we have half an idea what it might mean or what it might sound like, we are apt to call it a "variant character" (yìtǐzì 異體字) or calligraphic form of some standard glyph.  It happens all the time, e.g., here — in the comments.

Nick Kaldis sent in this character:

One of our last posts was on a German Mongolist named Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) who was a specialist on Kalmyk.  This prompted a regular reader to send the following interesting account about another German Mongolist who was also an expert on the Kalmyks and their language, Nicholas Poppe (1897-1991):

If someone is investigating texts, they can concentrate on the subject / content / style / linguistic nature of the writing.  Increasingly, however, scholars have begun to concentrate on the objects and materials on which the writing takes place.  From this, they tease out all sorts of interesting information about the social, political, and economic aspects of the texts.  A new book on this topic is Thomas Kelly's The Inscription of Things:  Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2023).

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.

[Basic information about Kalmyk (Mongolic language) and Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) below.]

For researchers of Julius Klaproth or those interested in Kalmyk language, I'm preparing to catalogue this Kalmyk-German glossary believed to have belonged to Klaproth. Any suggestions as to which book it is a glossary of? pic.twitter.com/SfSPyvZR3W

— Royal Asiatic Society (@RAS_Soc) April 4, 2024

Photograph of an artistic arrangement on the wall of a tea shop in Philadelphia's Chinatown.