Language Log

Helen Lewis, "How one woman became the scapegoat for America's reading crisis", The Atlantic 11/13/2024:

Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name?

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)

Xi Jinping is celebrated as the first national leader of the People's Republic of China who speaks Modern Standard (MSM) rather than some heavily accented Sinitic dialect / topolect.  That is basically true, though he slurs and swallows his words, and is (in)famous for his numerous verbal gaffes (see "Selected readings" below).  Now the pseudoscience and fraud muckraker Fang Shimin / Fang Zhouzi has pointed out another alleged language error perpetrated by President / Chairman / Party Secretary of the CCP while he has been at the APEC meeting in Peru the last few days.

习主席访问了三次秘鲁，还是坚持把“秘鲁”说成密鲁，以后“秘鲁”的读音也要改了吗？央视还提醒过习主席要怎么读“秘鲁”，太大胆了。 pic.twitter.com/LtR0sGVwT3

— 方舟子 (@fangshimin) November 18, 2024

The protean particle zhī 之 (3 strokes, classifier / radical 丶) has more grammatical functions than you can shake a stick at, e.g.:

(literary) genitive or attributive marker

    indicates that the previous word has possession of the next one

    indicates that the previous word modifies the next one

    particle indicating that the preceding element is specialized or qualified by the next

(archaic)  particle infixed in a subject-predicate construct acting as a nominalizer or indicating a subordinate clause

(literary) the third-person pronoun: him, her, it, them, when it appears in a non-subject position in the sentence

—

(adapted from Wiktionary, with illustrative quotations for each type)

New article in Antiquity (05 November 2024):  "Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia", by Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano, and Silvia Ferrara

Abstract

Administrative innovations in South-west Asia during the fourth millennium BC, including the cylinder seals that were rolled on the earliest clay tablets, laid the foundations for proto-cuneiform script, one of the first writing systems. Seals were rich in iconography, but little research has focused on the potential influence of specific motifs on the development of the sign-based proto-cuneiform script. Here, the authors identify symbolic precursors to fundamental proto-cuneiform signs among late pre-literate seal motifs that describe the transportation of vessels and textiles, highlighting the synergy of early systems of clay-based communication.

Other video angles and edits are available on YouTube.

Jichang Lulu congratulated me on the completion of my continental diabasis.  Since I didn't know the meaning of that word and couldn't readily find a suitable definition for it online (I was familiar with the Anabasis of Xenophon [c. 430-probably 355 or 354 BC], the title of which means "expedition up from"), I simply had to ask him.  The following is what Lulu said in reply:

The use of the term is probably not classically warranted. I meant diabasis (διάβασις, ‘crossing, traversal, passage…’, literally ‘going through’) as a pun on Xenophon's Anabasis (the ‘march up’, i.e., inland, although most of the book is about the march back down to the coast). 

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

La 9e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française:

La 9e édition du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française, dont la publication a commencé dans les années 1980, s’est achevée en novembre 2024, avec la parution du tome 4 aux éditions Fayard.

The 9th edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy, whose publication began in the 1980s, was completed in November 2024, with the publication of volume 4 by éditions Fayard.

Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie française est l’un des plus anciens dictionnaires de la langue française, dont la première édition date de 1694 et a été suivie de sept autres datant respectivement de 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878 et 1935. La 9e édition, dont les trois premiers tomes sont parus en 1992, 2000 et 2011, est désormais achevée ; elle constitue sans aucun doute la version la plus aboutie du projet académique, auquel elle reste fidèle et dont elle conserve les principes.

The Dictionary of the French Academy is one of the oldest dictionaries of the French language, the first edition of which dates from 1694 and was followed by seven others dating respectively from 1718, 1740, 1762, 1798, 1835, 1878 and 1935 The 9th edition, the first three volumes of which were published in 1992, 2000 and 2011, is now completed; it undoubtedly constitutes the most accomplished version of the academic project, to which it remains faithful and of which it preserves the principles.

I just received the following book:  P.N. Singer and Ralph M. Rosen, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Galen (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2024).  The volume has 29 chapters, the last of which is "Galen in Premodern Tibet and China: Impressions and Footprints" (pp. 658-674) by Dror Weil and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim.  Naturally, this chapter is of great interest to me.  It mentions many parallels and correspondences between Galenic and Sinitic medical practice and thought (e.g., humors, colors, purging, etc.), much of it passing through what is called "Islamicate" (Huíhui 回回) medicine and pharmaceutics, and through Persian literature as well.  The authors also take into account Sogdian, Syriac, and Sanskrit sources.

Of all the instances of Galenic thought and practice in China mentioned by the authors, the one that struck me most powerfully was this:

One record gives an account of a surgery on a boy’s head that experts in Islamicate medicine (Huihui yiguan 回回醫官) performed in order to extract a tumor. The tumor, interestingly, is described in this Chinese record by the term little cancer (xiao xie 小蟹), a literal translation of the Arabic sarṭān (cancer). (p. 664)

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "There's a maximum likelihood that I'm doing phylogenetics wrong."

An interesting recent review article (Wooster et al., "Animal cognition and culture mediate predator–prey interactions", Trends in Ecology & Evolution 2024) argues for bridging the academic silos of "predator-prey ecology" and "animal cognition and culture":

Abstract: Predator–prey ecology and the study of animal cognition and culture have emerged as independent disciplines. Research combining these disciplines suggests that both animal cognition and culture can shape the outcomes of predator–prey interactions and their influence on ecosystems. We review the growing body of work that weaves animal cognition or culture into predator–prey ecology, and argue that both cognition and culture are significant but poorly understood mechanisms mediating how predators structure ecosystems. We present a framework exploring how previous experiences with the predation process creates feedback loops that alter the predation sequence. Cognitive and cultural predator–prey ecology offers ecologists new lenses through which to understand species interactions, their ecological consequences, and novel methods to conserve wildlife in a changing world.

Oddly, there's nothing in the article about communication, which would seem to be a relevant aspect of "culture", and relevant to studies of "cognition" as well.

[This is a guest post by Denis Mair]   

  Cai Xutie was a Taiwanese woman who ran a family farm with her husband in a village near Jiayi in central Taiwan. She was a rice farmer and had never attended a public school. After her husband died in middle age, she sold some of the land, moved to Taipei with her children, and bought a modest apartment. Because of economic pressure, she helped to set up a number of revolving credit pools, which were used by economically disadvantaged people in the 1950s and 60s to obtain credit when they couldn't get it from banks.