Language Log

It wasn't until the 1870s that there was conclusive evidence that all four hooves of a horse are off the ground in the course of its gallop.  That feat was accomplished by the subject of this post.

Running (Galloping)
negative 1878–1879; print 1881
Eadweard J. Muybridge (American, born England, 1830 – 1904)

Getty Museum Collection 85.XO.362.44

As the story goes, in 1872 railroad magnate and ex-governor of California Leland Stanford made a bet with a fellow horseman regarding a horse's gallop. Contending that all four of a horse's feet are off the ground simultaneously at some point while galloping, Stanford hired Muybridge to prove it photographically.

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.

[This is a guest post by AntC]

Martin Schwartz called my attention to the Jiroft culture:

The Jiroft culture, also known as the Intercultural style or the Halilrud style, is an early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) archaeological culture, located in the territory of present-day Sistan and Baluchestan and Kermān provinces of Iran.

The proposed type site is Konar Sandal, near Jiroft in the Halil River area. Other significant sites associated with the culture include Shahr-e Sukhteh (Burnt City), Tepe Bampur, Espiedej, Shahdad, Tal-i-Iblis and Tepe Yahya.

The grouping of these sites as an "independent Bronze Age civilization with its own architecture and language", intermediate between Elam to the west and the Indus Valley civilization to the east, was first proposed by Yusef Majidzadeh, head of the archaeological excavation team in Jiroft (south central Iran). The hypothesis is based on a collection of artifacts that have been formally excavated and recovered from looters by Iranian authorities; accepted by many to have derived from the Jiroft area (as reported by online Iranian news services, beginning in 2001).

(Wikipedia)

The late Irene Good (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 1999; Harvard University Peabody Museum, 2001; later Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) worked at a number of Jiroft sites in the years just after they were discovered, especially on the important textiles that were preserved there.  Her investigations of the "palaeo-environmental perspective" on ancient textiles were instrumental in helping us understand the networks of trade, technology, and cultural transmission among Europe, MP, Iran, and IV.  See "Selected readings" for a biographical note on Irene.

When I first encountered the Chinese expression "pua" several years ago, I had no idea what it meant nor how to pronounce it, so I asked my students.  I wrote it on the board and pronounced it according to English phonology.  They laughed and told me they thought I was saying "pǔwa 普哇", whereas they pronounce it as an English letter acronym:  P-U-A.

You can hear it for yourself here.

@phuongviviyam

might start using PUA in English too #greenscreen #chinese #chineselanguage #chineselanguagelearning #gaslight #gaslighting

♬ original sound – viviyam

This afternoon I'm scheduled to give a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue, Room 9205), with the title "Signals and Symbols in Linguistic Variation and Change". The abstract:

Words are digital symbols transmitted as acoustic signals. The word sequence in an utterance is encoded by a phonological system whose symbol-facing side connects to morpho-syntax, while its signal-facing side controls articulation and perception. This "duality of patterning" (Hockett) or "double articulation" (Martinet) has crucial and little-recognized benefits for accurate transmission, lexical learning, and community convergence. It also raises serious and rarely recognized questions for phonological theory, including the nature of phonetic interpretation and the role of extra-phonological communication. This talk will explore these aspects of phonology, while also discussing the end-to-end nature of many contemporary AI systems.

[This is a guest post by William Jinbo WANG (王金波), associate professor of English and translation studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University]

Over the past 22 years I have been researching the translation of classical Chinese novels, with concentration on The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone; 18th-century) in the English- and German-speaking worlds. I have published more than a dozen research articles about the translation of the novel and received several research grants concerning the novel from various provincial and national grant-giving bodies. 

John Brewer writes:

Today's majority opinion by Justice Gorsuch in Bondi v. Vanderstok cites (on its page 10 of the opinion, which is the 13th page of the linked pdf) "S. Grimm & B. Levin, Artifact Nouns: Reference and Countability, in 2 Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) 55 (2017)."  That's a pretty unusual sort of citation to see in a judicial opinion, in my experience.

He also drops a footnote mentioning the amicus brief filed by various "Professors and Scholars of Linguistics and Law," which in turn cites authorities ranging from the SCOTUS-friendly (Scalia & Garner) to the perhaps less-known-in-those-circles Huddleston & Pullum.

Today's SMBC:

The mouseover title: "If you mix beer and oatmeal, it's Frat Brose."

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Exactly what had become ‘visualizable’ according to Heisenberg in 1927,
and whence the term ‘Blurriness Relation’ in lieu of Uncertainty Principle?

As backdrop for the physics concepts and associated German vocabulary to be explored in a moment, here is a story I call “Quadrille Dance & Shotgun Wedding”:

1925. Heeding the lesson of Niels Bohr’s ill‑fated orbital theory (1913‑1918), Heisenberg is wary of developing any visual model; he wants to “get rid of the waves in any form.” Accordingly, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he sets forth his matrix‑mechanics formulation of quantum theory.

Two years ago, I wrote a post about "kempt and sheveled" (3/26/23).

That elicited the following offline comment by a German friend:

In the first part of this inquiry, I stressed the connection between Mesopotamian and Indus Valley (IV) civilizations.  My aim was to provide support for a scriptal and lingual link between the undeciphered IV writing system and the well-known languages and writing systems of Mesopotamia (MP), which tellingly is translated as liǎng hé liúyù 兩河流域 ("valley / drainage basin of two rivers") in contemporary Sinitic.  The point is to detach IV from IE, which is a red herring and a detraction from productive efforts to decipher the IV script.  If we concentrate on the civilization, languages, and writing systems of MP, it should be easier to crack the IV code.

A recent achievement of helpful Google AI — Anna Brown, "How a glitch in an online survey replaed the word 'yes' with 'forks'", Decoded 3/21/2025:

At Pew Research Center, we routinely ask the people who take our surveys to give us feedback about their experience. Were the survey questions clear? Were they engaging? Were they politically neutral?

While we get a wide range of feedback on our surveys, we were surprised by a comment we received on an online survey in 2024: “You misspelled YES with FORKS numerous times.”

That comment was soon followed by several others along the same lines:

• • “Please review [the] answer choices. Every ‘yes’ answer for me was listed as ‘forks’ for some reason. I.e. instead of yes/no it was forks/no.”
  • “My computer had some difficulty with your answer choices. For example, instead of ‘yes’ for yes or no answers, my display showed ‘forks.’ Weird.”