New Indo-European genetic evidence

Carl Zimmer, "Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language", NYT 2/5/2025:

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote.

Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language.

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

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Kape: the language rope that binds the people of a remote Indonesian island

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco, an associate professor of linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, called my attention to this article he wrote for The Conversation (1/26/25), "Finding ‘Kape’: How Language Documentation helps us preserve an endangered language". He and his research team are currently doing intensive fieldwork on the languages of the remote Indonesian island of Alor, which lies northeast of Timor-Leste.  Their purpose is to document and preserve endangered languages.  Among the endangered languages they have discovered and first documented is Kape, which I will discuss in more detail below.

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The Power of Naming

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Overview: Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public: information theory; (TW) the colored quarks of Nambu and Han; cosmic‑ray decay according to Millikan; the Sinitic languages (Mair) vs. ‘the Chinese language’ (misnomer); Wu’s cosmic chirality as the violation of a nonNoetherian principle.

① information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: “Shannon’s information theory.” In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as “information theory.” The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century, but it is accompanied by innumerable smaller cases, as when Susskind argues that “in physics we treat them as pretty much the same thing” (paraphrase; details in Appendix A). Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable. Then, overheard by someone in the world at large, such casual usage is easily misconstrued, leading astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole. (As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.)

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Sincerity

Two colleagues noticed that the PRC government often rebukes other countries for lacking sincerity, and they asked me if Chinese had a different understanding of sincerity that permitted / encouraged them to do so.  "Sincerity" is so front and center in Chinese negotiations with other nations that one soon comes to realize, if you want smooth relations with the PRC, you must needs demonstrate to the Chinese representatives that you are utterly sincere, i.e., that you are willing to do exactly what they want you to do.  Anything less opens you to the charge of being insincere.

My colleagues asked me if there is something special about the Chinese conception of sincerity, i.e., does it have special Chinese characteristics" (jùyǒu Zhòngguó tèsè 具有中国特色)?  Just as it is an article of faith for the CCP that socialism in China comes with special characteristics (Zhōngguó tèsè shèhuì zhǔyì 中国特色社会主义).

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Japanese, Chinese, and English mixed language and script

In several recent posts, we've been exposed to a few Japanese speakers who tried to write their language without recourse to kana (the two Japanese syllabaries), i.e., kanji only.  I myself thought it was ridiculous / laughable and didn't work well at all.

Now we come across an even more quixotic quest, one where some folks combine Japanese, Chinese, and English languages (lexicons and grammars) and scripts to create a hybrid linguistic amalgam.

Below, I will show several examples of what the resultant combinations look like.  I will not translate or transcribe the sample texts, because — even if you don't know all three languages and scripts, you will be able to get an idea of how this experiment works .  I will only give a paraphrase of what portions of the texts mean, especially the fourth one, because it is the most overt in declaring its modus operandi.

In actuality, that was my original intention, but I ended up paraphrasing all of the passages, although I'm not entirely certain that I caught the nyuansu ニュアンス ("nuance") of each and every word.

For all the samples, I have endeavored to smooth out the three languages and three scripts into a single English rendering.

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No, no, no; yes, yes, yes

I have a close friend who is in the habit of saying, "no, no, no; yes, yes, yes", "yes,yes,yes; no, no, no", "yes, no", "no, yes", etc., etc., usually accompanied by various, animated hand and head gestures.  There are many fine gradations of the degree to which he agrees or disagrees with you, though normally his pronouncements reflect a combination of agreement and disagreement.

What he means by these locutions depends upon the degree to which he is in agreement with you.

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"WHO is who it is"

Recent events invite a reprise of the famous Abbot and Costello skit — and Josh Johnson has obliged:

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Stand in / on line

When you queue up, do you "stand in line" or "stand on line"?

This question was prompted by Nick Tursi who remarked:

Two of my colleagues are both from Brooklyn. They frequently say standing / waiting “on line” rather than “in line” when referring to queueing

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Punxsutawney and Maxatawny

It's unlikely that I ever would have written a post on the strange-sounding name "Punxsutawney" because it is so well-known worldwide for groundhog Phil who lives there and can predict whether winter weather will persist after he wakes up from his hibernation, although it is nestled in the wooded hills about 85 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

On the other hand, few have ever heard of Maxatawny, despite the fact that it is only 65 miles northwest of Philadelphia and situated on mostly flat land.

I never would have been aware of Maxatawny either, but for the miracle of the internet, because I happened upon it while surfing the www, which I have spent a goodly part of my life doing since its invention.  When I saw mention of Maxatawny pop up on my computer screen, I was instantaneously nearly catapulted out of my seat because of its obvious likeness to Punxsutawney.

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NAEP puzzles

The 2024 results from the National Assessment of Educational Practices (NAEP) have recently been in the news, mostly not on the positive side, e.g. "American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows", NYT 1/29/2024. The IES has an excellent NAEP website, with lots of information about what the tests are, how the tests are developed, administered, and scored, and what the results have been over time and space. Among many other things, there's a "questions library", which lets you explore the questions actually used in the test, a sample of graded student responses, and so on.

Looking through this material leaves me impressed with the process and its on-line documentation — but still puzzled about two things, both of which have to do with the meaning of NAEP comparisons across time.

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Polysyllabism in Sinitic and (phonemic) syllable stress

AntC wrote:

To your recent point on the 'slippery, slithery' article …
 
There's a town on Taiwan's East coast 'Taimali' / 太麻里鄉. This name is from the indigenous Paiwan language [also here for the people]. [see wikip]
 
I naively pronounced it with stress on the first syllable. I was roundly corrected by the Taiwanese family I'm staying with for a Lunar New Year visit: that should be Tai(m)-'ali, with stress on second syllable.

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How to call your relations

In the last few years I've noticed a number of apps that can be used to figure out the proper terms to refer to your relations in Chinese.  Of course, this is a problem in all languages.  For example, who is your "second cousin twice removed"?  Some people care about these things and are good at figuring them out.  For Chinese, these are particularly important matters, but younger generations are becoming increasingly ill adept at using the correct, precise terms of address.  Hence the felt need for (digital) tools to assist one in determining the proper address for your relatives.

For example, what do I call "wǒ de māmā de dìdì de nǚ'ér 我的媽媽的弟弟的女兒" (my mother's younger brother's daughter")?  Answer:  she is my "jiù biǎojiě/jiù biǎomèi 舅表姐/舅表妹", depending on whether she is older or younger than me.

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A different kind of snake year

On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

WXPN did its homework, and most of the information they conveyed was correct, but one thing they repeatedly said stunned me.  They didn't call "shé nián 蛇年" "year of the snake" in English, which I had always and ever heard it referred to as.  Rather, they referred to "shé nián 蛇年" as "Year of the Wood Snake". So I searched for it on the internet and, lo and behold, it turned up quite often as "wood snake".

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