Language Log

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.”

We touched upon this question recently in "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/15/25), where we examined Daniel Everett's thesis as propounded in How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.  In that volume, Everett argues that language is learned / acquired / developed, not hard-wired in the human brain.  He holds that our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus, had the biological and mental equipment for speech 1,500,000 years ago, 10 times earlier than the conventional wisdom that language originated with Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago, and that it was the result of a "language instinct". 

Now we come back to the lower date with this new research as presented in:

Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Remo Nitschke, Mercedes Okumura, Ian Tattersall. Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025; 16 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900

Jackie M. sent a link to an instance of a new eggcorn — "laying duck" for "lame duck":

Schumer had just written his political epitaph. Now, he is a laying duck in the Senate. New York, you must force him to resign and start shopping for a new senator.

— writerarmando.bsky.social (@writerarmando.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 2:28 PM

The words that leap to mind are pustakālaya पुस्तकालय (pustak पुस्तक ["book"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]) and granthālaya ग्रन्थालय (granth ग्रंथ ["text"] + ālaya आलय ["place"]).  Those are simple and straightforward.

There were several other Sanskrit words for library I used to know, such as vidyākośasamāśraya विद्याकोशसमाश्रय* that included the component vidya ("knowledge"), but they were more subtle and complicated, so they were harder for me to recall.

*knowledge treasury coming together (for support or shelter)

Yann LeCun's evaluation of political versus linguistic errors:

 

View on Threads

 

I've been saying "Erin go Bragh" my whole life and knew that it meant roughly "Ireland Forever!".

This is something I've been waiting for for decades:

"Onomatopoeia Odyssey:  How do animals sound across languages?", by Vivian Li, The Pudding (March, 2025)

Jean Nota Bene, the biggest French YouTuber (millions of followers) on historical subjects, recently focused on the Kushans.  He follows many of the same themes that we do on Language Log and Sino-Platonic Papers (including Greek-Indian-Chinese associations), so many readers of this post will be interested in what he has to say about the Kushan Empire (ca. 30–ca. 375 AD).  Although Nota Bene speaks in French, I think readers will be able to glean a lot of valuable information on this subject.  Plus his presentation is richly illustrated, so watch carefully and pause the video if you want to take a closer look.

Linguistics is a relatively young discipline, formally dating from roughly the mid-19th century.  In the study of language, it was preceded by philology, which has hoary roots going all the way back to Pāṇini (520-460 BC) and beyond.

In my own lifetime, until recently I preferred to identify myself as a philologist, but that met with too many dumb stares, so I gave up on that.  Now, however, I find that there is a World Philology Union to carry the torch for this venerable profession, so perhaps there's hope for reviving my lost lifework after all.

From the WPU's website:

The World Philology Union (WPU) was founded on 2 December 2021 in Oslo, Norway. The WPU is an international association whose purpose is to promote philology worldwide, in research, education, society and culture.

The first General Assembly of the WPU was held in Rome, 15 December 2022. At the same occasion, the first WPU conference was held, 14–16 December, hosted by the Sapienza University of Rome and ISMEO – The International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies. This conference discussed the current state of philology at universities and other academic institutions worldwide.

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Which do you think is harder — reading and writing Taiwanese with characters (sinographs) or with romanization?

I maintain — and I have tried to show over the years — that it's much easier to read Taiwanese written with roman letters than with Chinese characters.  The same is true of all vernacular Sinitic languages.

It is relatively easy for a speaker of Taiwanese to become literate in roman letters, not at all so in characters.  See the posts under "Selected readings" below.

[This is a guest post by Hiroshi Kumamoto]

The Last Words of Helmut Humbach (1921-2017)

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When an eminent classicist, the late Martin L. West published The Hymns of Zoroaster: A New Translation of the Most Ancient Sacred Texts of Iran, London: Tauris, 2010, Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst wrote (Review in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2011, p. 379),"This book (…) comes as something of a surprise, since scholars of the difficult texts in Old Avestan, the oldest known texts in Old Iranian, do not usually emerge out of the blue". Now another surprise is brought by Heindio Uesugi, who edited Old Avestan Dictionary, Tokyo : Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa  (ILCAA), 2024 [became available in Feb. 2025] (XXVIII, 404 + VI, 116 pages). Although Adam Alvah Catt at Kyoto University, who is credited as editorial supervisor, is known from his works in Indo-Iranian and Tocharian linguistics, the name of the editor has been totally unknown in the field in Iranian linguistics.