In 1991, I began the initial stage of my international project for the investigation of the Bronze Age and Iron Age Tarim mummies by focusing on their genetics. The reason for my doing so was because that was just around the time that techniques for the study of ancient DNA were being developed by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. I was fortunate in gaining the advice and support of Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, eminent population geneticist of Stanford University. Although I continued to carry out genetics research and was an author of the first paper on the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the Tarim mummies*, later I became disenchanted by genomic studies, not just of humans, but particularly of humans because of ulterior motives. Due to their susceptibility to be mathematically and statistically manipulated for political purposes, genomic studies had become an ideological minefield. Consequently, I switched the emphasis of the project to other disciplines such as textiles**, metallurgy***, physical anthropology****, archeology (burial practices, material goods, etc.)*****, micro/macrohistory******, equestrian studies*******, and, of course, linguistics********.
Or rather, the phonetic symbolism of (an aspect of physics), as illustrated by a recent xkcd:
Mouseover title: "Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation."
Having just come back from two weeks in London and Belfast, this article is particularly germane for me:
"The Irish and Scots Aren’t Fooled by Your Fake Accent: Some cultures are better than others at spotting impostors. The skill could allow them to pick out outsiders trying to infiltrate their groups." By Eric Niiler, WSJ (12'16/24)
I love to hear Scots and Irish speak, although often I cannot understand all that they are saying. Twenty and more years ago, the head circulation librarian at my university had such a mellifluous lilt that I would sometimes check out books when she was on duty just to hear her sweet tongue, but I had no idea which particular variety of Scottish (I think) she was speaking.
Grammatically, that is a choice question: "is it city[-like] (or not)?" In other words, is whatever is at question sophisticated / modern? This phrase, which has been chosen by Sixth Tone* (12/17/24) as one of the top ten Chinese buzzwords of 2024 (I will list the other nine in the Appendix) is composed of two identical English loanwords and the most common negative particle in Mandarin.
Before explaining this viral phenomenon further, I will show a video featuring "city不city" to demonstrate that it is real:
William Labov, known far and wide as one of the most influential linguists of the 20th and 21st centuries, passed away this morning at the age of 97, with his wife, Gillian Sankoff, by his side.
Bill is still very alive to us, so many of us, here at Penn. His voice reverberates. Mark is working on a longer, more detailed appreciation.
I recently paid a visit to the oldest Chinese temple in the city of Tangerang in Indonesia, Boen Tek Bio (文德廟 ["literary virtue"], note the Dutch-influenced spelling) which was renovated some time in September this year. I was very pleased to see they did a pretty good job restoring all the inscriptions and pieces of calligraphy.
I noticed some (very old) custodians of the temple were handing out talismans (fú 符), and very helpfully, a hand-drawn diagram explaining each part of the talisman (see the attached diagram) — notice the ad-hoc Mandarin romanizations and Indonesian translations of each element).
Kylie Kelce, wife of Jason Kelce, sister-in-law of Travis Kelce, mother of three (with a fourth on the way), and Dunkin Donuts enthusiast, can add another descriptor to that incomplete list: No. 1 podcast host.
The debut of Kylie’s new podcast, Not Gonna Lie, has unseated Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience from its long-held perch atop the most-listened charts on both Apple and Spotify. The inaugural episode, featuring It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson as a guest, was published on December 5, with new episodes planned to drop each Thursday.
I just spent two weeks in Japan. But if you think I’ve brought back exotic pearls of wisdom, you’ll be disappointed. That’s because I’ve been talking to my Tokyo-based colleague Gearoid Reidy — a great admirer of Japan but a cold critic of Western fetishization of almost everything out of the country. As he describes it in a recent column: “Talking to first-time tourists or perusing online forums, I often find astonishment: Why does everything work so well? How else could public safety and famed attention to detail be sustained, if not from some secret knowledge the West has lost?” The search for alleged life hacks out of Japan has resulted in a plethora of books on “the Japanese secret to everything: Eat less, save money, be more productive. Ikigai, wabi-sabi or shinrin yokuwill fix what’s wrong with your life.”
In its written form telegraphese , or "Morse," as it is called in the vernacular, is rarely seen. Yet as a vehicle of expression it is, to the initiated, as harmonious, subtle, and fascinating as the language of music itself.
Nothing could be simpler than its alphabet of dots and dashes. Yet it has come to pass that out of the manner of rendering this simple code has been evolved a means of communicating thought and feeling rivaling in flexibility and scope the human voice.
The comments on "Hypertonal conlang" (12/8/2024) include a lengthy back-and-forth about where the syllable break should be located in English words like "Cheryl". I was surprised to see that no one brought up the concept of ambisyllabicity, which has been a standard and well-accepted idea in phonology and phonetics for more than 50 years. It continues to be widely referenced in the scholarly literature — Google Scholar lists about 2,170 papers citing the term, and 260 since 2020.
The most influential source is Dan Kahn's 1976 MIT thesis, “Syllable-based Generalizations in English Phonology”. There's more to say about the 1970s' introduction into formal phonology of structures beyond phoneme strings (or distinctive feature matrices), but that's a topic for another time.
