Language Log

"Snail Alley" is only a semi-official name, but lots of inhabitants there have taken up the theme with some snail decorations.

Mark Swofford at the entrance to the alley:

This is one of many different formats of picture books for the illiterate adults that developed in Japan during late imperial history:

Early 20th-century Buddhist rebus-style text from Japan. Although labeled by the British Library as a Heart Sūtra for the illiterate, the Library of Congress identifies it as the “Hymn of Praise to Kannon for the Illiterate” (Kannon mekura wasan). (Source)

I recently spent a week at my son's campground in the countryside outside Dallas.  While there, I was elated to espy a sizable dodecahedron made of twelve substantial wooden panels tightly wrapped in brown, buff leather.  It had been constructed by a local artist about a dozen years ago.  

Contemplating that cosmic shape, it brought back all those vibrant discussions of geometry, linguistics, and metaphysics from a year and a half ago.  Esthetically and intellectually satisfying to commune with my old friend the dodecahedron, I fell into a reverie beneath those shaggy-scraggly-barked eastern red cedars that seemed to draw me up into their spreading branches that connected to the universe emanating from the dodecahedron that I held at my waist.

People who don't know any Chinese characters will think the four glyphs pictured above are just typical Chinese characters, but won't be able to make any sense of them at all.

People who are minimally / partially literate in Chinese characters will recognize components of the four glyphs, but not one of the glyphs as a whole.

People who are moderately literate in Chinese characters will "sort of" recognize parts of the four glyphs, but will not be able to extract meaning from the sentence as a whole.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-eighth issue:

“Demetrios of Bactria as Deva Gobujo and Other Indo-Greek Myths of Japan,” by Lucas Christopoulos. 

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fourth issue:

“Mythologies, Religions, and Peoples Outside Ancient China in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” by Xiaofeng He.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp364_Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas.pdf

A Sino-Indo-Iranian literary-religious-mythic nexus, with a focus on J. C. Coyajee

Für Professor Patrick Dewes Hanan, meinen Doktorvater

People often ask me what the meaning of the morpheme biàn 變 in the disyllabic term biànwén 變文 is.  The reason they come to me is because I spent the first two decades of my Sinological career focusing on this genre of medieval popular Buddhist prosimetric (shuōchàng 說唱) narrative.  

Wén 文, of course, means "writing; text".  No sweat there.  But biàn 變 is a thorny problem.  It has the following basic meanings:    

1. 1. (intransitive) to change (by itself); to transform
   2. (transitive) to change (something in some way); to alter; to transform
   3. (intransitive) to become; to turn into; to change into
   4. (transitive) to sell off (one's property)
   5. (intransitive) to be flexible (when dealing with matters); to accommodate to circumstances
   6. to perform a magic trick
   7. sudden major change; unexpected change of events
   8. changeable; changing
   9. grotesque thing
   10. (Buddhism) bianwen (form of narrative literature from the Tang dynasty)
   11. (Hokkien) to do (bad things)

       Lí tī pìⁿ sím-mi̍h khang-khùi? [Pe̍h-ōe-jī]

       What [bad thing] are you doing?

(Wiktionary)

A common meaning for hen 變 in Japanese is "strange"

It's not every day that you get a chance to experience Old Uyghur (language; script). Recently, when I was looking through albums of photographs of medieval Buddhist wall-paintings, I spotted an Old Uyghur inscription:

(click to embiggen)

That's from a Five Dynasties (907-979) transformation tableau (biànxiàng 變相) depicting the story of the Buddhist saint, Mahāmaudgalyāyana, rescuing his mother from hell.  It is located on the north side of the corridor to the antechamber to Cave 19 at Yulin Grottoes toward the western extremity of Gansu Province, part of the larger complex of medieval Buddhist caves at Dunhuang, which we have often mentioned on Language Log.  For the complete and heavily annotated translation of the transformation text on Mahāmaudgalyāyana (Mùlián 目連), see Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

[This is a guest post by Diana Shuheng Zhang]

(click to embiggen)

During my visit to the Luoyang Museum 洛阳博物馆, I found something amazing in its museum store. It is a set of 24 postcards, corresponding to the 24 solar terms 节气 (jieqi) in the traditional Chinese lunar calendar for agricultural purposes. What’s special about this set of cards is the design: every disyllabic lexeme for a solar term is coined into one single Sinitic “character”. I intended to attached multiple photos as examples but the last email was not successfully sent — the “size” was too big as an email. Therefore, here I’m only attaching one photo, that depicts the whole scene of the set of 24 cards.  By clicking on the photograph, you will be able to enlarge it sufficiently to enable you to see the details of the artwork and the writing.

As announced in the title of the first post on this subject, my aim is to understand where the Galatians originated and how / why they migrated to where they were when Apostle Paul wrote his epistle to them.  Since I was apparently insufficiently clear about both of those purposes in part 1, in this follow-up post I will provide additional scholarly material.  Inasmuch as the identification of the Gauls / Celts and the languages they spoke will be important for several posts about them that I will write in the coming weeks, today's post will necessarily be long and detailed. 

Here I will quote from Ben Witherington III, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Grand Rapids, MI:  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 1-7.

N.B.:  Illustration for art historians below.

"Unraveling the origins of the sogdians: Evidence of genetic admixture between ancient central and East Asians", Jiashuo Zhang, Yongdi Wang, Naifan Zhang, Jiawei Li, Youyang Qu, Cunshi Zhu, Fan Zhang, Dawei Cai, and Chao Ning, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (Volume 61, February 2025, 104957)

Highlights:

• Genome-wide data was generated for two individuals from a joint burial in the Guyuan cemetery dating to the Tang Dynasty.
• The female individual exhibits local ancestry, while the male individual carries both local ancestry and additional genetic components.
• The integration of genomic data with archaeological evidence suggests that the two individuals were likely husband and wife.
• The Sogdians, who travelled to China and intermarried with local populations, played a significant role in the Silk Road trade.

This will be a long post because it brings together much newly accumulated historical, archeological, and linguistic research that has the potential to change our conception of the course of development of medieval Eurasian civilization.

We begin with a pathbreaking article by Neil Price:

Vikings on the Silk Roads:
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East
Neil Price, Aeon (5/5/25)

This article has a significant amount of valuable information that did not make it into the recent blockbuster British Museum exhibition "Silk Roads" (9/26/24-2/23/25) and its accompanying catalog of the same title (British Museum, 2024), edited by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, and Tim Williams at the end of last year and beginning of this year. There was also a two-day international conference on "Contacts and exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, AD 500–1000" (12/5/24-12/6/24), at which I delivered the concluding remarks.

Price's article begins:

In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibāl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the ’Abbāsids – an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad – live by the Hijri calendar. The man’s name is Abu ’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh b ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khurradādhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.

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.