Language Log

A learned friend recently sent me a draft composition on medieval Chinese history in which he referred to "*" as an "asterix".  This reminded me that ten years ago I wrote a post, "The many pronunciations of '*'" (12/17/15), on this subject and we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about it.

Given that lately we've been talking a lot about Celts, Galatians, and so on, I think it is appropriate to write another post on Asterix the Gaul, that famous French comic book character, and how he got his name.  Also inspired / prompted by Chris Button's latest comment.

I often hear "*" pronounced "asterix" or "asterick", and so on (e.g., "astrisk" [two syllables], esp. in rapid speech).  It's hard even for me to pronounce "*" or type the symbol those ways, so ingrained is the pronunciation "as-ter-isk".

What with all the talk about Taiwanese and Gaelic swirling around Language Log recently, I was serendipitously surprised to find this in my inbox last week:

Randy Alexander is not a professional Sinologist, but when it comes to reading Chinese poetry, he's as serious as one can be.  The following poem is by Du Fu (712-770), said by some to be "China's greatest poet".  In the presentation below, I will first give the text with its transcription, and then Randy's translation.  After that we will delve deeply into the grammatical exegesis of one line of the poem, the last.  

Blake Shedd called my attention to 

…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.

Here's the article:

Hens, Ducks, & Human Rights in China:  Vittorio Bufacchi & Xiao Ouyang discuss some philosophical & linguistic difficulties

From Mok Ling:

As I'm writing this (evening of 3 May), my friends across the Strait of Malacca in Singapore are eagerly awaiting the results of their most recent general elections. As I've found out, in Singapore, voting in elections is not only a civic duty but mandatory by law!

I happened to come across this image showing the reverse of a poll card issued to all voters:

The reverse of a poll card issued for the Singaporean presidential election, 2011.
The polling station in question was at the void deck of Block 115 Clementi Street 13
in the Holland-Bukit Timah Group Representation Constituency.  (source)

Two days ago, I received a big package with three heavy books inside.  They were three copies of the following tome:

Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair and Zhenjun Zhang (London:  Routledge, 2025), 742 pages.

It came as a surprise for, even though we had been working on the handbook for years, I had lost track of when it would actually be published.

Holding the printed and bound work in my hands, the sheer magnitude of what its pages contained began to sink in.

Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.

Scans can be found here:https://t.co/pW2nH8Udtj pic.twitter.com/HMehP0F6qd

— Maxim Persikov (Panates) (@gyankotsu) December 5, 2024

The Japanese writing system consists of three major components — kanji (sinographs), hiragana (cursive syllabary), and katakana (block syllabary).  I would argue that rōmaji (roman letters) are a fourth component.  We have rehearsed and rehashed their different lexical, morphological, and grammatical functions so often that I don't want to waste time going over them again now.  Since we are focusing on katakana in this post, I will merely mention that their main roles are the following:

• transcription of foreign-language words into Japanese
• the writing of loan words (collectively gairaigo)
• emphasis; to represent onomatopoeia
• for technical and scientific terms
• for names of plants, animals, minerals
• often for the names of Japanese companies

(Wikipedia)

[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. 

[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.

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)

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

[This is a guest post by Hiroshi Kumamoto]

The Last Words of Helmut Humbach (1921-2017)

1

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.