Language Log

[This is a guest post by Michael Broughton.]

I had an interesting Rorschach encounter with the oracle bone graph for woman a couple of years back. Oddly, this experience came in a rather roundabout way through an investigation into the character for interpretation, yi 譯. At the time, I was starting my Chinese translation business and wanted to come up with a meaningful logo for the business. I thought that an investigation into the character yi 譯 might help to inspire some ideas, and so I tried to do a little bit of digging into why it was written the way it was. Of note, the Liji (Book of Rites) has four characters for interpreting officials, as James Legge wrote in his elegant translation:

To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers) – in the east, called transmitters (ji 寄); in the south, representationists (xiang 象); in the west, Di-dis (didi 狄鞮); and in the north, interpreters (yi 譯).

As editor of Journal of Chinese History, Sarah Schneewind asked me if I would do a review of this book:  Documents géographiques de Dunhuang.  Having done over three hundred reviews during my career, I try to decline them as much as possible at this stage.  However, I succumbed to her offer because it was about Dunhuang and was by a French author, for both of which I have soft spots in my heart..

Jokingly, I wrote back:  "In honor of your surname in these arctic times, Sarah, I will do the review."

She replied, "Vielen Dank, Victor!  Ganz schön, dass meine Name etwas gilt!"  ("Thank you very much, Victor! It's really nice that my name means something!")

Our colleague and teacher, Prof. Matsumoto Akirō, passed away on January 6, 2026, at 82 years of age.

Prof. Matsumoto graduated from Waseda University in East Asian history in 1966, received his Master’s degree, also from Waseda, in philosophy in 1972, and thereafter studied at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran. He taught at International University of Japan and at St. Thomas (Eichi) University and held visiting professorships at Durham University (UK) and the University of Virginia (USA). He originally specialized in Islamic theology, working in Persian and Arabic texts under the mentorship of Prof. IZUTSU Toshihiko (井筒 俊彦) in Japan and Prof. Sayed Jalaluddin Ashtiani at Ferdowsi. His research included the mystical thought of Ibn ‘Arabi, Ibn Sina, Jami, Rumi, and Mulla Sadra and the 20th century Twelver Shi’ism of Ayatollah Khomeini. He also published numerous translations of Persian philosophical works into Japanese.

This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation:  link is embedded here.  As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying.  Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic.  I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.

Post 2/3
Three days after the inferno, the HK NatSec Office brands the fire “以火乱港 2.0” — the exact same phrase they used for 2019 rioters.
Translation: they’re prepping to blame “anti-China forces” so no tycoon or cadre ever sees a courtroom. pic.twitter.com/ndkFLHrCoE

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动 (@TGTM_Official) November 30, 2025

From Mark Swofford:

Here's a lighthearted Google Translate oddity from a newspaper article on the opening of ferry service between Taiwan and Ishigaki, Japan. 

The relevant bit:

選在冬季開航，海象較差船舶易晃，影響旅客搭乘意願。洪郁航表示，首航至明年2月底將採試營運優惠價，最低優惠至2000元，而最大優惠價差高達2000元，提高民眾嘗試及體驗意願。

Notable & Quotable: Lost in Woke Translation
‘Then a black Dutch fashion blogger wrote an article saying that Gorman’s work should only be translated by a black woman.’
Dec. 2, 2025

If we adhered to such a standard for choosing translators, where would it lead?

"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)

With two audio recordings.  If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded in the title.

…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

Imagine running propaganda and forgetting to blur the Top Gun logo. Peak CCTV. Even the Chinese can’t bear to see it! #TopGun pic.twitter.com/p0gs5X1MK7

— The Great Translation Movement 大翻译运动 (@TGTM_Official) September 23, 2025

The Strange Reason Chinese Doesn’t Borrow Words

Time for another Julesy:

Kim Jong-Un has a mission to eliminate bourgeois, foreign, and southern terminology. This story in the Daily Mail by Sabrina Penty, citing the Daily NK, is hardly scholarly, but it gives some examples, and there are other stories online. The Metro in the UK reported that "I love you" (discovered in a love letter during a routine Big-Brother check by the Socialist Patriotic Youth League) was subject to severe state criticism. "Hamburger" has to be called something else (dajin-gogi gyeopppang [double bread with ground beef]) in Korean. "Karaoke" is too Japanese (try "on-screen accompaniment machines" instead). But the most interesting ban was on the phrase "ice cream" ("aiseukeurim 아이스크림). Kim wants it replaced by eseukimo. But doesn't this show that the dear leader is weak on etymology?  Isn't it transparently a Koreanized borrowing of English eskimo?  

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. 

Mark Metcalf wrote: