Language Log

A pathbreaking, new book from Brill:

The Vernacular World of Pu Songling
Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China
Series:  Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 173 (2025).  xix, 312 pp.
By Zhenzhen Lu 

Before I introduce what to me is one of the most stupendous humanities discoveries I have encountered in the last six decades, I have to explain briefly why it is so exciting.   Namely, here we get to witness the emergence of a few bits of vernacular English in a religiously imbued medieval Latin matrix.  This is exactly how medieval vernacular Sinitic started to appear in the framework of Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic during the heyday of medieval Buddhism.  Just as in the medieval Christian homilies of Peterhouse MS 255, we see the common (sú 俗) preachers of Dunhuang resorting to vernacular language and popular "memes" in their "transformation texts" (biàn[wén] 變[文]) to keep the attention of their auditors / readers.

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Geoffrey Chaucer's (d. 1400) Troilus and Criseyde.  That was a long time ago, sixty years, in fact.  Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times yesterday and discovered that this medieval romance was back in the news.

900-Year-Old Copyist's Error May Unravel a Chaucer Mystery
The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.
Stephen Castle, NYT (7/15/25)

I recall that when I began learning Mandarin, one of the things (!) that troubled me greatly was why the word for "thing" was written with the characters for "east" and "west":  dōngxi 東西.  My classmates came up with all sorts of outlandish, speculative explanations for the supposed etymology.  All along, I suspected that the meaning "thing" for the disyllabic word dōngxi 東西 was not derived from the characters used to write it but was the phonetic reflection of a borrowing or the representation of some colloquial, topolectal term.

From Mok Ling:

A friend of mine, Lucy, is in a Mandarin learning group. She told me about the bizarre etymology she was taught for the word dōngxi 東西. Apparently, 東西 being used to mean "thing, item" is based on the conception of the Five Phases (wǔxíng 五行 [VHM:  formerly translated as Five Agents or Five Elements, which brings out the correspondences with the Four Elements of Western classical thought, also in the metaphysics of Indian, Tibetan, and other cultures]): East is represented by the element of Wood (木) and West is represented by the element of Metal (金). Objects are made of metal and wood, therefore "east-west" became a shorthand "thing" — obviously pretty ridiculous.

If you do a search across the internet for this term, you will find it used here and there.  You will even find the extended expression Topolect Literature Movement (TLM), which is traced back to at least the mid-twentieth century.

For the lexical legitimacy and morphological construction of "topolect literature", see this comment to a previous post: 

"Topolect literature" may seem to be a contradiction in terms — fāngyán wénxué 方言文學 ("topolect literature"). On the other hand, "oral literature" is a well-established concept / term in global scholarship, the idea being that this is written literature transcribed / derived from oral sources.

IA sent me this article (in Chinese) about a new translation of George Orwell's 1984.  It begins:

Yīngguó zuòjiā Qiáozhì Ōuwēiěr de míngzhù `1984' chūbǎn yuē 75 nián, jìnrì yíng lái shǒubù Táiwén bǎn. Yìzhě Zhōu Yíngchéng shuō, zhè shì tuīdòng `Táiyǔ zhèngchánghuà'de chángshì, ràng Táiyǔ mǔyǔzhě bùbì tòuguò Zhōngwén yìběn, yě néng jiēchù shìjiè jīngdiǎn wénxué

英國作家喬治‧歐威爾的名著「1984」出版約75年，近日迎來首部台文版。譯者周盈成說，這是推動「台語正常化」的嘗試，讓台語母語者不必透過中文譯本，也能接觸世界經典文學。

1984, a famous novel by British writer George Orwell, was published about 75 years ago and recently had its first Taiwanese version. Translator Zhou Yingcheng said that this is an attempt to promote the "normalization of Taiwanese" so that native Taiwanese speakers can access world classic literature without having to rely on Chinese translations.

IA points out that, as in the following quotation from the translator, "Zhōngwén 中文" (lit. "Chinese writing"), refers not only to written language but spoken as well:

Tā shuō:`Dāngshí zài guó wài jiǎng zhōngwén, chángcháng bèi dàng zuò zhōngguó rén, yúshì wǒ kāishǐ sīkǎo zìjǐ gēn táiwān de liánjié shì shénme, dé chū de jiélùn shì tái yǔ. Dàn wǒ tái yǔ bùgòu hǎo, yǒu shí wǒmen xiǎng jiǎng qiāoqiāohuà,(jiǎng zhōngwén) pà biérén tīng dǒng, jiù huì qiēhuàn chéng tái yǔ, dàn yòu méi bànfǎ wánzhěngde shuō

他說：「當時在國外講中文，常常被當作中國人，於是我開始思考自己跟台灣的連結是什麼，得出的結論是台語。但我台語不夠好，有時我們想講悄悄話，（講中文）怕別人聽懂，就會切換成台語，但又沒辦法完整地說」。

He said: "When I was speaking Chinese abroad, I was often mistaken for Chinese, so I began to think about what my connection with Taiwan was, and I concluded it was Taiwanese. But my Taiwanese is not good enough. Sometimes when we want to whisper, we are afraid that others will understand (what we are saying in Chinese), so we switch to Taiwanese, but we can't speak it completely."

Thirty-five or so years ago, Allyn Rickett (1921-2020), my old colleague at Penn, referred to a certain person as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽" ("mawkishly maudlin" [my translation of Rickett's Mandarin]; "old-lady-like").  This is such an unusual expression, and it so perfectly characterized the individual in question, that it's worth writing a post on it.

In the years around the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Rickett ("Rick") was in China doing research for his doctoral dissertation on the Guǎn Zǐ 管子 (Master Guan), a large and important politicophilosophical text reflecting the thought and practice of the Spring and Autumn period (c. 770-c. 481 BC), though the received version was not edited until circa 26 BC.  Rickett was accused of spying for the US Office of Naval Intelligence and imprisoned by the PRC government.  There he underwent four years of "struggle sessions".  Call them what you will, he had ample opportunity to become familiar with such colloquial terms as "pópomāmā 婆婆媽媽".

I should also note that Rickett, who was a student of the distinguished Sinologist, Derk Bodde (1909-2003), was an outstanding scholar in his own right, and his densely annotated translation of the Guan Zi is a monumental achievement, one that he worked on for most of his professional life.

敦煌学大辞典第二版全新发布了！
New second edition of Dictionary of Dunhuang Studies!
敦煌学不可或缺的工具
Indispensable tool for #DunhuangStudies
郝春文 主编
70%词条已修订了
词汇量：241万 ➡️ 400万
词条数：5,000 ➡️ 12,000 pic.twitter.com/vYLaYQAHgL

— Neil Schmid 史瀚文 (@DNeilSchmid) January 15, 2025

A couple of days ago we examined the mystifying Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese (LS/CC) collocation 惡惡 (here).  After considering several different ways to pronounce and interpret the elements of this expression, we decided that, in most instances, it should be read wùè and be rendered as "hate evil".

Today we'll go much more slowly and deliberately through a brief classical occurrence of 惡惡 to gain a better appreciation for the meaning of the dyad 惡惡 and how to appreciate its nuances in actual use.

Here I shall quote a short passage from Lǐjì 禮記 (Record of rites) (ca. 3rd c.-1st c. BC):

Suǒwèi chéng qí yì zhě, wú zì qī yě, rú wù èchòu, rú hào hǎosè, cǐ zhī wèi zì qiān. Gù jūnzǐ bì shèn qí dú yě.

所謂誠其意者、毋自欺也。如惡惡臭、如好好色。此之謂自謙、故君子必愼其獨也。

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-third issue: "Speaking and Writing: Studies in Vernacular Aspects of Middle Period Chinese Culture" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).

Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my seminar on Middle Vernacular Sinitic (MVS). They cover a wide variety of topics, from epistolary style to social mores, to philosophy and religion. They reveal how a vernacular ethos informs the thought and life of men and women from different social classes and distinguishes them from those who adhere to a more strictly classical outlook. Although they are on quite dissimilar subjects, this trio of papers harmonize in their delineation of the implications of vernacularity for belief and perception. Taken together, they compel one to consider seriously what causes some people to tilt more to the vernacular side and others to cling to classicism. While the authors of these papers do not aim to arrive at a common conclusion on the meaning of the vernacular-classical divide, the readers who probe beneath the surface of all three papers will undoubtedly find facets that refract and reflect themes that bind them into a unified body of inquiry.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-second issue: "Dramatic Transformations of Sinography in East Asia and the World" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).

Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my “Language, Script, and Society in China” course during the fall semester of 2023. All three of them are concerned with radical changes made to Sinographic script during its adjustment to modernity.

[Full disclosure:  the reason I am so consumed by the Arabic vernaculars is because of their own inherent, intrinsic nature, but I must confess that I'm also preoccupied by their comparative parallelism with the Sinitic "topolects".  The workings of both are extremely difficult to comprehend.]

This post is to follow up on VHM's "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6" (5/12/24) and Mark's "Maltese Arabic: Correction?" (5/13/24), plus J.W. Brewer's excellent first comment to the latter.

Mark ends his post thus:  "…it seems entirely wrong to exclude Maltese from a taxonomy of Arabic 'colloquials' or 'vernaculars' (i.e. Arabic languages), purely on the grounds of its borrowings from Italian."  I would not want to do that.

To provide for a more nuanced evaluation of the position of Maltese vis-à-vis the Arabic vernaculars, below I cite several scholarly accounts of the subject and related issues.  Extensive coverage of the history of the languages on Malta is provided.

Britannica

Maltese language, Semitic language of the Southern Central group spoken on the island of Malta. Maltese developed from a dialect of Arabic and is closely related to the western Arabic dialects of Algeria and Tunisia. Strongly influenced by the Sicilian language (spoken in Sicily), Maltese is the only form of Arabic to be written in the Latin alphabet."

That's the bare bones.  As we shall find in the following paragraphs, the complexities of Maltese are far greater than can be told in such a capsule description.