Language Log

New book in the Cambridge Elements Series
Yuanfei Wang and Victor H. Mair
Early Globalism and Chinese Literature
Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2026 

The entire book, richly illustrated in color, is available open access online.

Summary

Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture.

Scholarly paper:

Timothy Glover, "The Original Text, Recipient, and Manuscript Presentation of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae", Mediaeval Studies, 85 (August 29, 2025), érudit, 163-238.

Easier to assimilate and attractively prepared with striking illustrations:

Tom Almeroth-Williams, "The hermit’s best-seller:  The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works of literature reveals its secrets", University of Cambridge (1/5/26).

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

“A Study of Dunhuang Manuscript S.2614V, Mahāmaudgalyāyana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld: Revisions and Textual Transmission,” by Ryu Takai.

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

“The Patriarch of Empty Lies,” by Wilt L. Idema. (free pdf)

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 

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

“Bai Xingjian and His Dream World of Sex and Love,” by Qianheng Jiang. 

http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp367_Bai_Xingjian_Sex_Love.pdf

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"

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)

[This is a guest post by Bill Benzon]

I thought you’d be interested in a study showing the distribution of “Xanadu” across the web. I first looked into this back in 2010. I’ve now updated that work using ChatGPT o3 (one of the so-called “reasoning” models). It designed the study and executed it.

This report ran all night. And it’s the kind of thing that would have been impossible prior to the internet. Here’s the abstract:

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:

That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article.  I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.

Here are some highlights:

Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.

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.