Language Log

Linguistics bibliography roundup

March 9, 2025 @ 6:47 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Accents, Artificial intelligence, Bibliography, Bilingualism, Cognitive science, Communication, Evolution of language, Grammar, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Language and genetics, Language and history, Language and religion, Phonetics and phonology, Prosody, Vocabulary, Words words words

Something for everyone

"Cultural Nuances in Subtitling the Religious Discourse Marker Wallah in Jordanian Drama into English." Al Salem, Mohd Nour et al. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 12, no. 1 (March 6, 2025). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-04515-6.
"Humpback Whale Song Shown to Be Structurally Similar to Human Language." PhysOrg, February 6, 2025. https://phys.org/news/2025-02-humpback-whale-song-shown-similar.html. Discussing "Whale Song Shows Language-like Statistical Structure." Arnon, Inbal et al. Science (February 7, 2025). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7055, "Convergent Evolution in Whale and Human Vocal Cultures." Whiten, Andrew et al. Science 387, no. 6734 (February 6, 2025): 581-582. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv2318, and "Language-like Efficiency in Whale Communication." Youngblood, Mason. Science Advances 11, no. 6 (February 5, 2025): eads6014. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014.

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Fried and steamed mud: food for the season

February 25, 2025 @ 9:14 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and food, Lexicon and lexicography, Lost in translation

From a Hong Kong restaurant:

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A different kind of snake year

January 30, 2025 @ 11:27 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Language and culture

On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

WXPN did its homework, and most of the information they conveyed was correct, but one thing they repeatedly said stunned me. They didn't call "shé nián 蛇年" "year of the snake" in English, which I had always and ever heard it referred to as. Rather, they referred to "shé nián 蛇年" as "Year of the Wood Snake". So I searched for it on the internet and, lo and behold, it turned up quite often as "wood snake".

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Eagles and vultures

January 7, 2025 @ 10:21 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Translation

Big birds in the Bible.

"‘On Eagles’ Wings’: Comfort and Translation,The bird is most probably not cited in the Bible." WSJ Opinion (1/6/25)

A dilemma.

Rosemary Roberts, of Waterbury Connecticut, writes:

Eli Federman’s op-ed “The Bald Eagle Is Heaven-Sent” (Dec. 31) brings to mind the beautiful hymn “On Eagles’ Wings,” which is often sung both at Roman Catholic funeral Masses and at many protestant church services. While most of the hymn is based on Psalm 91 from the Old Testament, the refrain is based on Exodus 19:4, when God told the Israelites, after their flight from Egypt, that He had carried them “on eagles’ wings” through their times of trial. The refrain reads:

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The City of Angels in Latin

September 16, 2024 @ 11:07 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and the law

"The Best New Book Written Entirely in Latin You’ll Try to Read This Year: Why Donatien Grau, an adviser at the Louvre, decided to write 'De Civitate Angelorum,' a book about Los Angeles, the Roman way." By Fergus McIntosh, New Yorker (September 16, 2024)

Since even elite schools like Penn and Princeton no longer have a language requirement in their Classics departments, I doubt that many people, other than a few extraordinarily conscientious lawyers and biological taxonomists, will understand much of what Grau has written. Still, it's an interesting experiment to see how much of his book fluent speakers of French, Spanish, and Italian comprehend.

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Crab raccoon, part 2

September 2, 2024 @ 12:09 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Classification, Emojis and emoticons, Language and biology, Memes

[This is a guest post by Meme Master Mark (MMM), who says he's honored that I call him that: "3M is also from Minnesota" (see the first sentence).]

Having spent many of my formative years in Minnesota, "crab raccoon" makes perfect sense.

This was a pretty disturbing tattoo:

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Logos: The sacred phonology, mathematics, and agriculture of the alphazodiac

June 30, 2024 @ 6:05 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Language and mathematics, Language and philosophy, Philology, Phonetics and phonology

[This is a guest post by Brian Pellar]

. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. — Hebreu Primiti

The Consonants of Command

Dear Professor Mair,

In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,

the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].

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Diagramming: history of the visualization of grammar in the 19th century

June 28, 2024 @ 9:36 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Grammar, Language and biology, Lexicon and lexicography, Metaphors, Writing systems

Aside from etymology, one of my favorite language study activities before college was diagramming sentences. Consequently, I was delighted to be reminded of those good old days by this new (June 19, 2024) article in The Public Domain Review: "American Grammar: Diagraming Sentences in the 19th Century". This is a magisterial collection of crisply photographed archival works that you can flip through page by page to study at your leisure.

The works collected are the following:

James Brown, The American Grammar (Philadelphia, PA: Clark and Raser, 1831).

Frederick A. P. Barnard, Analytic Grammar; with Symbolic Illustration (New York: E. French, 1836.

Oliver B. Peirce, The Grammar of the English Language (New York: Robinson and Franklin, 1839).

Solomon Barrett, The Principles of Grammar (Cambridge, MA: Metcalf and Co., 1857).

Charles Gauss and B. T. Hodge, A Comprehensive English Grammar (Baltimore, MD: Pan Publication Co., 1890)

Stephen Watkins Clark, A Practical Grammar (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1847).

Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, Higher Lessons in English (New York: Clark and Maynard, 1880).

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Shameful grass

May 24, 2024 @ 8:31 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Signs, Translation

Liwei Jiao sent in this photograph from a park in Hefei, China:

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Indigo and cabbage, part 2

May 11, 2024 @ 7:19 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Etymology, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Language and science

The first part of this series, "Indigo and cabbage", written the day before Thanksgiving in 2023, is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling posts I've ever made. This follow-up is even more of a delight, because here I get to introduce a new paper by anthropologist-linguist-textile expert Elizabeth J. W. Barber, and what a tour de force it is (see below).

Here I give an extended account of her scholarship, especially her early activities in the computer analysis of Chinese, because she was instrumental in helping to make that possible at its foundational stage.

She earned a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in Archaeology and Greek in 1962. Her chief mentor was Mabel Lang from whom she learned Linear B and who advised her honors thesis on Linear A. In addition to Lang, Wayland wrote her thesis under Emmett L. Bennett Jr. Her thesis used computer indices of the Hagia Triada Linear A texts in an attempt to decipher its signs and symbols. The computer indices were made via punched cards, a method which was preceded by the work of Alice E. Kober on Linear B. She earned her PhD from Yale University in linguistics in 1968. Her doctoral study at Yale University was supervised by Sydney Lamb, under whom she wrote her dissertation, "The Computer Aided Analysis of Undeciphered Ancient Texts."

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Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth

May 7, 2024 @ 11:04 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and art, Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Writing systems

Given that we've been discussing astronomy / astrology and their relationship to the alphabet so intensely in recent weeks, I'm pleased to announce this important conference that is about to be convened: “The Power of the Planets: The Social History of Astral Sciences Between East and West”, May 20–21, 2024, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali – Università di Bologna (Ravenna, Italy).

I warmly recommend that you take a close look at the header images of two objects in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Mirror with a Coiling Dragon, China, Tang Dynasty 618-907 (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1995.367), Drachma – Sasanian, Iran, reign of Hormizd II, 4th century (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.738).

The quality of the photographs is extraordinarily fine and detailed. Using the zoom and expand functions, you can see things not clearly visible to the naked eye. Especially noteworthy is the jagged dorsal fin / frill / spine that runs along the back of the dragon on the Tang mirror and is a conspicuous counterpart of many species of dinosaurs.

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Digital Humanities for the study of traditional Asian medicines

April 12, 2024 @ 7:00 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and medicine, Philology

A guest post for The Digital Orientalist (4/10/24), under The Magic of Philology and Indexing, Polyglot Asian Medicines (Foundational Resources and Digital Tools), by Michael Stanley-Baker, Christopher S.G. Khoo and Faizah Zakariah (all three are based at academic institutions in Singapore), "Tracking Drug Names Across Language, Time, Space and Knowledge Domains to Produce New Visions of Traditional Medicine".

This is a richly detailed article with many links and citations. I will not attempt to cover, much less extensively quote, lengthy portions. Instead, I will begin with the authors' general introduction, note the main sections of the article, refer to the graphs, and quote one typical section to show what the authors' approach can accomplish.

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Cucurbits and junk characters

March 30, 2024 @ 11:14 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Writing systems

Christopher Rea came to Penn a few weeks ago and delivered this lecture:

"From Zhuangzi’s Gourd to Cinderella’s Pumpkin: Gua 瓜 as a Vehicle for the Imagination"

(2/22/24)

The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi tells us that one remedy for a lack of imagination is to take your gourd for a ride. Confucius makes a point about usefulness by comparing himself to a calabash. Gua 瓜—which include gourds, melons, pumpkins, squash, and bitter melon—abound in Chinese philosophy, art, poetry, historiography, and storytelling, notably in late imperial novels such as Jin Ping Mei, Journey to the West, and Story of the Stone. Why? Christopher Rea argues that gua have several qualities that account for their enduring popularity in the figurative imagination, including their sound, shape, seasonality, variety, and abundance.

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Archive for Language and biology

Linguistics bibliography roundup

Fried and steamed mud: food for the season

A different kind of snake year

Eagles and vultures

The City of Angels in Latin

Crab raccoon, part 2

Logos: The sacred phonology, mathematics, and agriculture of the alphazodiac

Diagramming: history of the visualization of grammar in the 19th century

Shameful grass

Indigo and cabbage, part 2

Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth

Digital Humanities for the study of traditional Asian medicines

Cucurbits and junk characters

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