Archive for Language and biology
July 24, 2022 @ 4:50 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and animals, Language and biology
The giraffe is such an outlandish animal that many otherwise sensible people have thought that it must be a combination of several species.
From the concept of a giraffe being an amalgam of several animals jointly; compare Persian شترگاوپلنگ (šotorgâvpalang, “giraffe”, literally “camel-ox-leopard”) and Ancient Greek καμηλοπάρδαλῐς (kamēlopárdalis, “giraffe”).
Noun
زَرَافَة • (zarāfa) f (plural زَرَافَات (zarāfāt))
-
- group of people, cluster of people, body of people
-
زَرَافَاتٍ وَوُحْدَانًا ―
zarāfātin wa-wuḥdānan ―
jointly and severally; in groups and alone
(source)
The name "giraffe" has its earliest known origins in the Arabic word zarāfah (زرافة), perhaps borrowed from the animal's Somali name geri. The Arab name is translated as "fast-walker". In early Modern English the spellings jarraf and ziraph were used, probably directly from the Arabic, and in Middle English orafle and gyrfaunt, gerfaunt. The Italian form giraffa arose in the 1590s. The modern English form developed around 1600 from the French girafe.
"Camelopard" is an archaic English name for the giraffe; it derives from the Ancient Greek καμηλοπάρδαλις (kamēlopárdalis), from κάμηλος (kámēlos), "camel", and πάρδαλις (párdalis), "leopard", referring to its camel-like shape and leopard-like colouration.
(source)
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June 25, 2022 @ 5:22 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Names
If you stroll through the grounds of the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania, you may come upon this phenomenal tree:
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April 23, 2022 @ 6:41 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Evolution of language, Language and biology, Language change
New article by Johnson in The Economist (4/23/22):
On the origin of languages
It is tempting to think that they have clear beginnings. They don’t
First two paragraphs:
IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own language between the lines of text and at the edges. What makes these marginalia more than marginal is that they are considered the first words ever written in Spanish.
The “Emilian glosses” were written at the monastery of Suso, which was founded by St Aemilianus (Millán, in Spanish) in the La Rioja region of Spain. Known as la cuna del castellano, “the cradle of Castilian”, it is a UNESCO world heritage site and a great tourist draw. In 1977 Spain celebrated 1,000 years of the Spanish language there.
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March 3, 2022 @ 10:54 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and food, Lost in translation
From John Dankowski via Dave Thomas:
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February 3, 2022 @ 9:23 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and biology, Writing systems
Last week, a master's student went to the board to write the Chinese character for "nose" (bí 鼻), but forgot how to do so. There is no simplified version. The form of this character differs slightly between China and Japan: in China it is 鼻 and in Japan it is 鼻. Can you spot the difference?
Believe it or not, the top part of the character depicts a nose. Here's the small seal script form, about two millennia ago (the bottom part is the phonophore, which was added long after the top part was invented):
Glyph origin
Phono-semantic compound (形聲, OC *blids): semantic 自 (“nose”) + phonetic 畀 (OC *pids).
自 (OC *ɦljids) originally meant “nose” but came to be used to mean “self”, so the sense of “nose” has been replaced by 鼻 (OC *blids). Some scholars interpret 鼻 (OC *blids) as a combination of a nose (自 (OC *ɦljids)) and two lungs (畀 (OC *pids)).
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January 2, 2022 @ 9:27 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Historical linguistics, Language and animals, Language and biology, Language and culture, Phonetics and phonology, Semantics
From Chau Wu:
I have always wondered about the deep gulf of variations in the sounds of "néng 能 -bearing" characters, that is, the variations in the onsets and rimes (shēng 聲 and yùn 韻):
néng 能 n- / -eng (Tw l- / -eng) [Note: 能 orig. meaning 'bear'; nai, an aquatic animal; thai, name of a constellation 三能 = 三台]
xióng 熊 x- (Wade-Giles: hs-) / -iong [熊 Tw hîm; the x- in MSM xióng is due to sibilization of h- caused by the following -i.]
pí 羆 ph- / -i (the closely related p- onset is also seen in 罷, 擺)
nài 褦 n- / -ai (the same onset n- is seen in 能)
tài 態 th- / -ai (the same th- onset is seen in 能)
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September 29, 2021 @ 9:28 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Lost in translation
From a Chinese fish market:
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September 24, 2021 @ 12:00 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Endangered languages, Language and biology, Language and medicine
New article in Mongabay (the critter in the banner at the top of the page who serves as their logo reminds me of our little friend, the gecko):
"Extinction of Indigenous languages leads to loss of exclusive knowledge about medicinal plants", by Sibélia Zanon on 20 September 2021 | Translated by Maya Johnson
Key points:
- A study at the University of Zurich in Switzerland shows that a large proportion of existing medicinal plant knowledge is linked to threatened Indigenous languages. In a regional study on the Amazon, New Guinea and North America, researchers concluded that 75% of medicinal plant uses are known in only one language.
- The study evaluated 645 plant species in the northwestern Amazon and their medicinal uses, according to the oral tradition of 37 languages. It found that 91% of this knowledge exists in a single language, and that the extinction of that language implies the loss of the medicinal knowledge as well.
- In Brazil, Indigenous schools hold an important role in preserving languages alongside cataloguing and revitalization projects like those held by the Karitiana people in Rondônia and the Pataxó in Bahia and Minas Gerais.
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June 10, 2021 @ 7:59 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Acoustics, Language and biology, Language and culture
I was going to title this post "Insect vocalisms", but thought better of it, because I didn't want anyone to think I was claiming any kind of linguistic quality for the mind-boggling acoustic phenomenon that I witnessed on Saturday. Though what I heard was not language in any way, shape, or form, it did impart an overwhelming message.
I was on a long run in the mountains of western Pennsylvania. I started out from Breezewood and headed for Bedford along Route 30 (Lincoln Highway). As I ran happily at a comfortable clip, I was puzzled by a shrill ringing noise that accompanied me all the way. I couldn't tell where the loud, high-pitched sound was coming from. For awhile I thought it might be some mining operation underground, but I soon dismissed that theory because it lasted too long and I seemed to be enveloped in the noise. All around me were forests and woods, and the constant ringing seemed to be emanating from them.
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May 23, 2021 @ 4:09 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and culture, Language and medicine
On Joshua Yang's Twitter (@joshiunn):
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February 7, 2021 @ 3:44 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Computational linguistics, Information technology, Language and biology, Language and science
[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]
The following was drafted as an Appendix to a project whose working title is "The Emperor's New Information" (after Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind). It's still a work-in-progress, so feedback would be welcome. For example: Are the two examples persuasive? Do they need technical clarification or correction? Have others at LL noticed how certain authors "who should know better" use the term information where data is dictated by the context, or employ the two terms at random, as if they were synonyms?
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January 16, 2021 @ 6:55 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and food, Names
It's one of my favorite vegetables. Delicious prepared in so many different ways (in soups, stir fried, I even use it for salads). And it almost never goes bad — I can keep it in my frig for a month or more. Plus, it looks nice — aesthetically pleasing, with its exquisite shades of light green blending into white and crêpe-like crisp and crimped, delicate texture of the upper portions of the soft, frilly leaves next to glistening, gleaming, smoothly rounded surfaces of the basal rosette.
Quick question: what's the first thing you think of when you hear the name "Napa cabbage"? Write it down now before clicking to the second page of this post.
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July 29, 2020 @ 12:17 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and politics, Translation
Jim Unger sent me this mystifying note (7/25/20):
The other day, my wife called my attention to the fact that the ‘organ theory of the emperor’ (Tennō kikan setsu), for which Minobe Tatsukichi (1873-1948) was prosecuted in the 1930s, is written 天皇機関説. This is odd since ‘organ’ in the medical sense (the apparent source of Minobe’s metaphor) is currently written 器官 whereas 機関 is now pretty much ‘engine’. Since it is inconceivable that generations of historians writing in English have simply been perpetuating a mistranslation, it appears that either 器官 is a later coinage or that 機関 narrowed in meaning sometime later, or both. I am not particularly interested in untangling this mess, but it might be worth studying because it seems to be a case of one or more Sino-Japanese compounds undergoing semantic change within Japanese, which, of course, ought not happen if every kanji were a logogram of fixed meaning. Do both these words occur in Chinese? If so, have they ever overlapped in meaning in Chinese? Is one or the other a 19th or 20th century neologism?
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