Archive for Language and biology
November 19, 2019 @ 3:37 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and animals, Language and biology
In "Dynamic stew" (10/24/13) and the comments thereto, we had a vigorous discussion of words for "bear" in Korean, Sinitic, Tibetan, and Japanese, And now Diana Shuheng Zhang has written a densely philological study on “Three Ancient Words for Bear,” Sino-Platonic Papers, 294 (November, 2019), 21 pages (free pdf).
Let's start with the basic word for "bear" in Sinitic: xióng (MSM) 熊.
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November 17, 2019 @ 1:30 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Etymology, Language and biology
[This is a guest post by Robert Hymes]
I just happened to be reading your Language Log post from April, “Of horseriding and Old Sinitic reconstructions.” I too have always been sympathetic to the possibility of a mare-馬 connection, which I’ve tended to assume would have happened through a Chinese borrowing from Indo-European either directly or mediatedly, though as you point out the problem of the “mare” root’s presence in only Germanic and Celtic is, well, a problem.
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November 7, 2019 @ 7:33 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and animals, Language and biology, Lexicon and lexicography
This is a follow-up post to "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19). The two main words for "horse" in Mongolian that we will consider are mor' and adyy, though we will also touch upon others.
My original inquiry:
If you know, please tell me the difference between морь / mor' and адуу / adyy.
Is it true that морь means "gelding" (to be ridden) and адуу means horses in general, but not for riding.
Any other nuances of these two words that might be useful for me to understand how they are thought of by Mongolian people?
I presume that Manchu "morin" is borrowed from Mongolian.
Many correspondents kindly replied to my inquiry concerning the difference between adyy and mor. Because most of their responses are brief and informal, I will not cite all the respondents by name, though I will list them in the acknowledgements.
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October 13, 2019 @ 1:23 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Classification, Language and biology, Names
Here's what it looks like (click to embiggen for necessary detail):
![Click to embiggen](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/hairy.jpg)
Photograph by Yixue Yang, who gave it the name "spiked lantern".
Quiz: before going to the next page, please give it whatever name you think is most appropriate, based on its shape or whatever other attributes you can glean from the photograph.
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August 1, 2019 @ 2:16 pm· Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and biology, Language and medicine
"FDA approves first novel drug to treat medical burnout":
TWISP, WA – The US Food and Drug Administration today approved Peaceaudi (Idongivafumab) injection for intravenous use for the treatment of medical burnout.
“Medical burnout is a serious condition, which affects thousands of doctors across the country. The effects of burnout have untold consequences, and could significantly shorten the careers of physicians if untreated,” said Arnold J. Palmer, MD, assistant to the regional manager for drug development of the FDA.
“This announcement marks the first time a drug has been specifically approved to treat medical burnout. Idongivafumab’s unique ability to target and inhibit C-suite peptides, as well the entire electronic health record (EHR) cascade, represents a quantum leap in burnout science."
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July 4, 2019 @ 8:53 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Language and biology, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and science, Names, Variation, Vernacular
The surname of the mayor of Prague is Hřib (Zdeněk Hřib [b. May 21, 1981]):
"Zdeněk Hřib: the Czech mayor who defied China"
By refusing to expel a Taiwanese diplomat, the Prague mayor has joined the ranks of local politicians confronting contentious national policies
Robert Tait in Prague
The Guardian, Wed 3 Jul 2019 01.00 EDT
The surname Hřib, though unusual, struck me as familiar. Jichang Lulu observes:
Hřib is the regular Czech reflex of the Proto-Slavic source of, e.g., the Russian and Polish words for "mushroom" (гриб, grzyb). The Czech form, however, has a more specific meaning (certain mushrooms, e.g., Boletus). On the other hand, the further origin of Slavic gribъ has long been a matter of much debate, and I'm not aware of a generally accepted Proto-Indo-European (or other) etymology.
That set me to wondering whether there are cognates in other IE branches.
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May 20, 2019 @ 11:06 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Lexicon and lexicography, Names, Words words words
How would you respond in your native language if someone walked up to you and asked (in your native language or in English or some other language which both of you know), "What's the word for 'the insect that eats wood and destroys walls'?".
A friend of mine in China did that with eight of his colleagues, and not a single one of them could remember the Chinese name for "the insect that eats wood and destroys walls".
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April 21, 2019 @ 7:01 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Historical linguistics, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Language and culture, Language and history, Phonetics and phonology, Reconstructions
This post was prompted by the following comment to "The emergence of Germanic" (2/27/19):
…while riding horses _in battle_ is post-Bronze Age (and perhaps of questionable worth at any time), I think riding in general is older, and probably (assuming the usual dating of PIE) common Indo-European.
The domesticated horse, the chariot, and the wheel came to East Asia from the west, and so did horse riding:
Mair, Victor H. “The Horse in Late Prehistoric China: Wresting Culture and Control from the ‘Barbarians.’” In Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, ed. Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse, McDonald Institute Monographs. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003, pp. 163-187.
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October 8, 2018 @ 12:38 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and advertising, Language and biology, Language and food, Transcription
From a correspondent in Taiwan:
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May 15, 2018 @ 8:59 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Epigraphy, Language and biology, Philology, Writing systems
We've been looking at strange Chinese characters:
"Really weird sinographs" (5/10/18)
"Really weird sinographs, part 2" (5/11/18)
For a sinograph to be weird, it doesn't need to have 30, 40, 50, or more strokes. In fact, characters with such large numbers of strokes might be quite normal and regular in terms of their construction. What makes a character bizarre is when its parts are thrown together in unexpected ways. On the other hand, characters with only a very small number of strokes might be quite odd. Two of my favorites are the pair 孑孓, which are pronounced jiéjué in Modern Standard Mandarin and together mean "w(r)iggler; mosquito larva".
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March 7, 2018 @ 9:22 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Historical linguistics, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Lexicon and lexicography, Writing systems
At the conclusion of "Barking roosters and crowing dogs" (2/18/18), I promised a more philologically oriented post to celebrate the advent of the lunar year of the dog. This is it. Concurrently, it is part of this long running series on Old Sinitic and Indo-European comparative reconstructions:
I will launch into this post with the following simple prefatory statement:
Half a century ago, the first time I encountered the Old Sinitic reconstruction of Mandarin quǎn 犬 ("dog"), Karlgren GSR 479 *k'iwən, I suspected that it might be related to an Indo-European word cognate with "canine" [<PIE *kwon-]).
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June 4, 2017 @ 2:56 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and biology, Language and politics, Language and the law, Phonetics and phonology, Writing systems
June Teufel Dreyer noticed that the People's Daily and other official outlets refer to Okinotori as a jiāo 礁, reef, which fits her understanding of the geology involved. The Japanese, hoping for a larger Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), say it is an island. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) definition is that a rock incapable of sustaining life (“life” is not defined; could be human life, animals, plants, bacteria?) is not an island. The government of Japan position is that Okinotori isn’t a rock, since it is composed of coral. Yet the character, which she assumes the Japanese use as well, clearly contains the rock element. So, June asked, can coral be considered a rock? In this case, there are substantial implications.
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May 29, 2017 @ 11:18 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and biology, Language and food, Multilingualism, Signs, Translation
About a week ago I received this Facebook query from Scaruffi.com about Chinese chatbot poetry (relayed by Mark Liberman):
Since friday Chinese social media are flooded with comments about a poetry book written by Microsoft's chatbot Xiaoice that was published on May 19 (three days ago).
I cannot find a single reference to this book in Google's search engine.
No western media seems to have picked up the news.
(As of today, monday the 22nd)
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