The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (TPC) was first planted by British missionaries in Tainan, which later expanded to all southern parts of Taiwan, constituting the present Southern Synod of TPC. The most important pioneer among them was the Scottish missionary Rev. Thomas Barclay who worked in Taiwan-Fu (the present Tainan). He was born in Glasgow, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow. While there, he studied under Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin [according to Wikipedia]. The celebrated Lord Kelvin reminds me of the absolute zero degree in physical chemistry and the electric cable equation as the underpinning of the Transatlantic cable as well as the conduction of electric impulses along nerve fibers.
As announced in the title of the first post on this subject, my aim is to understand where the Galatians originated and how / why they migrated to where they were when Apostle Paul wrote his epistle to them. Since I was apparently insufficiently clear about both of those purposes in part 1, in this follow-up post I will provide additional scholarly material. Inasmuch as the identification of the Gauls / Celts and the languages they spoke will be important for several posts about them that I will write in the coming weeks, today's post will necessarily be long and detailed.
When I was a wee lad and went to bible school each week, I had a hard time comprehending just whom were all of those epistles in the New Testament addressed to. Of course, there are many other books in the New Testament, a total of 27, but the ones that intrigued me most were the 9 Pauline letters to Christian churches that we refer to as "epistles". I was most captivated by these 9 books and I wanted to know what kind of people they were, what their communities were like, what their ethnicities were, and, above all, even way back then, what languages they spoke.
These communities were called:
Romans Corinthians — Paul wrote two epistles to them Galatians Ephesians Philippians Colossians Thessalonians — Paul also wrote two epistles to them
Another superlative article from our Czech colleagues:
China’s Superstition Boom in a Godless State In post-pandemic China, superstition has surged into a booming industry, as youth turn to crystals, fortune-telling, and AI oracles in search of hope and meaning. By Ansel Li, Sinopsis (5/13/25)
Introduction
It is one of history’s more striking ironies: the People’s Republic of China, an officially atheist, Marxist-Leninist regime that has long sought to suppress all forms of organized religion, now finds itself caught in a tidal wave of superstition. Post-pandemic, what began as a trickle has become a torrent—an uncontrolled spread of fortune-telling, lucky crystals, and spiritual nonsense, growing in the vacuum left by institutional faith and spread further by a hyper-connected internet society.
This phenomenon is not merely a return to old habits or rural mysticism. It has become a nationwide consumer frenzy, driven by the very demographic the Communist Party hoped would be its most rational constituency: the young and educated. In chasing these modern symbols of hope, they are losing more than just money.
This morning, as is my wont, I stepped out on my stoop to test the weather. Across the street, I saw children running around picking up eggs that had been hidden in the grass here and there and delightedly putting them in the baskets they held with one hand. These eggs were colored, all right, but made of plastic, not the kind of natural eggs we used to spend a lot of time on boiling and dyeing and, if we were fancy and clever, making designs and even using multiple colors through a combination of melted wax and various tools and techniques. I fondly recall the olfactory and tactile sensations of vinegar, melted wax used during the process, and smooth egg shells.
Really elaborately decorated Easter eggs are called pysanky (plural form of pysanka from the Ukrainian word pysaty meaning "to write" (source), cf. Russian письменность ("writing"). You don't have to be a pro and make pysanky like the ones shown here, but you can derive a lot of fun and satisfaction making your own colored Easter eggs that are dyed and decorated in a fashion that is commensurate with your time and talents.
Stumbled upon an earliest surviving partial bible translation into Japanese made by Manuel Barreto in 1591 (known as バレト写本 or Reg. lat. 459), here's the first paragraph.
In the first part of this inquiry, I stressed the connection between Mesopotamian and Indus Valley (IV) civilizations. My aim was to provide support for a scriptal and lingual link between the undeciphered IV writing system and the well-known languages and writing systems of Mesopotamia (MP), which tellingly is translated as liǎng hé liúyù 兩河流域 ("valley / drainage basin of two rivers") in contemporary Sinitic. The point is to detach IV from IE, which is a red herring and a detraction from productive efforts to decipher the IV script. If we concentrate on the civilization, languages, and writing systems of MP, it should be easier to crack the IV code.
"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.
The Indus Valley civilization, also called the Harappan civilization, is seen by experts as on a par with the better-known ones of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
One of the earliest, it flourished on the banks of the Indus and Saraswati Rivers during the Bronze Age. It had planned townships, water management and drainage systems, huge fortified walls and exquisite pottery and terra cotta artistry.
It's interesting precisely where they positioned the curse tablet:
A skeleton found during excavations beneath a historic hospital in Orléans, France,
has a curse tablet between its legs. (Image credit: Service Archéologie Orléans (SAVO))
When I got to the Latin, I was puzzled by whether I should leave "sit" in there or get rid of it. I knew it must be some form of the verb "to be", but I wasn't sure exactly what form and what function it played..
So I put "sit" in Google Translate Latin and pushed the translate button, but forgot that I had the "into" language set on Chinese. I was surprised / delighted / tickled when the Latin came out as Chinese "suí tā qù 隨它去" (lit., "let it go"). On the one hand, I was amazed by how colloquial it sounded, but, on the other hand, I thought it was a brilliant attempt on the part of GT to capture the grammatical sense of Latin "sit".
