Language Log

A year and a half ago, we learned of the initial AI-assisted decipherment of a charred scroll that had been buried for two millennia under the volcanic ashes of Mt. Vesuvius (eruption 79AD) in the city of Herculaneum:  "AI (and human ingenuity) to the rescue" (2/6/24).

Since then, researchers have continued to work on the scroll until now they have identified the precise text on it:

Lost Work of Greek Philosopher Philodemus Unearthed from Herculaneum Scroll
By Tasos Kokkinidis, Greek Reporter (May 6, 2025)

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"

From AntC:

Kid's T-shirt in a Carrefour, downtown Taichung. (I think an English-speaking kid wouldn't be seen dead in it.)    [VHM:  American English:  "wouldn't be caught dead" — usually, in my experience]

Blake Shedd called my attention to 

…an article on philosophy / human rights and how a Chinese translation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (available online from Philosophy Now, 118 [February-March, 2017], 9-11, and also available here from the website of one of the authors) raises some questions of hermeneutics.

Here's the article:

Hens, Ducks, & Human Rights in China:  Vittorio Bufacchi & Xiao Ouyang discuss some philosophical & linguistic difficulties

Jianwei Xun, the supposed philosopher behind the hypnocracy theory, does not exist and is a product of artificial intelligence
A collaboration between an essayist and two AI platforms produced a book that reflects on new forms of manipulation

Raúl Limón, EL PAÍS (4/7/25)

The entire proposition behind this scheme is so preposterous and diabolical that I am rendered virtually speechless.

The French city of Cannes hosted a roundtable discussion on February 14 called “The Metamorphosis of Democracy – How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting Digital Governance and Redefining Our Policy.”

The debate was covered in an article by EL PAÍS after Gianluca Misuraca, Vice President of Technology Diplomacy at Inspiring Futures, introduced the concept of “hypnocracy” — a new form of manipulation outlined in a book by Jianwei Xun called Hypnocracy: Trump, Musk, and the New Architecture of Reality. However, this Hong Kong philosopher does not exist, as revealed by Sabina Minardi, editor-in-chief of the Italian magazine L’Espresso.

Two colleagues noticed that the PRC government often rebukes other countries for lacking sincerity, and they asked me if Chinese had a different understanding of sincerity that permitted / encouraged them to do so.  "Sincerity" is so front and center in Chinese negotiations with other nations that one soon comes to realize, if you want smooth relations with the PRC, you must needs demonstrate to the Chinese representatives that you are utterly sincere, i.e., that you are willing to do exactly what they want you to do.  Anything less opens you to the charge of being insincere.

My colleagues asked me if there is something special about the Chinese conception of sincerity, i.e., does it have special Chinese characteristics" (jùyǒu Zhòngguó tèsè 具有中国特色)?  Just as it is an article of faith for the CCP that socialism in China comes with special characteristics (Zhōngguó tèsè shèhuì zhǔyì 中国特色社会主义).

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-second issue — “Divine Support and World Conquest in the Stele Inscriptions of Qin Shi Huangdi and the Res Gestae of Augustus,” by Dan Zhao.

ABSTRACT: This paper comparatively examines the propaganda of the first emperors of China and Rome, Qin Shi Huangdi and Augustus. Focusing on the interplay between divine support and claims of world conquest and utilising the Qin stelae and the Res Gestae Divi Augusti as case studies, this paper will argue that both early imperial Chinese and Roman propaganda shared extremely similar rationales and methods. Divine support and military victories were intimately linked and mutually dependent. As such, the emperors' claims to unprecedented levels of divine support also impelled them to claim successful world conquest, lest the very ideological foundations of their regimes be called into question.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-eighth issue, “The Dance of Qian and Kun”, by Denis Mair:

ABSTRACT: This collection of papers and interpretive essays reflects my interest in structuralism as practiced by ancient Chinese thinkers who devoted their study to the symbolism of a fertility dance. I point to evidence that the authors/compilers of the oracle used a dance of contraries as a matrix to provide context for archetypal life situations. Some of the papers present empirical evidence of architectonic, dance-like features in the overall formal matrix: oscillations, rhythms, symmetries, and gradients of integration. In other essays I present plausible readings of individual symbols. My aim in doing so is to demonstrate that the symbols contain dense patterning and conceptual seeds that encourage symbolic elaboration. For instance, I show that centrality, ebb-and-flow, rapprochement of contraries, fertility worship, and many other ideas are implicit in the text. Such implicit ideas give the text a wide range of applicability.

The interpretive essays touch upon the question of how human sacrifice, used as a display of competency by late Shang-era elites, eventually tapered off in the early to mid-Zhou era. In that period the Zhou swerved off in a new direction toward civil religion and a concern with intrinsic values of human self-understanding, which pointed the way to the teachings of a humanistic educator like Confucius. Although the internecine wars of the Zhou were violent, the act of killing was no longer put on display as an apex ritual, as it earlier had been, used, for example, to commemorate the building of construction projects in the late Shang. My analyses of specific symbols give evidence of a distinct turn toward humanistic thinking in the early to mid-Zhou.

Chatting with my London cabbie on a longish ride, I was intrigued by how he frequently referred to "the Knowledge".  He did so respectfully and reverently, as though it were a sacred catechism he had mastered after years of diligent study.  Even though he was speaking, it always sounded as though it came with a capital letter at the beginning.  And rightly so, because it is holy writ for London cabbies.

When I first encountered AI Overview (AIO) about half a year ago, I was amazed by how it would whirl and swirl while searching for an answer to whatever query I had entered into the Google search engine.  It would usually find a helpful answer within a second.

As the months passed, the response time became more rapid (usually instantaneous), the answers better organized and almost always helpful, but sometimes AIO would simply not answer.

About a week ago, I was stunned when occasionally AIO — after thinking for a split second — would declare that it didn't have an answer for what I had asked about.

In this comment to "'Neutrino Evidence Revisited (AI Debates)' | Is Mozart's K297b authentic?" (11/13/24), I questioned whether John Searle's "Chinese room" argument was intelligently designed and encouraged those who encounter it to reflect on what it did — and did not — demonstrate.

In the same comment, I also queried the meaning of "understand" and its synonyms ("comprehend", and so forth).

Both the "Chinese room" and "understanding" had been raised by skeptics of AI, so here I'm treating them together.

One of my favorite expressions of ineffability in Chinese is yǒuyuán 有緣, which is what two people feel when they are drawn together by some inexplicable, indisputable attraction.  Considerations of beauty and practicality are not what matter.  They simply are fated / predestined to be together.  They have an undeniable affinity for each other.

I first gained a serious appreciation for the idea of affinity in college when I read Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), the third novel of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).  The concept was taken up in chemistry (Robert Boyle [1627-1691] — check out his hair!), then sociology (Max Weber [1864-1920]), then in psychology to describe the magnetism between individuals, and in dozens of other fields (commerce, finance, and law; religion and belief; science and technology; business; music; literature; history; mathematics; language studies; etc.).  Needless to say, "affinity" is a powerful, productive concept, just as it is an actual force in relations between entities in the microcosm and macrocosm.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-third issue: "Speaking and Writing: Studies in Vernacular Aspects of Middle Period Chinese Culture" (pdf), edited by Victor H. Mair (August, 2024).

Foreword
The three papers in this collection were written for my seminar on Middle Vernacular Sinitic (MVS). They cover a wide variety of topics, from epistolary style to social mores, to philosophy and religion. They reveal how a vernacular ethos informs the thought and life of men and women from different social classes and distinguishes them from those who adhere to a more strictly classical outlook. Although they are on quite dissimilar subjects, this trio of papers harmonize in their delineation of the implications of vernacularity for belief and perception. Taken together, they compel one to consider seriously what causes some people to tilt more to the vernacular side and others to cling to classicism. While the authors of these papers do not aim to arrive at a common conclusion on the meaning of the vernacular-classical divide, the readers who probe beneath the surface of all three papers will undoubtedly find facets that refract and reflect themes that bind them into a unified body of inquiry.