Language Log

New guideline issued to promote Chinese language:
7 main tasks set to highlight ‘never-changing gene’
By Li Yuche, Global Times (1/19/2026)

If you're wondering what brought this on, I think it's AI and LLMs, which are featured in the rest of the article, especially as they relate to oracle bones and traditional Chinese writing.

It will also help to understand the aim of the article if you know something about the nature of the journal in which it appears, for which see below.

We've been discussing the oracle bone form (late 2nd millennium BC) of nǚ女 ("woman; female"):

(WP)

I've always felt that it shows the profile of a submissive, kneeling female figure with her arms crossed in front of her (I say this after examining scores of variants of OB forms of 女).

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-third issue:

“Correspondences between Old Chinese and Proto-Celtic Words,” by Julie Lee Wei

In his remarks on "Stay hyDRAEted", Alec Strange noted that you can't avoid reading dorei no remonēdo ドレイのレモネーど  (intended to be "Drae's Lemonade") as "slave lemonade" (dorei / ドレイ / 奴隷 ["slave"]).  Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n- (or in a few cases l-), so it would have nothing to do with "Drae's".

Following up on our previous post, "Sakas, Kushans, and Hephthalites: the sources in Greek, Latin, Persian, and Chinese" (9/24/25) by Taishan Yu, we turn now to Étienne de La Vaissière's "A Military Origin for New Persian?", which was published lightning fast by Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae.

Received: 26 April 2025 • Accepted: 3 July 2025
Published Online: 5 August 2025

(Since we have previously had lively discussions on subjects related to today's topic, I will publish this essay as is, but with the admonition that it is for advanced Siniticists, though naturally all Language Log readers are welcome to partake.)

[This is a guest post by Kirinputra]

I was (routinely) digging into the etymology of Taioanese U-LÓNG, which, like UDON, comes from Japanese うどん, and it turns out that うどん is cognate to WONTON, Cantonese 雲吞 (of c.), & Mandarin 馄饨.

The 廣韻 has 餛飩; so does Cikoski, with the gloss K[IND OF] DUMPLING. So the word is pretty ancient. 集韻 has it written 䐊肫, apparently. Using that as a search term, I found an article on your blog, but the commenters were generally unaware that 餛飩 had this alternate form in the medieval book language. (Of c., the person that wrote 䐊肫湯 may not have known either.)

From Glenn B.:

I just spotted a pair of recently introduced resolutions in the New Jersey legislature that might be of interest to Language Log. SJR 167 and the identical AJR 230 would (if adopted) recognize Sanskrit "as one of the world languages."

Not all of the claims made on behalf of Sanskrit seem kosher to me, particularly the claim that "Sanskrit has a unique origin, not created by man," but I'd love it if Language Log were able to provide a more authoritative discussion.

That's the title of a brand new (3/13/25) book by Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider, a noteworthy volume on the 1918 influenza pandemic.  Here she is interviewed (6/7/25) by Colin Gorrie (the interview is too long [58:14] to post directly on Language Log):

Proto-Indo-European Origins: A Conversation with Laura Spinney    

Follow along with the interview by using the transcript (available on the YouTube site; it shows up on the right side).

The whole title of Spinney's remarkable tome is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. As Gorrie explains:

This book integrates linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to give us an up-to-date overview of Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancient language that English and many other languages ultimately descend from. Our conversation is wide-ranging, touching not only on the linguistics but also on what we can reconstruct of the culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and the light it sheds on later history and literature.

If we take stock of the sinographic cosmopolis at the end of first quarter of the 21st century, it is evident that it is increasingly moribund.  Vietnam has jettisoned chữ Hán for the Latin alphabet; North Korea has switched exclusively to hangul; South Korea now uses very few hanja; the Japanese script currently consists of draconically limited kanji, many of which are simplified, often in ways that are different from the simplified characters adopted by the PRC, plus two types of syllabaries and roman letters; the PRC itself now uses radically simplified and limited characters and the Latin alphabet, not to mention that all of the hundreds of millions of students in China learn English, which is a primary index of success for rising in the world of education, and entering sinographs into computers and other digital devices is overwhelmingly accomplished through the alphabet (with resultant amnesia eroding the characters they do learn); while the ephemeral Sinoform scripts of Inner Asia (Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan) disappeared around a millennium ago; Sinitic Dungan speakers write their language in Cyrillic….  For those who are advocates of the sinographic script, naturally all of this would be cause for alarm.

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer in response to the video and paper featured in this recent Language Log post:  "Cantonese is both very cool and very old" (4/1/25)]

After I read the paper the first word that came to mind was “Cringeworthy” in regard to the author’s phrase “purer descent”; and the second word was “Superficial” in regard to the author’s knowledge of Cantonese and Chinese linguistics. For instance, the author who has narrowly focused on just those items that support his claims doesn’t seem to know that the Ancient Chinese tone category of Rusheng/Entering Tone which has disappeared from Mandarin was not a particular tone contour; the distinctive feature of Rusheng was that the monomorphosyllables belonging to it had as their finals or endings the three stop consonants -p, -t , -k, all of which have been retained in Cantonese, as well as in various other Chinese topolects of South China.

Carl Zimmer, "Ancient DNA Points to Origins of Indo-European Language", NYT 2/5/2025:

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote.

Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do English, Hindi and Spanish, along with hundreds of less common languages. Today, about half the world speaks an Indo-European language.

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

1st Americans came over in 4 different waves from Siberia, linguist argues:  The languages of the earliest Americans evolved in 4 waves, according to one expert.

By Kristina Killgrove, Live Science (May 3, 2024)

Killgrove reports:

Indigenous people entered North America at least four times between 12,000 and 24,000 years ago, bringing their languages with them, a new linguistic model indicates. The model correlates with archaeological, climatological and genetic data, supporting the idea that populations in early North America were dynamic and diverse.

Nearly half of the world's language families are found in the Americas. Although many of them are now thought extinct, historical linguistics analysis can survey and compare living languages and trace them back in time to better understand the groups that first populated the continent.