Language Log

A Sino-Iranian tale of the donkey's Eurasian trail

May 10, 2024 @ 6:27 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Borrowing, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and culture

By now, we have conclusively traced the path of the domesticated horse from the area around the southern Urals and Pontic Steppe through Central Asia to East Asia. It's time to pay more attention to another equid, this one not so glamorous, but still redoubtable in its own formidable way: Equus asinus asinus.

Samira Müller, Milad Abedi, Wolfgang Behr, and Patrick Wertmann, "Following the Donkey’s Trail (Part I): a Linguistic and Archaeological Study on the Introduction of Domestic Donkeys to China", International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 6 (2024), 104–144. (pdf)

Abstract

How and when did domestic donkeys arrive in China? This article sets out to uncover the donkeys’ forgotten trail from West Asia across the Iranian plateau to China, using archaeological, art historical, philological, and linguistic evidence. Following Parpola and Janhunen’s (2011) contribution to our understanding of the Indian wild ass and Mitchell’s (2018) overview of the history of the domestic donkey in West Asia and the Mediterranean, we will attempt to shed light on the transmission of the beast of burden to Eastern Eurasia.

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A new look at sperm whale communication

May 8, 2024 @ 11:20 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Animal communication, Data bases, Language and animals

For as long as I can remember, I've been aware that whales, dolphins, porpoises, and other large mammals of the seas (the cetaceans) make whistles, clicks, calls, groans, songs, and other sounds / noises. These vocalizations are manifestly complex and nuanced, leading people to believe that they are communicating content, emotions, and so forth. What exactly they are conveying and how they do it have remained a mystery, but researchers never stop trying to figure out cetacean "language". A new study at MIT claims to have made progress in analyzing sperm whale sound systems.

Scientists document remarkable sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet'
By Will Dunham, Reuters (May 7, 2024)
[with 2:58 video]

I was hesitant to read this article at all because of the mention of a "phonetic alphabet". Even with the quotation marks around it, attributing this ability to sperm whales was a bit much for me.

Yet, since it was "scientists" doing the documenting, I forced myself to read the first two paragraphs:

The various species of whales inhabiting Earth's oceans employ different types of vocalizations to communicate. Sperm whales, the largest of the toothed whales, communicate using bursts of clicking noises – called codas – sounding a bit like Morse code.

A new analysis of years of vocalizations by sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean has found that their system of communication is more sophisticated than previously known, exhibiting a complex internal structure replete with a "phonetic alphabet." The researchers identified similarities to aspects of other animal communication systems – and even human language.

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Planet power, plus dinosaurs and dragons: myth and reality of heaven and earth

May 7, 2024 @ 11:04 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and art, Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Writing systems

Given that we've been discussing astronomy / astrology and their relationship to the alphabet so intensely in recent weeks, I'm pleased to announce this important conference that is about to be convened: “The Power of the Planets: The Social History of Astral Sciences Between East and West”, May 20–21, 2024, Dipartimento di Beni Culturali – Università di Bologna (Ravenna, Italy).

I warmly recommend that you take a close look at the header images of two objects in The Cleveland Museum of Art: Mirror with a Coiling Dragon, China, Tang Dynasty 618-907 (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1995.367), Drachma – Sasanian, Iran, reign of Hormizd II, 4th century (https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1966.738).

The quality of the photographs is extraordinarily fine and detailed. Using the zoom and expand functions, you can see things not clearly visible to the naked eye. Especially noteworthy is the jagged dorsal fin / frill / spine that runs along the back of the dragon on the Tang mirror and is a conspicuous counterpart of many species of dinosaurs.

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The call / name of the gecko

April 26, 2024 @ 1:15 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Animal behavior, Animal communication, Etymology, Language and animals, Names, Onomatopoeia

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Stochastic popinjay and Perso-Arabic art / adab

January 20, 2024 @ 6:32 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Artificial intelligence, Language and animals, Language and art, Language and music

‘Stochastic Parrot’: A Name for AI That Sounds a Bit Less Intelligent

An ancient Greek word for guesswork fuels a term that suggests supersmart computer programs are just mimicking whatever they see

Ben Zimmer, WSJ, Word on the Street (January 18, 2024)

In his capacity as chair of the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year competition new words committee, our Language Log colleague Ben Zimmer oversaw the selection of candidates from the "special ad-hoc category related to one of the most buzzed-about stories of 2023: artificial intelligence."

Our new category included an array of AI heavy hitters. There was “ChatGPT,” the name for OpenAI’s chatbot, which is so successful it often gets used generically for any generative AI system. There was “LLM,” short for “large language model,” the machine-learning algorithm trained on mountains of text that powers AI programs. And there was “hallucination,” for AI-generated responses that are untethered from reality.

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"Sheep-dog", spindle whorls, and meditation

December 19, 2023 @ 10:55 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Classification, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Names

Some people call it a "woolly dog", but that's more a description of what it's like. That's not its name. And it's not a "sheepdog" or "sheep dog", like a border collie.

Before I go any further into the nomenclature of canines, I want to recognize that they're all the same species: Canis lupus familiaris. No matter what their size, shape, coloration, or behavior, from the chihuahua to the great dane, they are all the same species: Canis lupus familiaris. It's only their breed that is different. That is to say, they are bred to enhance different characteristics and to emphasize diverse traits.

Conversely, there are thousands of different species of birds. It has always puzzled me why there is only one species of dog, but thousands of species of birds (upwards of 10,000), but I'm sure that somebody on Language Log will have the precise answer. Is it that dogs are selectively bred by humans, whereas birds do their own thing?

The dog I'm talking about here — although extinct now — was raised for thousands of years for its wool! It was carefully kept apart from other types of dogs to enhance its wool-bearing capability. Like a sheep. That's why I like to call it a sheep-dog, albeit somewhat jocularly. It's a dog, but it has the wool producing characteristics of a sheep.

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Ox Demolition

October 12, 2023 @ 7:47 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and animals, Signs

From AntC:

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Skunk stunk

August 4, 2023 @ 8:19 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and animals, Language and biology, Names

Two nights ago, it was raining heavily, with lightning and thunder every so often. As I was peering out into the blackness of my backyard, all of a sudden, a bright light flashed on. At first I thought it was lightning, but then I realized that someone or something had set off the light. It didn't take long for me to spot a gleaming, coal black skunk crawling around through the brush.

Most striking were the narrow, white stripe on its forehead and along the length of its nose and the two broad swaths of white fur along its back. It was so beautiful, all soaked in the rain, that I wanted to go out and get a closer look (make friends with it, so to speak), but my companion said, "No way!"

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Elk topolects

July 17, 2023 @ 10:51 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Animal communication, Dialects, Language and animals, Language and biology, Topolects

Who would have thought?

Even North America’s Elk Have Regional Dialects

Why do Pennsylvania elk sound different from Colorado elk?

By Kylie Mohr, The Atlantic Monthly (July 16, 2023)

—–

It’s a crisp fall evening in Grand Teton National Park. A mournful, groaning call cuts through the dusky-blue light: a male elk, bugling. The sound ricochets across the grassy meadow. A minute later, another bull answers from somewhere in the shadows.

Bugles are the telltale sound of elk during mating season. Now new research has found that male elks’ bugles sound slightly different depending on where they live. Other studies have shown that whale, bat, and bird calls have dialects of sorts too, and a team led by Jennifer Clarke, a behavioral ecologist at the Center for Wildlife Studies and a professor at the University of La Verne, in California, is the first to identify such differences in any species of ungulate.

…

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So many words for "donkey"

March 17, 2023 @ 5:37 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Animal behavior, Animal communication, Language and animals

Almost as many as Eskimo words for "snow". (hee-hee haw-haw) (see below for a sampling)

I've always been a great admirer of donkeys, and I love to hear them bray and make all sorts of other expressive sounds, some of which I am incapable of adequately expressing in words — especially when they are being obdurately stubborn and are unwilling to move, no matter what. Anyway, their vocabulary extends way beyond the basic "hee-haw":

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Transcriptional Chinese animal imagery for English daily greetings

March 13, 2023 @ 5:35 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and animals, Transcription

As those students who take my early morning classes know, I sometimes greet them with "gǒutóu māo níng 狗头猫咛" ("good morning"; lit. "dog's head cat's meow"). I learned that method of transcription from my father-in-law, who didn't know the alphabet but picked up a few words of English and wanted to write them down for future use.

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More on glat(t)

January 2, 2023 @ 9:49 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and animals, Language and food, Language and religion

We have been discussing the Yiddish word "glat", albeit with a lot of loose ends (see "Glat perch and medicare yam" (12/19/22). Having gained some additional information, it is worthwhile taking another look.

From a colleague:

I am very familiar with the word Glat, or Glatt. It is often used together with the word kosher. Glatt is Yiddish for "smooth". This word relates to meat and poultry and is never used with fish. Perhaps Chinese borrowed this word because Israel exports food items to China, including fish?

What Is Glatt Kosher?

For meat to be kosher, it must come from a kosher animal slaughtered in a kosher way. Glatt kosher takes it further; the meat must also come from an animal with adhesion-free or smooth lungs.

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