Language Log

James D. Seymour, "Transmission vs. Termination of Cultures:  The Cases of the Medieval Uighurs and Modern Uyghurs", chapter 6 of David W. Kim, ed., Silk Road Footprints: Transnational Transmission of Sacred Thoughts and Historical Legacy (Wilmington, DE:  Vernon, 2025).

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VHM:  N.B.:  Please note that the pre-publication final draft linked to in the title above is virtually the same as that which appeared in the published book, but any citations or quotations, etc., should be based on what is confirmed as actually appearing  in the book. Spelling in the book is more strictly British. (Apologies for any misspelled/misspelt words in the linked version!)

Post-publication corrections/refinements are in this sans serif typeface.

Key words: Uighur Khaganate, Uighurs, Uyghurs, Xinjiang, Yugurs.

The name "Uyghur", in its various guises and at different times, has caused much confusion among students and scholars of Central Asian history.  This article, by James D. Seymour, who has been researching the topic for more than half a century, strives to straighten out the twists and turns of the history of the name and the peoples who bore it. 

[This is a guest post by M. Paul Shore]

     Because my January 19th post about the pronunciation of "Davos" has attracted a number of comments on the general question of what degree of pronunciational authenticity mainstream and semi-mainstream broadcasters should attempt for foreign proper nouns and, occasionally, common nouns, and under what circumstances, I've decided to submit this new post on that general question rather than have my thoughts about it buried in that previous thread.

     Because discussions of the question tend to stagnate and become nearly meaningless as a result of the assumption or near-assumption that there can be only two categories of authenticity, namely "authentic" and "inauthentic", I’d like to take a stand against that binary thinking and propose that four basic levels of authenticity be recognized:

From M. Paul Shore (of partial Swiss German ancestry; former Linguistics major) to PBS News staff: 

I was intrigued by the surname of a very nice man whom I met at Home Depot.  His name was Steven Dreibelbis, and his position in the store was that of "Customer Experience Manager".

Steven'a surname, Dreibelbis, sounded very German to me.  I asked him about it and he told me that he was indeed of German descent on his father's side, but his mother was Colombian and his grandmother was Peruvian, so he looked more South American than German.

[Preface:  The nitty-gritty questions about pronunciation discussed below are expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet) because the people who have written them down here are non-phoneticians.  What they have recorded are their best approximations of how they think they are saying "Canton".]

After reading "'Cant-idates'" (11/12/25) and "Can't even" (11/13/25), I submitted this comment:

As for "can't", there are quite a few "Cantons" in America. I'm from the one in Stark County Ohio, and some of the people there pronounce the name not as "Can-ton", but as "Cant-un".

This prompted Mark Liberman to ask:

Is that your way to representing [ˈkænʔn̻], i.e. the second syllable as a glottal-onset syllabic nasal?

When I first learned the name of this important port city in northeastern Taiwan, I was told that it was originally written with characters that mean "chicken coop; hen coop; rooster cage", Taiwanese "Kelang" (POJ Ke-lâng/Koe-lâng).  I found that to be rather droll and thought that it was probably derived from the cramped geological formation of the hilly city.  The actual story of the city's name, which has come back into the news today, is quite different, as I will explain below the break.

Keelung pranked by name change on Google Maps
Prankster used characters for 18th century rendering of Keelung's name
Duncan DeAeth, Taiwan News (Oct. 24, 2025)

"China changed village names 'to erase Uyghur culture'", Anna Lamche, BBC (6/20/24)

I thought about this phenomenon again today, a year after that BBC article was published, because this morning Robert Thurman, the Columbia Tibetologist, told me about his concept of "ethnicide".  This, forced name changes, is one way to do it.

China has changed the names of hundreds of villages in Xinjiang region in a move aimed at erasing Uyghur Muslim culture, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says.

According to a report by the group, hundreds of villages in Xinjiang with names related to the religion, history or culture of Uyghurs were replaced between 2009 and 2023.

Words such as "sultan" and "shrine" are disappearing from place names – to be replaced with terms such as "harmony" and "happiness", according to the research, which is based on China's own published data.

I have always been deeply intrigued by George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), but Mark's recent "Dynamic Philology" (5/24/25) rekindled my interest.

Put simply,

He is the eponym of Zipf's law, which states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely,

where P_n is the frequency of a word ranked n^th and the exponent a is almost 1. This means that the second item occurs approximately 1/2 as often as the first, and the third item 1/3 as often as the first, and so on. Zipf's discovery of this law in 1935 was one of the first academic studies of word frequency.

Although he originally intended it as a model for linguistics, Zipf later generalized his law to other disciplines. In particular, he observed that the rank vs. frequency distribution of individual incomes in a unified nation approximates this law, and in his 1941 book, "National Unity and Disunity" he theorized that breaks in this "normal curve of income distribution" portend social pressure for change or revolution.

(Wiktionary)

So far as I know, most Americans pronounce the name of the capital city of the Republic of Korea as "soul".

(Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /səʊl/
(General American) enPR: sōl, IPA(key): /soʊl/ 
 
Rhymes: -əʊl
Homophones: sole, soul, sowl

From Korean 서울 (Seoul, literally “capital city”), originally from Claude-Charles Dallet's French-based romanization of Korean, reinforced by the 1959 South Korean Ministry of Education romanization of Korean, which transcribed the Korean vowel ㅓ (/⁠ʌ⁠/) with the digraph "eo" and which was official until 1984.

Note that English Seoul predates the Revised Romanization romanization of Seoul. The two romanization systems simply produce identical forms.

(Wiktionary)

Having just a couple of months ago burrowed my way into the center of one of the world's most famous Neolithic barrows, more specifically a passage tomb at Newgrange (ca. 3200 BC, older than Stonehenge, which I had visited the previous week, and the Egyptian pyramids, which I have yet to behold in person) in County Meath, Ireland with J. P. Mallory, Indo-European archeolinguist and author of In Search of the Irish Dreamtime:  Archaeology and Early Irish Literature (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), all 6'7" of him and 6'2" of me, making it a difficult crawl / squeeze for the two of us, I was keen to read this article:

To Historians and Tourists, It’s a Mysterious Ancient Burial Site. It Used to Be My Playground.
Author Oliver Smith spent many childhood days exploring a prehistoric mound near his grandparents’ house in Wales. As an adult, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to it—and other sites like it.
By Oliver Smith. WSJ (Feb. 12, 2025)

It's unlikely that I ever would have written a post on the strange-sounding name "Punxsutawney" because it is so well-known worldwide for groundhog Phil who lives there and can predict whether winter weather will persist after he wakes up from his hibernation, although it is nestled in the wooded hills about 85 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

On the other hand, few have ever heard of Maxatawny, despite the fact that it is only 65 miles northwest of Philadelphia and situated on mostly flat land.

I never would have been aware of Maxatawny either, but for the miracle of the internet, because I happened upon it while surfing the www, which I have spent a goodly part of my life doing since its invention.  When I saw mention of Maxatawny pop up on my computer screen, I was instantaneously nearly catapulted out of my seat because of its obvious likeness to Punxsutawney.

Please do not check in a dictionary or online before you try to pronounce the name just by looking at it.

When I passed through this area, it was all very confusing to me, but the local residents have no problem distinguishing the three towns.  The Dalles OR and Dallesport WA face each other across the mighty Columbia River, whereas Dallas OR is about 150 miles to the southwest.  I met one young man who was born in Dallas OR, migrated up to Dallesport WA, and crosses the bridge every day to work in The Dalles OR because he doesn't have to pay taxes in OR.  He has absolutely no difficulty differentiating the three towns and seemed surprised when I told him it was hard for me to keep their names straight.

After talking with him (and others) for several minutes, i figured out the secret for keeping the names separate, apart from the spellings.