Archive for Language and astronomy
February 16, 2026 @ 11:09 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Writing systems
This is the regular script form of the Chinese character for horse: 馬.
When I used to give talks in schools, libraries, and retirement homes, anywhere I was invited, I would write 馬 (10 strokes, official in Taiwan) on the blackboard or a large sheet of paper and show it to the audience, then ask them what they thought it meant. Out of the hundreds, if not thousands, of people to whom I showed this character, not one person ever guessed what it signified. When I told those who were assembled that it was a picture of something they were familiar with, nobody got it. When I said it was a picture of a common animal, nobody could recognize what it represented.
All the more, when I showed the audiences the simplified form of the character, 马 (3 strokes, official in the PRC), nobody could get it.
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January 28, 2026 @ 11:39 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Language and astronomy, Language and culture, Language and mathematics, Language and philosophy, Language and science
I recently spent a week at my son's campground in the countryside outside Dallas. While there, I was elated to espy a sizable dodecahedron made of twelve substantial wooden panels tightly wrapped in brown, buff leather. It had been constructed by a local artist about a dozen years ago.
Contemplating that cosmic shape, it brought back all those vibrant discussions of geometry, linguistics, and metaphysics from a year and a half ago. Esthetically and intellectually satisfying to commune with my old friend the dodecahedron, I fell into a reverie beneath those shaggy-scraggly-barked eastern red cedars that seemed to draw me up into their spreading branches that connected to the universe emanating from the dodecahedron that I held at my waist.
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August 8, 2025 @ 6:41 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and mathematics, Language and science
As is usually the case, the Wikipedia article on the Chinese calendar is comprehensive and built on consensus. It states:
The Chinese calendar, as the name suggests, is a lunisolar calendar created by or commonly used by the Chinese people. While this description is generally accurate, it does not provide a definitive or complete answer. A total of 102 calendars have been officially recorded in classical historical texts. In addition, many more calendars were created privately, with others being built by people who adapted Chinese cultural practices, such as the Koreans, Japanese, Vietnamese, and many others, over the course of a long history.
A Chinese calendar consists of twelve months, each aligned with the phases of the moon, along with an intercalary month inserted as needed to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons. It also features twenty-four solar terms, which track the position of the sun and are closely related to climate patterns. Among these, the winter solstice is the most significant reference point and must occur in the eleventh month of the year. Each month contains either twenty-nine or thirty days. The sexagenary cycle for each day runs continuously over thousands of years and serves as a determining factor to pinpoint a specific day amidst the many variations in the calendar. In addition, there are many other cycles attached to the calendar that determine the appropriateness of particular days, guiding decisions on what is considered auspicious or inauspicious for different types of activities.
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August 7, 2025 @ 7:03 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and mathematics, Language and science
The chapter on "Calendar and Chronology" in Brill's Encyclopedia of China Online (2009) was authored by Ho Peng Yoke (1926-2014), who was the Director of the Needham Research Institute from 1990-2001. The first two paragraphs of Ho's chapter begin as follows:
The traditional Chinese calendar is lunisolar, i. e. it is based on both the movement of the moon and on what seems to be the orbit of the sun around the earth. The incommensurability of the lunar synodical period of 29.530587… days and the equinoctial year's 365.2421… days has always been the cause for numerous difficulties with respect to the establishment of a calendar in China. In order to replace the former calendars which after a time had lost their validity, roughly 100 different types of calendars were devised over a period of about 2000 years, many of which were never officially adopted. According to Joseph Needham, the history of calendar making is the consequence of attempts to "make the incompatible compatible."
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August 6, 2025 @ 10:47 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and mathematics, Language and science
The calendrical system used for defining the dates of traditional Chinese festivals such as ‘Chinese New Year’ (The first day of the first lunar month, now called 'Spring Festival’ Chun jie 春節 in the PRC), the mid-autumn festival 中秋 (full moon of the 8th lunar month) and so on is the last of the many versions of the Chinese luni-solar calendar that were adopted by successive imperial governments until the fall of the empire in 1911. It is in fact the system adopted by the Qing dynasty in 1644.
Christopher Cullen’s book Heavenly Numbers: Astronomy and Authority in Early Imperial China (Oxford, 2017) gives a detailed account of the successive systems of mathematical astronomy that were used by Chinese astronomical officials in early imperial times to produce the annual luni-solar calendars that were promulgated by imperial authority. The following explanations are taken from Cullen’s book.
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January 30, 2025 @ 11:27 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Language and culture
On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
WXPN did its homework, and most of the information they conveyed was correct, but one thing they repeatedly said stunned me. They didn't call "shé nián 蛇年" "year of the snake" in English, which I had always and ever heard it referred to as. Rather, they referred to "shé nián 蛇年" as "Year of the Wood Snake". So I searched for it on the internet and, lo and behold, it turned up quite often as "wood snake".
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January 23, 2025 @ 5:32 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language and astronomy
[This is a guest post by Chris Button]
I think I might finally have figured out heaven:
tiān 天 LMC tʰian, EMC tʰɛn, OC xjəm
xiān 祆 LMC xian, EMC xɛn, OC xəɲ ~ xjəm
It's Pulleyblank's formulation (xj- > tʰ ; -jəm > -ɛn), but it also explains why x- is retained in 祆 because of it using the intermediary stage -əɲ (between OC -jəm and EMC -ɛn) as the OC source of the EMC form (where OC x- > EMC x-) rather than -jəm (where OC xj- > EMC tʰ-).
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June 30, 2024 @ 6:05 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language and astronomy, Language and biology, Language and mathematics, Language and philosophy, Philology, Phonetics and phonology
[This is a guest post by Brian Pellar]
. . . the consonants are the letters or ciphers which assemble around the vowels to form the words, just as the constellations assemble around the Sun, image of the Divinity, and compose the community of stars over which it presides. — Hebreu Primiti
The Consonants of Command
Dear Professor Mair,
In regard to your question, “Is there some sense in which we could think of the 12 aspects/signs/symbols of the alphazodiac as comprising/encompassing the basic sounds of the universe?” I’ve dabbled a bit with some intriguing answers in my papers. For instance, in my very first paper, SPP 196, I placed in the endnotes a very interesting reference from the Gospel of the Egyptians (a Nag Hammadi text) that I feel might bear a relationship to the structure and the underlying “sacred” vowels that comprise the Logos/Word — the breath of God — of the alphazodiac. More specifically,
the “three powers” (the Father, Mother, and Son) give praise to the unnamable Spirit — and the “hidden invisible mystery” that came forth is composed of seven sacred vowels (i.e., the Son “brings forth from the bosom/the seven powers of the great / light of the seven voices, and the word/[is] their completion”), with each of those seven vowels repeated exactly twenty-two times (“iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii[iii]/ ēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēēē /oooooooooooooooooooooo/uu[uuu] uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee/aaaaaaa[aaaa]aaaaaaaaaaa/ ōōōōōōōōōōōō ōōōōōōōōōō”) (Robinson 1990: 209–210). [SPP 196, pp. 38-39].
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June 7, 2024 @ 11:10 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and art, Language and astronomy, Language and culture, Language and mathematics, Language and philosophy, Language and science
Spotted on the counter for tea/coffee service at the Residence Inn in Omaha, Nebraska:
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June 5, 2024 @ 12:16 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language and archeology, Language and astronomy, Language and culture, Language and history, Language and mathematics, Language and philosophy, Language and science
Wherein we embark upon an inquisition into the divine proportions of the dodecahedron and its congeners, take a peek at the history of accounting, explore the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, and examine the humanistic physics of Werner Heisenberg*.
[*Heisenberg's father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies at the University of Munich in Germany. Heisenberg had more a “humanistic” education, i.e. more Latin and Greek than in natural sciences. One morning the young Werner Heisenberg discovered reading Plato's Timaeus a description of the world with regular polyhedra. Heisenberg could not understand why Plato being so rational started to use speculative ideas. But finally he was fascinated by the idea that it could be possible to describe the Universe mathematically. He could not understand why Plato used the Polyhedra as the basic units in his model, but Heisenberg considered that in order to understand the world it is necessary to understand the Physics of the atoms. (source) He contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. (Britannica | Apr 23, 2024)
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We have had an exciting, joyful journey through dodecahedra land, from the archeological discovery of a new specimen in England, to deep, dense discussions about the meaning and purpose of these mysterious objects, to scampering through and clambering over a playground installation of a related form. In this post, I would like to return to the essential twelveness of the dodecahedra.
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May 24, 2024 @ 11:05 am· Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology, Language and astronomy, Language and culture, Language and mathematics, Language and science
I stopped short when I passed by this piece of gym equipment in a kindergarten playground near my home.
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May 12, 2024 @ 4:43 pm· Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Language and archeology, Language and astronomy, Language and science
A little over a year ago, Frank Jacobs published this admirable survey of a mysterious object that has perplexed and preoccupied us for the past week — The Mysterious Dodecahedrons of the Roman Empire, Big Think, Atlas Obscura (5/12/23):
The first of many of these puzzling objects was unearthed almost three centuries ago, and we still don’t know what they were for.
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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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