Language Log

We've been on the trail of the griffin for some time:  "Griffins: the implications of art history for language spread" (8/9/24), "Idle thoughts upon the Ides of March: the feathered man" (3/11/23) — very important (not so idle) observations about griffins in the pre-Classical West by Adrienne Mayor, with illuminating illustrations.  Following the leads in these and other posts, I think we're getting closer to the smoking gryphon (in some traditions, e.g., Egyptian sfr/srf, it is thought to be fiery).

One name from the Middle East rings a bell with a well-known fabulous monster from classical China.  That is

…the Armenian term Paskuč (Armenian: պասկուչ) that had been used to translate Greek gryp 'griffin' in the Septuagint, which H. P. Schmidt characterized as the counterpart of the simurgh. However, the cognate term Baškuč (glossed as 'griffin') also occurs in Middle Persian, attested in the Zoroastrian cosmological text Bundahishn XXIV (supposedly distinguishable from Sēnmurw which also appears in the same text). Middle Persian Paškuč is also attested in Manichaean magical texts (Manichaean Middle Persian: pškwc), and this must have meant a "griffin or a monster like a griffin" according to W. B. Henning.

(Wikipedia)

As a starting point for pierogi, here's a basic definition:

Pierogi, one or more dumplings of Polish origin, made of unleavened dough filled with meat, vegetables, or fruit and boiled or fried or both. In Polish pierogi is the plural form of pieróg (“dumpling”), but in English the word pierogi is usually treated as either singular or plural.

(Britannica)

Now, turning to Asia, we are familiar with the Tang period scholar, poet, and official, Duàn Chéngshì 段成式 (d. 863), as the compiler of Yǒuyáng zázǔ 酉陽雜俎 (Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang), a bountiful miscellany of tales and legends from China and abroad.  Yǒuyáng zázǔ is especially famous for including the first published version of the Cinderella story in the world, but it also contains many other stories and themes derived from foreign sources.

I've eaten a lot of muxu beef / pork / chicken / shrimp in my day, and I love the combination of meat strips, black "wood ear" fungus, scrambled eggs, daylily, and cucumber served wrapped in a thin, soft pancake.  Usually I'm compulsive about knowing the meaning of the names of dishes that I eat, but muxu has always defeated me.  I'm not even sure how to pronounce the name (it's also transcribed as moo shu, mushu, and mooshi) nor how to write it in characters (variants include completely unrelated 木须, 木樨, etc.).

When I first encountered the dish decades ago, I spent a fair amount of time trying to unravel the jumbled meanings, pronunciations, and written forms of the name.  However, since I was getting nowhere fast, I soon gave up on those investigations (in the days before the internet and search engines, things were much harder to figure out).  Then I spent so many years wandering around overseas, and I simply didn't encounter muxu for a long time.

From François Lang:

A week ago, I was in Gothenberg, Nebraska and went to the local historical museum.  I asked the volunteers there what was the most unusual, interesting, and important exhibit they had.  One of them, Barbara Fisher, thought for a moment, then said, "We have a unique collection of barbed wire fence downstairs, each strand of which is specific to the ranch or tract where it was used."  She must have read my mind and heart, for that is just the sort of thing that would captivate me.

So I dashed down the stairs and beheld:

As someone deeply interested in the languages of Taiwan, I have long been preoccupied by the origins and expansion of Austronesian on the island circa six millennia ago and its spread from there around four thousand years ago throughout Southeast Asia, to Oceania and as far as Madagascar.  This new research article from PLOS ONE sheds light on how a part of that process occurred.

"Investigating Demic versus Cultural Diffusion and Sex Bias in the Spread of Austronesian Languages in Vietnam." Thao, Dinh Huong et al. PLOS ONE 19, no. 6 (June 17, 2024): e0304964. 

The LLOG post on "Frociaggine" (6/8/2024) quoted the two glosses for frocio in Wiktionary:

1.  (vulgar, derogatory, outgroup) gay man, poof, faggot
2.  (friendly, ingroup) homosexual person, especially a gay man

The "friendly, ingroup" version may be reinforced by last weekend's Il Roma Pride — Emma Bubola, "Italians Respond to Pope’s Slur by Taking Francis to Pride", NYT 6/16/2024:

At Saturday’s celebration in Rome, Pope Francis’ image was on cardboard cutouts adorned with flower necklaces. People came dressed as the pope, wore papal hats and said that there was never too much “gayness.”

At Rome’s Pride celebration, bare-chested men in pink angel wings danced to Abba songs, women wrapped in rainbow flags kissed, and shimmering drag queens waved from parade floats. And then there was Pope Francis.

The pontiff’s image was everywhere. On cardboard cutouts adorned with flower necklaces, on glittery banners, on stickers. Romans came to the Pride parade on Saturday dressed like Francis, wearing papal hats and T-shirts that read, “There is never too much frociaggine,” a reference to an offensive slur against gay men that the pope has been accused of using twice in recent weeks.

The slur “is the slogan of the 2024 Pride,” said Martina Lorina, 28, an actress who was holding up a banner bearing the word.

After I left Omaha and headed westward on Route 30 / Lincoln Highway, I began to notice that every little town along the way with a population of around three thousand or more had a restaurant called Runza.  My instinct was to pronounce that "roon-zuh", but the people around here say "run-zuh".

Because I was not familiar with them, at first I didn't pay much attention to the Runza restaurants, but then I saw a sign that said they made legendary burgers.  Since I'm a burger freak, always in quest of a superior hamburger, by the time I reached Cozad — which somehow has captured my heart, for more than one reason — I decided to stop in and try one.

Spotted on the counter for tea/coffee service at the Residence Inn in Omaha, Nebraska:

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)

—————

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.

I stopped short when I passed by this piece of gym equipment in a kindergarten playground near my home.

In Victor's recent post "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6", he wrote that "I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata". A more elaborate version of this idea can be found in the Wikipedia article, which tells us that

Maltese […] is a Semitic language derived from late medieval Sicilian Arabic with Romance superstrata spoken by the Maltese people. […] Maltese is a Latinized variety of spoken historical Arabic through its descent from Siculo-Arabic, which developed as a Maghrebi Arabic dialect in the Emirate of Sicily between 831 and 1091. As a result of the Norman invasion of Malta and the subsequent re-Christianization of the islands, Maltese evolved independently of Classical Arabic in a gradual process of latinization. It is therefore exceptional as a variety of historical Arabic that has no diglossic relationship with Classical or Modern Standard Arabic. Maltese is thus classified separately from the 30 varieties constituting the modern Arabic macrolanguage.

Both Victor and Wikipedia are somewhat wrong, or at least misleading — and my main evidence for this is an amusing anecdote. So onwards…

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.

Abstract