Language Log

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

“Zhenzhu’s Deputy: Loyalty and Filiality in The Compass of Islam,” by Jonathan N. Lipman.
(free pdf)

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

“A Study of Dunhuang Manuscript S.2614V, Mahāmaudgalyāyana Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld: Revisions and Textual Transmission,” by Ryu Takai.

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

“The Many Voices of Silence: The Diverse Theories of the Ineffable Dao in the Zhuangzi,” by Ming SUN.

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

“How Oppenheimer Mistook Time for Death at Trinity (the A-bomb Test Site) and How the Bhagavad Gītā, Read Properly, Resonates with the Block Universe of Einstein,” by Conal Boyce.

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

“The Baghdad Battery: Experimental Verification of a 2,000-Year-Old Device Capable of Driving Visible and Useful Electrochemical Reactions at over 1.4 Volts,” by Alexander Bazes.

As has often been mentioned on Language Log, Dunhuang is a desert oasis town at the far western end of the Gansu / Hexi Corridor.  This is where the fabled Silk Road splits to head north and south around the vast Tarim Basin (filled with the extremely hot [summer] / cold [winter] / arid) Taklakamakan Desert.  Site of the Mogao Grottoes (hundreds of richly decorated medieval Buddhist caves), one of which (no. 17) housed tens of thousands of manuscripts that were sealed away more than a millennium ago.  Among them were the earliest written Sinitic vernacular narratives that I worked on for the first twenty years of my Sinological and Buddhological career (see the last three items of the "Selected readings" below).

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

“Buddhism among the Sogdians: A Re-Evaluation,” by Todd Gibson.

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

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

“The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them,” by Samuel Robert Ramsey.

PROLOGUE

Travel the length and breadth of Japan, across the more than 6,800 islands in the archipelago, and anywhere you go, from the Tokyo megalopolis to the most remote and isolated village, every person you meet will immediately understand and speak Nihongo—Japanese. The accents you hear might vary from place to place. There will be odd and unexplained words and pronunciations peculiar to each of these places. But not one person among the more than 126 million citizens of Japan will have any trouble at all understanding the standard language as it’s normally spoken.

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

“The Pazyryk Vehicles: New Data and Reconstructions, a Preliminary Report,” by Victor A. Novozhenov, Kyrym Altynbekov, and Elena V. Stepanova. (free pdf)

New book by Luke Waring:

Writing and Materiality in Ancient China:  The Textual Culture of the Mawangdui Tombs (Columbia University Press, December 2025)

Since 2001, the Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (SJEAS) has been playing an increasingly prominent role in scholarship on East Asia, especially language aspects. Sponsored since 2001 by the Academy of East Asian Studies (AEAS) at Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea, SJEAS is an international, multidisciplinary publication dedicated to research on pre-1945 East Asian humanities. SJEAS presents new research related to the Sinographic Cosmopolis/Sphere of pre-1945 East Asia, publishing both articles that stay within traditional disciplinary or regional boundaries and works that explore the commonalities and contrasts found in countries of the Sinographic Sphere. SJEAS is particularly keen to highlight new research by scholars from China (broadly conceived), Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that engages with Western scholarship in this field.

(source)

Today is (not very officially) World Linguistics Day, celebrated on the birthday of Ferdinand de Saussure. It started with "National Linguistics Day" in the UK, noted by LLOG in 2024.