Language Log

A pathbreaking, new book from Brill:

The Vernacular World of Pu Songling
Popular Literature and Manuscript Culture in Late Imperial China
Series:  Sinica Leidensia, Volume: 173 (2025).  xix, 312 pp.
By Zhenzhen Lu 

Following up on our previous post, "Sakas, Kushans, and Hephthalites: the sources in Greek, Latin, Persian, and Chinese" (9/24/25) by Taishan Yu, we turn now to Étienne de La Vaissière's "A Military Origin for New Persian?", which was published lightning fast by Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae.

Received: 26 April 2025 • Accepted: 3 July 2025
Published Online: 5 August 2025

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

“Relations between Persia and Central Asia in Antiquity: An Examination of the Written Sources,” by Yu Taishan. (pdf)

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

“Demetrios of Bactria as Deva Gobujo and Other Indo-Greek Myths of Japan,” by Lucas Christopoulos. 

We've been inconsistent recently in our annual celebrations of Talk Like A Pirate Day, so here's our favorite image, with a couple of past post links below the fold:

"Active Use of Latent Tree-Structured Sentence Representation in Humans and Large Language Models." Liu, Wei et al. Nature Human Behaviour (September 10, 2025).

Abstract

Understanding how sentences are represented in the human brain, as well as in large language models (LLMs), poses a substantial challenge for cognitive science. Here we develop a one-shot learning task to investigate whether humans and LLMs encode tree-structured constituents within sentences. Participants (total N = 372, native Chinese or English speakers, and bilingual in Chinese and English) and LLMs (for example, ChatGPT) were asked to infer which words should be deleted from a sentence. Both groups tend to delete constituents, instead of non-constituent word strings, following rules specific to Chinese and English, respectively. The results cannot be explained by models that rely only on word properties and word positions. Crucially, based on word strings deleted by either humans or LLMs, the underlying constituency tree structure can be successfully reconstructed. Altogether, these results demonstrate that latent tree-structured sentence representations emerge in both humans and LLMs.

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

“Horses and Humans: A Consequential Symbiosis,” edited by Victor H. Mair.

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

“Mythologies, Religions, and Peoples Outside Ancient China in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” by Xiaofeng He.

https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp364_Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas.pdf

Launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies & Call for Papers

The Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology at Korea University (Seoul, South Korea) is proud to announce the launch of the Journal of Sinographic Philologies and Legacies (JOSPL), a pioneering venue in the growing field of Sinographic studies. This quarterly, peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal is dedicated to the study of the humanistic heritage of East Asia’s Sinographic sphere—a cultural region where Literary Sinitic (漢文) and Sinographs (漢字) functioned as the cosmopolitan language of government, religious institutions, scholarship, and belles-lettres. JOSPL invites submissions that engage critically with this legacy from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives.

That's the title of a brand new (3/13/25) book by Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider, a noteworthy volume on the 1918 influenza pandemic.  Here she is interviewed (6/7/25) by Colin Gorrie (the interview is too long [58:14] to post directly on Language Log):

Proto-Indo-European Origins: A Conversation with Laura Spinney    

Follow along with the interview by using the transcript (available on the YouTube site; it shows up on the right side).

The whole title of Spinney's remarkable tome is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. As Gorrie explains:

This book integrates linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to give us an up-to-date overview of Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancient language that English and many other languages ultimately descend from. Our conversation is wide-ranging, touching not only on the linguistics but also on what we can reconstruct of the culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and the light it sheds on later history and literature.

Two days ago, I received a big package with three heavy books inside.  They were three copies of the following tome:

Routledge Handbook of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair and Zhenjun Zhang (London:  Routledge, 2025), 742 pages.

It came as a surprise for, even though we had been working on the handbook for years, I had lost track of when it would actually be published.

Holding the printed and bound work in my hands, the sheer magnitude of what its pages contained began to sink in.

This afternoon I'm scheduled to give a talk at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 Fifth Avenue, Room 9205), with the title "Signals and Symbols in Linguistic Variation and Change". The abstract:

Words are digital symbols transmitted as acoustic signals. The word sequence in an utterance is encoded by a phonological system whose symbol-facing side connects to morpho-syntax, while its signal-facing side controls articulation and perception. This "duality of patterning" (Hockett) or "double articulation" (Martinet) has crucial and little-recognized benefits for accurate transmission, lexical learning, and community convergence. It also raises serious and rarely recognized questions for phonological theory, including the nature of phonetic interpretation and the role of extra-phonological communication. This talk will explore these aspects of phonology, while also discussing the end-to-end nature of many contemporary AI systems.

敦煌学大辞典第二版全新发布了！
New second edition of Dictionary of Dunhuang Studies!
敦煌学不可或缺的工具
Indispensable tool for #DunhuangStudies
郝春文 主编
70%词条已修订了
词汇量：241万 ➡️ 400万
词条数：5,000 ➡️ 12,000 pic.twitter.com/vYLaYQAHgL

— Neil Schmid 史瀚文 (@DNeilSchmid) January 15, 2025