Language Log

Two days ago, a Penn freshman from China gifted me with a small format edition of the Guǐgǔzi 鬼谷子 (Master of Ghost Valley), a text that has long intrigued me.

Guiguzi (鬼谷子) is a collection of ancient Chinese texts compiled between the late Warring States period and the end of the Han Dynasty. The work, between 6,000–7,000 Chinese characters, discusses techniques of rhetoric. Although originally associated with the School of Diplomacy, the Guiguzi was later integrated into the Daoist canon.

(source)

Not only was I pleased by the content of the book, I was also charmed by its appearance.  Over the long decades of my career as a Sinologist, I have purchased thousands of Chinese books, but I had never seen one quite like this.  It has fine printing on good quality paper with a classy cover.  Its dimensions are small, 6 7/8ths inches (174.625 mm) by 4 1/4 inches (107.95 mm).  Published in 2015 (reissued 2019) (ISBN 978-7-101-10697-8) by the famous Chinese publishing house Zhōnghuá Shūjú 中华书局 (Chung Hwa Book Co.), it is part of a relatively new series called Zhōnghuá jīngdiǎn zhǐzhǎng wénkù 中华经典指掌文库 (Chung Hwa Classics Series for the Palm).  All the several dozen volumes in this series are premodern classics.

Article in Taiwan News (4/9/23):

National Taiwan Library repairs 500-year-old Quran
'Book Hospital' tasked with repairing ancient Quran damaged by time, elements
By Sean Scanlan

500-year-old Quran being repaired (CNA photo)

Despite its being a Middle Iranian language that has been extinct for a millennium, we've often mentioned Sogdian on Language Log.  That's because of its intrinsic linguistic interest, but also because its speakers, as I have often said, were Eurasian Kulturvermittlers par excellence and outstanding socioeconomic entrepreneurs.

Now we have a comprehensive, reliable grammar of Sogdian, which is cause for celebration:

Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豊 2022. Sogudogo bunpō kōgi ソグド語文法講義
[Lectures on Sogdian Grammar]. Kyoto: Rinsen. iv, 500 pp.
ISBN: 978-4-653-04188-7.

Although this hefty tome is in Japanese, Adam Alvah Catt has written an informative review that enables those who cannot read it themselves to get a good idea of the book's contents.

Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Volume 76: Issue 1 (March 17, 2023), 165-167

DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1556/062.2023.00325

URL:  https://akjournals.com/view/journals/062/76/1/article-p165.xml

Here I will make available the first, next to last, and last paragraphs of the review.

Regular readers of Language Log will not be strangers to Sogdian, an extinct Middle Iranian language (see the list of "Selected readings" below).  The pace of research on Sogdian has picked up greatly in recent decades.  Now, with the publication of Catalogue of Sogdian Writings in Central Asia by International Institute for Central Asian Studies (IICAS) in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, we are set for even more intensive studies on Sogdian in the coming years.

On amazon.com yesterday:

\$33,634.25 for a book that's in 464 libraries, and is available on abebooks.com for \$17.76 (at least it's not \$19.84 :-) or \$49.00 plus shipping?

I've seen unreasonable amazon prices for out-of-print books before, but in the thousands of dollars, not the tens of thousands.

Is this an out-of-control re-pricing bot? Or a money-laundering scam? Or what?

Herewith, I wish to announce the publication of a stupendous Festschrift in honor of András Róna-Tas’s 90th birthday. 

András Róna-Tas, distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Szeged, Hungary, winner of several international prestigious prizes, has devoted his long academic career to the study of Chuvash, Turkic elements in Hungarian, Mongolic-Tibetan linguistic contacts, the Para-Mongolic language Khitan and other Central Asian languages and cultures.

This book, presented to him on the occasion of his 90th birthday, contains a collection of papers in Turkic and Mongolic Studies, with a focus on the literacy, culture, and languages of the steppe civilizations. It is organized in three sections: Turkic Studies, Mongolic Studies, and Linguistic and cultural contacts of Altaic languages. It contains papers by some of the most renowned experts in Central Asia Studies.

#OldEnglish #WOTD: wundor-blēo, n.n: a wondrous colour. (WUN-dor-BLAY-oh / ˈwʌn-dɔr-ˌbleːɔ) Image: Panther in a bestiary; England, c. 1226-1250; @bodleianlibs MS. Bodley 764, f. 7v. pic.twitter.com/nHqwdYElVh

— Old English Wordhord (@OEWordhord) May 5, 2022

From Miffy Zhang Linfei:

I went to Chicago over the weekend, and look what I found in a small European vintage shop named P.O.S.H.

New book from Columbia University Press:

The Culture of Language in Ming China:  Sound, Script, and the Redefinition of Boundaries of Knowledge

$35.00  £28.00

Publisher's description:

The scholarly culture of Ming dynasty China (1368–1644) is often seen as prioritizing philosophy over concrete textual study. Nathan Vedal uncovers the preoccupation among Ming thinkers with specialized linguistic learning, a field typically associated with the intellectual revolution of the eighteenth century. He explores the collaboration of Confucian classicists and Buddhist monks, opera librettists and cosmological theorists, who joined forces in the pursuit of a universal theory of language.

It's no wonder that the people are losing patience with the Party:

 "‘A toddler could write this’: senior Chinese policeman’s Peace Mantra book, praised by authorities, is ridiculed

    Investigation and apologies over ‘intellectual’ officer’s book, which provincial government and state media had said was recommended reading
    Sharing of the book’s repetitive content leads to online debate about unthinking praise for officials"

By Jun Mai, SCMP (7/30/20).

The "intellectual" author of the volume is He Dian, the second most powerful officer of the public security department in the northeastern province of Jilin.  The title of his 336-page tome is Píng'ān jīng 平安經, to which the English name Peace Mantra has become attached.  Since it's such a phony work, we might as well give it a more accurate apocryphal Sanskrit title, Śānti sūtra शान्ति सूत्र.

Joe Farrell wrote in to ask:

Do you know whether the word "handbook" (Gk encheiridion, Lat (liber) manualis) can be found in any other ancient or medieval languages? And, if so, whether it is clearly a loan word or it simply arises spontaneously in different languages from a similar conceptual and material relationship between books and hands.

Clément Pit-Claudel writes:

I was recently at the Boston antiquarian book fair, where I spotted a book titled The Battle of Foochow about the Fuzhou Uprising of November 8, 1911, in which revolutionaries defeated the Qing (Manchu) army, a significant step on the way to the fall of the last dynasty in traditional Chinese history, when the six-year-old Last Emperor, Puyi, abdicated on February 12, 1912.  Here's a photograph of the cover:

A couple of weeks ago, I wrung my hands on Facebook over the proliferation of commercial publishers' Handbooks of Linguistics. These are usually priced out of individuals' budgets, being sold mostly to university libraries, and the thousands of hours of work poured into them by dedicated linguists are often lost behind a paywall, inaccessible to many of the people who would most like to read them.

That post prompted a flood of urgent discussion; it seemed like this was a thought that was being simultaneously had around the world. (Indeed, Kai von Fintel had posted the identical thought about six months prior; probably that butterfly was the ultimate cause of the veritable hurricane  that erupted on my feed.)

Long story short, a few weeks later we now have a proto-editorial board and are on to the next steps of identifying a venue and a business model for the series. Please check out our announcement below the fold, and follow along on our blog for updates as the series develops!