Language Log

Brian McFadden's recent comic on "Social Media Substitutes" starts with this panel:

Which being translated is "May this tusk root out the lice of the hai[r and the] beard".

You can read all about this object here: Daniel Vainstub et al., "A Canaanite’s Wish to Eradicate Lice on an Inscribed Ivory Comb from Lachish", Jewish Journal of Archaeology 2022. The abstract:

An inscription in early Canaanite script from Lachish, incised on an ivory comb, is presented. The 17 letters, in early pictographic style, form seven words expressing a plea against lice.

Worth pondering:

‘The more languages we have, the better we can understand the world’

The vanishing Aleut language and the future of Russia’s linguistic diversity

3:50 am, October 25, 2022
Source: Meduza

Interview by Anna Smirnova. English-language version by Sam Breazeale.

Is it possible for a recently dead language like Manchu, which was politically powerful for centuries and had millions of speakers, to be brought back to life?  I think definitely yes, if there's a will to revive it, especially if it has close living relative with tens of thousands of speakers, such as Sibe / Xibe, there's no reason why it cannot be done

In early October, an 86-year-old man named Gennady Yakovlev died in the village of Nikolskoye on Russia’s Bering Island. Subsequent news reports referred to him as the last native speaker of the Aleut language — and many proclaimed that the language had died along with him. Meduza spoke to Evgeny Golovko, the director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Linguistic Studies, about the history of the Aleut language, why languages disappear, and whether the Aleut language really died along with Yakovlev.

Inasmuch as we recently puzzled over modern shorthand, it should be fun to take a look at what shorthand was like two millennia and more ago.

There Are Still Codes Throughout Ancient Roman Literature

For centuries we’ve ignored the marginalia writing of slave stenographers, but focusing on it now could give fresh insight into their lives, and into military and literary history.

By Candida Moss, The Daily Beast (11/5/22)

What happened is like a rediscovery of a century-old discovery of a cultural practice that was common two millennia and more ago.

Several years ago, Ryan Baumann, a digital humanities developer at Duke University, was leafing through an early 20th-century collection of ancient Greek manuscripts when he ran across an intriguing comment. The author noted that there was an undeciphered form of shorthand in the margins of a piece of papyrus and added a hopeful note that perhaps future scholars might be able to read it. The casual aside set Baumann off on a new journey to unlock the secrets of an ancient code.

For a country that already has Chinese characters (kanji) and two syllabaries of its own (hiragana and katakana; see also furigana), judging from the ubiquity of romaji across the country, it would appear that they are well into the process of turning Latin letters into an integral component of their quadripartite writing system.  Some may argue that they already have done so.

What's going on?

Why hasn't something similar yet happened in China (Vietnam's writing system is already clearly based on the Latin alphabet)?

"Akasi or Akashi? Hepburn Most Established of Japan’s Different 'Rōmaji' Systems", Nippon.com newsletter (11/2/22)

Signs on highways and at railway stations in Japan show place names in both Japanese and Roman letters, although the rōmaji system employed can vary. The Hepburn system dominates, but the Kunrei and Nihon systems are also seen around the country.

The following note and video were sent to me by Bill Benzon.  The video is too long (19:15) to make as the main content of this post, but it is captivating, and I warmly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the topics it covers, especially English language learning by Japanese.

The video features Moe, the former geisha who successfully transitioned to Kimono Mom.  Among her interlocutors is a woman from Brazil who has a lot of interesting things to say about Portuguese (especially how different the grammar is from English).  Aside from discoursing on language teaching and learning, Moe is very good at talking about food and cooking for her little family, so if you like that sort of thing, hop on her channel (see below) and you will have many popular videos to choose from.

I was trying to find an old post I wrote about a dictionary of Japanese pronunciations of Chinese characters and put this in the Google search engine:  victor mair language log dictionary japanese pronunciation (no quotation marks).  I was thunderstruck by the first result (out of 188,000):

victor mair language log       –>       ヴィクトル・メアの言語ログ 

Vu~ikutoru mea no gengo rogu

"Another Trump appointee provides a lesson in ethical misconduct", WaPo 11/5/2022:

The Office of the Inspector General issued a report last month identifying a series of “administrative, ethical and policy violations” by J. Brett Blanton, appointed by President Donald Trump and sworn in in early 2020.

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Here I’ll deal briefly with Halpern’s Kodansha Kanji Dictionary, then devote most of my attention to the Four‑Corner Method — not that I’m an advocate of the latter but its formal design and quirky byways (such as its Fifth‑Digit Kludge) require a good deal of time simply to be described, never mind assessed. An antiquarian pursuit? Given that translation apps now have a phone‑camera option for handling hànzì, and given that a Chinese Chip in the cranium seems imminent, a study of two dictionary look‑up methods might strike one as quaint. But there are lessons to be learned by studying such material as if from a System Analyst’s viewpoint. I hope this piece might have some appeal from that angle at least, if not from a nuts‑and‑bolts Chinese studies standpoint.

As promised, here are the additional paragraphs from Vandermeersch on the roots of rationality in the earliest levels of Sinitic script.  They come from John Lagerwey who will be awarded the 3rd “Prix Vandermeersch” on November 18.  John explains:

I don’t have the time right now to give the full answer JPL deserves, but I am attaching the quotes from VDM’s Wangdao that I commented on recently during the day in his honor. This gives a number of key quotes from his work on “teleological” vs “morphological” and therefore constitutes the best answer to JPL at this time.

For the convenience of readers, I [VHM] am alternating Google translations with the original French text, section by section.  I have made a few small modifications that are marked with my initials, and a few tiny ones for idiomaticity that are not marked.

For the latest study and lexicographical material touching on the subject of this post, see below at the very bottom.

——————-

Léon Vandermeersch, Wangdao ou La voie royale II Recherches sur l’esprit des institutions de la Chine archaïque, structures politiques, les rites

Léon Vandermeersch, Wangdao or The Royal Way II Research on the spirit of institutions in archaic China, political structures, rites

A few days ago, G.W. sent a question about this tweet:

Remember—Biden tried to fire essentially every worker who didn't take the COVID vaccine. That's the real Joe Biden.

VOTE!

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) November 1, 2022

G.W.'s question:

I noticed was that he writes "take the vaccine," rather than "get the vaccine." To me, "take" sounds just wrong — I feel like the verb we use for injections is "get." And I wondered if "take" would make it sound more like the vaccine is an evil Big Government imposition, which the recipients passively accept (as in "take it lying down"), as compared to something you might "get" which would be more of an actively sought-after benefit. From googling, it looks like both "take" and "get" are fairly common, actually; but is there a way to find out if vaccine-skeptics and/or Republicans are more likely to use "take"?

Amid the chaos at Twitter, there's this:

Ok, I’ve joined #Mastodon but also this pic.twitter.com/2Uue7E4BR8

— Sinéad Crowley (@SineadCrowley) November 4, 2022

A PRC graduate student in Chinese literature at Indiana University sent along this clever arrangement of "Happy Birthday":