Language Log

You may or may not have heard of Kucha.  For those who are interested in Tocharian or Uyghur, you almost certainly would be well aware of this oasis city on the northern rim of the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin of Eastern Central Asia. 

Coordinates: 41°42′56″N 82°55′56″E

Kucha is the historical seat of so-called Tocharian B, i.e., Kuśiññe Kantwo, the home of the renowned Buddhist translator, Kumārajīva (344-413), and an important center of Uyghur history and culture from the 7th to 13th centuries.

Below is a guest post by Corey Miller.

Alan Lomax was brought back to my mind through his appearance in this year’s holiday film A Complete Unknown, which is centered on Bob Dylan. I, a most unmusical linguist, wasn’t sure why the name rang a bell; my first thought was that he was (someone like) Milman Parry or Albert Lord, people who were interested in finding vestiges of the Homeric tradition in modern southeastern Europe. His portrait in the film is most unflattering (in contrast to the angelic Pete Seeger or a mute Woody Guthrie), culminating in a fistfight.

Nancy Friedman just published "52 interesting things I learned this year" (Fritinancy, 12/30/2024). The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially liked (10), which resonates with (17), which references LLOG.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-ninth issue: “Lawrence Scott Davis (1951–2024),” by Lothar von Falkenhausen.

Next year  E. J. Brill will publish a book by the little-known but highly accomplished Sino-anthropologist L. Scott Davis, in which he pioneers a novel, anthropological interpretation of the Chinese classics. The book demonstrates how certain motifs and images in the Yijing (Classic of Changes), the Lunyu (Confucian Analects), and the Zuo zhuan (Zuo Tradition) are strategically deployed as structuring elements so as to meld these texts into a semantic continuum. Unfortunately, the author passed away this fall without being able to see his book in print; this obituary aims to make him and his life’s work better known to the scholarly community.

"Oh, you've never read The Odyssey???"

Your timing is perfect. Emily Wilson's translation is the best one in literally ages, has that sweet iambic pentameter to give it a "bouncy" feel, & makes dudebros cry that the classic has "gone woke". pic.twitter.com/zN5uSPTJSY

— Librarian Mama (@hyuumanatees) December 26, 2024

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-fifty-eighth issue, “The Dance of Qian and Kun”, by Denis Mair:

ABSTRACT: This collection of papers and interpretive essays reflects my interest in structuralism as practiced by ancient Chinese thinkers who devoted their study to the symbolism of a fertility dance. I point to evidence that the authors/compilers of the oracle used a dance of contraries as a matrix to provide context for archetypal life situations. Some of the papers present empirical evidence of architectonic, dance-like features in the overall formal matrix: oscillations, rhythms, symmetries, and gradients of integration. In other essays I present plausible readings of individual symbols. My aim in doing so is to demonstrate that the symbols contain dense patterning and conceptual seeds that encourage symbolic elaboration. For instance, I show that centrality, ebb-and-flow, rapprochement of contraries, fertility worship, and many other ideas are implicit in the text. Such implicit ideas give the text a wide range of applicability.

The interpretive essays touch upon the question of how human sacrifice, used as a display of competency by late Shang-era elites, eventually tapered off in the early to mid-Zhou era. In that period the Zhou swerved off in a new direction toward civil religion and a concern with intrinsic values of human self-understanding, which pointed the way to the teachings of a humanistic educator like Confucius. Although the internecine wars of the Zhou were violent, the act of killing was no longer put on display as an apex ritual, as it earlier had been, used, for example, to commemorate the building of construction projects in the late Shang. My analyses of specific symbols give evidence of a distinct turn toward humanistic thinking in the early to mid-Zhou.

Dr. Hu Shih (1891-1962) was arguably the greatest Chinese scholar of the 20th century, for whom I have the utmost respect.  He and I thought alike on a number of important subjects:  language, literature, and script reform, philosophy (we both were attracted to the utilitarian-pragmatist-logician and defensive strategist Mo Zi [c. 470 -c.391 BC]), recognition of the great influence of Indian civilization upon Chinese culture, dedication to public service and education, devotion to democracy, and so forth.  Overall, the only other 20th-century thinker and writer who could compete / compare with Hu Shih was Lu Xun (1881-1936), but the latter came from the left, whereas Hu Shih came from the right.  I admired them both.

Even when I was a child, I was never a theist, and I stopped going to church when I went to college and my mother wasn't around to urge me to do so.  Likewise, I suspected that Hu Shih, being a Confucian minded Chinese intellectual, was not a theist either.  So it was quite a surprise when the following notice from the Hu Shih Memorial Hall in Taipei came to my attention:

Post by @globalc@chaos.social

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"Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes", Retraction Watch 12/27/2024:

All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.” […]

Among other moves, according to the statement, Elsevier “eliminated support for a copy editor and special issues editor,” which they interpreted as saying “editors should not be paying attention to language, grammar, readability, consistency, or accuracy of proper nomenclature or formatting.” The editors say the publisher “frequently introduces errors during production that were not present in the accepted manuscript:”

"In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

A giant step backward — about a thousand years.  Writing regression.

“'Pseudo-Chinese': New Japanese Social Media App Only Allows Kanji", Jay Allen, Unseen Japan (12/18/24)

Whatever possessed some folks to do this?

Wanna stress-test your Japanese knowledge? A new social media app for Japanese users dares you to ditch kana by allowing only kanji input, a.k.a. "Pseudo-Chinese."

Or is that stress-testing your Chinese knowledge?  What kind of language results?  Natural, normal, native Japanese?  Or some kind of hentai Nihongo kaibutsu 変態日本語怪物 ("abnormal Japanese language monstrosity")?

The winning submission to a high school essay contest, written by Mallory Valis, described as "a 16-year-old from Toronto", starts this way:

Bro, this intro is high-key gonna slap. Just let me cook.

Oh wait, I should be more formal.

Uhh. . . . Henceforth I commence my righteous thesis. Yeah.

In the eyes of older generations, Gen-Z slang besmirches the Sacred English Language™ with its base, loose, and astonishingly convoluted wordplay. By now, you’ve heard it before. Words sprouting like weeds in conversations with friends or wriggling through Instagram comment sections: rizz, fit check, girlboss, slay, simp. . . the list spirals downwards into a pit of sacrilege.

So began the abstract of Bill Labov's 1972 paper "Some principles of linguistic methodology":

Current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement in linguistics require attention to principles of methodology which consider sources of error and ways to eliminate them. The methodological assumptions and practices of various branches of linguistics are considered from the standpoint of the types of data gathered: texts, elicitations, intuitions and observations. Observations of the vernacular provide the most systematic basis for linguistic theory, but have been the most difficult kinds of data for linguists to obtain; techniques for solving the problems encountered are outlined. Intersubjective agreement is best reached by convergence of several kinds of data with complementary sources of error.

1972 was when I got out of the U.S. Army, after returning from Vietnam, and started graduate school at MIT. Leaving one war I didn't believe in, I found myself enlisted in another — because what Bill called "current difficulties in achieving intersubjective agreement" was a euphemistic way of describing the religious wars then consuming the field of linguistics. Some of the theological leaders had become established elsewhere (George Lakoff, Jim McCawley, and Paul Postal), but Haj Ross and Dave Perelmutter were starting guerilla campaigns within MIT, where Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle were the intellectual government.

I respected and even admired all of the people just named, and learned meaningful lessons from their work. Focusing on the analysis of prosody helped me to avoid the worst of the intellectual killing fields. But I saw no real way to stay neutral in that period of academic linguistics, any more than I could have in 17th-century central Europe.  Which is why I finished grad school in three years, and spent the next 15 years in an industrial research job.

Yesterday's Frazz: