Language Log

It's a bad month in general:  dark, dreary, drizzly, dank, and damp.  Soon one's thoughts are flitting* about as though one had taken wings, like Eros or Cupid.

In Chinese mythology, there is a deity called Yǔrén 羽人 ("Feathered Man").  It has an ambiguous origin — first appears in Shānhǎi jīng 山海經 (Classic of the Mountains and Seas) and Chǔ cí 楚辭 (Songs of the South / Elegies of Chu), both circa mid to late 1st millennium BC.  Neither of these texts were in the Confucian mainstream, and in later times were relegated to an amorphous "Daoist" cultural current.

There are many early representations of Feathered Man".  If you want to get a good sense of what he looks like, here is a generous selection of images.

I note that "Eros" lacks a clear etymology.  Ditto for "Feathered Man".  I'm wondering if both of them could have emerged from that soup of Central Asian myth origins that Adrienne Mayor has previously often explored so fruitfully:  Amazons, fossils, poison weapons, tattoos, and so forth.

The following image is from a guest post on the Tangle newsletter (3/3/23) that comes from a Chinese dissident who recently fled to the U.S.:

From Kiewwoo Goh:

In my experience, folks have different approaches / attitudes to questions (and answers):

1. some people love to ask questions

2. some people like to answer questions

3. some people don't like to ask questions

4. some people don't like to be asked questions

5. some people like to ask a question as a prelude to telling someone something

and so forth and so on, in any number of permutations and combinations.

"Mommy, guess what I saw at school today?"

"Daddy, guess what Joey told me yesterday?"

"Did you know that…?

"Do you know what that doohickey is for?"

"Hanmoji" is a portmanteau consisting of the first syllable of hanzi ("Chinese character") and the second part of emoji.

From Bob Bauer:

Have you heard of or seen the book entitled The Hanmoji Handbook: Your Guide to the Chinese Language through Emoji, MITeen Press, published August 30, 2022?

The day before yesterday (Thursday, 2 March 2023) I read a review of this book by Richard James Havis on page B9 in the South China Morning Post. Here is a quotation from the review: “Its authors An Xiao Mina, Jennifer 8 Lee and Jason Li – based in North America – show readers how Chinese characters form their meanings by relating them to the emjois we use every day.” (The number “8” does occur in Jennifer 8 Lee’s name just as written).

I have heard of emoji but know little about them and haven’t paid much attention to them. Does each emoji have a specific pronunciation associated with it like a Chinese character typically does? I’m thinking emojis differ from Chinese characters in this particular area (and probably other areas as well). For example, when I see “”, I don’t pronounce it, but I just think ‘smiley face’. However, when I see the Chinese character 木, I associate two pronunciations with it: Cantonese “muk6” and Putonghua “mù” and its English meaning “tree”.

From the Temu website.

The implications of horse domestication — above all its consequent equine chariotry and horseback riding — for the spread of Indo-European are topics we have addressed on numerous occasions before.  A paper that was published just two days ago has made a stunning, convincing breakthrough concerning when and where humans began to ride horses:

"First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship"

Martin Trautmann, Alin Frnculeasa, Bianca Preda-Blnic, Marta Petruneac, Marin Focneanu, Stefan Alexandrov, Nadezhda Atanassova, Piotr Wodarczak, Micha Podsiado, Jnos Dani, Zsolt Bereczki, Tams Hajdu, Radu Bjenaru, Adrian Ioni, Andrei Mgureanu, Despina Mgureanu, Anca-Diana Popescu, Dorin Srbu, Gabriel Vasile, David Anthony, and Volker Heyd

Science Advances, 9 (9), eade2451. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ade2451

View the article online

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451

Yamnaya (c. 3300-2600 BC)

[Please read all the way to the bottom of this post.  There are some big surprises here, including references to a book and an article on linguistics by the novelist Tom Wolfe (1930-2018), who's clearly on the wrong side of the political fence.  Despite the spate of mostly unremittingly anti-Wolfe comments, many important issues about the field are raised there.]

I often receive anguished inquiries about emojis, emoticons, hanzi, hangul, kana, and similar matters.  I try to answer as many of them as I can, and many of them have important implications for the nature of writing, the relationship between speech and script, cultural interactions and contexts, and so forth.

Back in mid-January, there was some Twitter discussion about a group of mysterious emoji characters (here, here, here, here, and here), and Ben Zimmer played a key role in it:

Why does 🔛 have an exclamation point? Why the arrows? So many questions and so few answers

— Adam Aaronson (@aaaronson) January 18, 2023

Meant to send this more than a month ago.

Interesting new journal in Iranian Studies

"Berkeley Working Papers in Middle Iranian Philology is a new open access e-journal hosted by UC Berkeley’s Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and edited by Adam Benkato and Arash Zeini. It publishes short and longer articles or research reports on the philology and epigraphy of the Middle Iranian languages (Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian, Chorasmian, Khotanese). Submitted papers will be reviewed by the editors and published on an ongoing basis. The journal promotes a simple and quick publishing process with collective annual volumes published at the end of each year. The editors encourage scholars working on Middle Persian documents in particular to submit their work."

I've always been skeptical of the distinction between "stress-timed" and "syllable-timed" languages, at least as a claim about the phonetic facts of speech timing as opposed to the psychological dimensions of speech production and perception. Syllable durations in all languages vary widely, due to differences in the intrinsic durations of different vowels and consonants, the effects of phrasal position and emphasis, and many other factors. As a result, inter-stress intervals in languages like English or German are not actually "isochronous", and neither are inter-syllable intervals in languages like French or Spanish. And it's not even true that speakers generally make such intervals closer to isochronous than the relevant timing factors would otherwise predict.

But in "Speech rhythms and brain rhythms", 12/2/2013, I showed a plot of the average syllable-scale power spectrum in the 6300 American-English sentences in the TIMIT dataset, which indicated a key periodicity at 2.4 Hz. I noted that "2.4 Hz corresponds to a period of 417 msec, which is too long for syllables in this material. In fact, the TIMIT dataset as a whole has 80363 syllables in 16918.1 seconds, for an average of 210.5 msec per syllable, so that 417 msec is within 1% of the average duration of two syllables. […] One hypothesis might be that this somehow reflects the organization of English speech rhythm into 'feet' or 'stress groups', typically consisting of a stressed syllable followed by one or more unstressed syllables."

I added that "Unfortunately there aren't any datasets comparable to TIMIT in other languages; but I'll see what I can come up with as a more-or-less parallel test in languages that are said to be 'syllable timed' rather than 'stress timed." Almost ten years later, I've never delivered on that promise, though it would have been easy to do so. So for today's Breakfast Experiment™ I'll show the same analysis for the 6300 sentences in the recently-published Global TIMIT Mandarin Chinese dataset.

[This is a guest post by ChatGPT]

Write a Language Log blog post by Victor H. Mair

Title: "The Wonders of the Chinese Language"

As one of the world's oldest and most complex languages, Chinese has captivated linguists and language enthusiasts for centuries. From its unique writing system to its vast vocabulary and intricate grammar, Chinese is a fascinating and challenging language that continues to surprise and delight those who study it.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Chinese is its writing system. Chinese characters are visual symbols that convey meaning, and they are used in both written and spoken language. Unlike the phonetic alphabets used in many other languages, Chinese characters do not correspond to specific sounds, but rather to concepts or ideas. This makes the learning process much more complex, as students must memorize thousands of characters and learn their meanings and pronunciations.

Let us begin this post with a brief introduction to the 16th-century Hokkien (Minnan) drama, Tale of the Lychee Mirror:

(source)