Language Log

To this post made more than half a month ago, "The invention, development, and decipherment of writing" (12/30/22), after a couple of important comments on other subjects (Phrygian inscriptions; Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Chinese stimulus diffusion of writing), R. Fenwick made the following vital remarks, and just in the nick of time before comments closed:

@David Marjanović:
Heyerdahl obviously demonstrated that such a voyage wasn't physically impossible. There's just no reason to assume it actually happened.

Except that it actually did happen. It's true that Heyerdahl's specific settlement model has subsequently not held water – we know now that Polynesia was settled rather from the western Pacific and ultimately Taiwan – but at least one successful return voyage in the other direction was almost certainly achieved. And we do have at least one very powerful reason to conclude that it was: sweet potatoes. They've been widely cultivated by eastern Polynesian peoples since well before European incursion into the Pacific (the earliest ¹⁴C dates we have on sweet potato remains are from c. 1210—1400 AD, on the Cook Islands), but sweet potatoes are native to South and Central America, and early Polynesian seafarers most likely took on sweet potato cultivation as a result of direct trade with the Inca. There's even a singular but stark linguistic footprint of the interaction, as Proto-Eastern Polynesian *kumara "sweet potato" (cp. Māori, Rarotongan kūmara, Rapanui, Tuamotuan kumara, Marquesan kūma‘a, Hawaiian ‘uwala) is virtually identical to terms for sweet potato in the Quechuan languages (e.g. Cuzco khumara, Ayacucho kumar, Northern Pastaza kumal, Colonial Chincha cumar).

Other evidence for Polynesians visiting South America is unfortunately very thin, but I've read reports from a couple of archaeological excavations – in Chile, I think – where small quantities of avian bone have been recovered that are consistent with domestic chickens, a south-eastern Asian domesticate that formed a key part of Polynesian diets. I'll have to look into the literature a little further and see if the situation on the ground has improved regarding pre-Columbian chickens. There's also a recent study that also claimed a South American genetic component in portions of the Polynesian human population, but I haven't read the article yet.

"Baby Blues" by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott for January 16, 2023:

(source)

Enigmatic East Asian sign:

In this post, I will focus on the adversative passive usage of nèijuǎn 内卷 ("involution"). 

Etymology

Calque of English involution, from its Latin roots. This sense was coined in Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia (1963) by Clifford Geertz, as an antonym of evolution, where Geertz observed Javanese and Balinese rice farmers failed to transit from labor-intensive farming to capital-intensive farming, but rather developing intensive competition that does not increase productivity.

Usage

1. (economics, social sciences, of a society or nation) to stop developing or progressing despite intense inner competition
2. (neologism, slang) to be in a state of increased competition for limited resources, requiring great effort to stay ahead
3. (neologism, slang) to study harder or work longer as a result of intense competition among peers

(source)

In the wake of Wordle have come many other-dles and similar games — a sample in alphabetical order:

Absurdle, Antiwordle, Byrdle, CFBordle, Crosswordle, Dangle, Dordle, Framed, Gordle, Heardle, Hello Wordl, IYKYK, Leaderboardle, Lewdle, Lookdle, Lordle of the Rings, Nerdle, Octordle, Peotl, Primel, Quordle, Searchdle, Sedecordle, Squirdle, Star Wordle,  Taylordle, Waffle, WARdle, Weddle, Wheredle, Word Hurdle, Worldle,  …

Now from Dallin Tucker and Benjamin Tucker comes Gramle, a Wordle-like game where the goal is an IPA transcription of a displayed spectrogram and waveform. According to the About page, "Gramle was created as a collaboration between DT and BVT. It was DT’s high school computer science final project".

It's wonderful that a bright high-school student can now create an impressive interactive web app like this. Further development might well turn this into a useful way to learn about analyzing spectrograms and waveforms — though I suspect that increasing its educational effectiveness might take it in a somewhat less Wordle-ish direction…

From Michael Carasik:

I have been wondering whether Gandhi’s “ahimsa” can be related to Hebrew חמס, the reason (per Gen 6:11) that God brought the Flood.

Michael asks whether this connection is plausible.

Though Sanskrit is an Indo-European language and Hebrew is Semitic, my initial impression is that the connection is not entirely implausible.  Here's why.

From Ellen Fleming, a reporter for WWLP22 in Chicopee, Massachusetts:

Sometimes that Boston accent slips out when you least expect it pic.twitter.com/urXO2xrQ6E

— Ellen Fleming (@EllenFlem) January 12, 2023

[Following up on the previous post…] David Owen wrote the following as empirical support for his claim that sentence-initial appositives ("Bad Things") are a recent innovation:

I reread most of Samuel Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets,” and skimmed as much as a modern reader can stand of “The Rambler,” and penetrated as far as it’s humanly possible to penetrate into “Rasselas,” and found no examples.

So I downloaded Volume 1 of Lives of the Poets, sentencized it, ran the simple search for sentence-initial participles, removed the non-appositives, and found 36 remaining examples of this "Bad Things" subset:

David Owen, "The Objectively Objectionable Grammatical Pet Peeve", The New Yorker 1/12/2023:

Usage preferences are preferences, not laws, and I sometimes switch sides. […]

But some common practices are objectively objectionable, in my opinion. Here’s an example of a sentence type that I think no writer should ever use:

A former resident of Brooklyn, Mrs. Jones is survived by three daughters and five grandchildren.

The first phrase is an appositive—typically a noun or noun phrase that modifies another noun or noun phrase, which appears next to it in the sentence. (“A former resident of Brooklyn” and “Mrs. Jones” refer to the same person, so they are said to be “in apposition.”) Appositives almost always follow the noun they modify, and are set off by commas; the kind I don’t like come first. I also don’t like sentences that, to me, seem closely related to my “Mrs. Jones” example, but are syntactically different, as in this paragraph from National Geographic:

Known affectionately as “the girls,” Ruth and Emily have a lot of fun for two Asian elephants. Ages 54 and 48, they spend their days tinkering with an array of special toys at the Buttonwood Park Zoo in Massachusetts. No mere plastic playthings, these toys have been engineered to appeal to the pachyderms’ social nature, psychology, and intelligence.

My problem with all such sentences is that they seem to have been turned inside out: they start in one direction, then swerve in another.  […] Grammatical terms are hard to keep straight, even for grammarians. For the sake of simplicity, therefore, I will refer to all such front-loaded, somersaulting sentences as Bad Things.

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

Below are my reconstructed Old Chinese onsets lined up with the 22 "tiangan dizhi"* calendrical signs ("ganzhi"). To be absolutely clear, the reconstructions are based on evidence unrelated to the ganzhi. It's just a very interesting coincidence that they happen to line up so well. Pulleyblank was clearly onto something! I'm not including the Middle Chinese reflexes here, but I have worked them out in detail and can send that over if there is interest. Two things not noted in the list are that an s- prefix caused aspiration (e.g., st- > tʰ–) and that the voiced stops alternated with prenasalized forms (e.g. b ~ ᵐb).

[*VHM:  "ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches"]

A colleague recently called my attention to "rapid b’ball fans".  Carol Kennedy remarked to me that what the colleague intended was "rabid b’ball fans".  Carol noted further that her father, Leigh Lisker, an experimental phonetician and specialist on Telugu who was in the departments of linguistics and South Asian Regional Studies at Penn and was also affiliated as a research scientist at Haskins Laboratories, used "rapid" and "rabid" over and over again when he was exploring voice onset times, etc.

In a masterful Smithsonian Magazine (January-February 2023) article, Chanan Tigay documents:

How an Unorthodox Scholar Uses Technology to Expose Biblical Forgeries:  Deciphering ancient texts with modern tools, Michael Langlois challenges what we know about the Dead Sea Scrolls

This engrossing account is so rich that I can only touch on a few of the highlights.  It's about a would-be, and to some extent still is, rock musician — looking like the bassist from Def Leppard — named Michael Langlois.  But, at 46, "he is also perhaps the most versatile—and unorthodox—biblical scholar of his generation."

What makes Langlois so special?  Reading through Tigay's article, it is his relentless quest to get to the bottom of puzzles posed by tiny details of the Dead Scrolls, and his creativity in devising unconventional tools and approaches for doing so.

From TIC Redux:

In the 1971 British dark comedy horror film "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", the title character (played by a scenery-chewing Vincent Price) elaborately kills his victims through torturous deaths inspired by the ten (or so?) Plagues of Egypt… More than once in the film, those biblical plagues are referred to (per closed-captioning) as "the G'Tach"… That term intrigues me, but I've never been able to find any uses of, or references to, it except in connection with this film… Is it a real word?…