In the fifth comment to "Artistic Sinograph: Buddha" (11/11/21), stephen reeves says he'd like to hear about the origins of Zen. This has always been one of my favorite topics, so I'm more than happy to tell it. "Zen" entered the English lexicon already by 1727. Here's a succinct, serviceable, popular explanation of its derivation: […]
I take great pleasure in finding morphemes in early Sinitic that are disyllabic, i.e., neither syllable of which means anything by itself, but acquires meaning only in combination with another morpheme to which it is customarily linked. I have found hundreds of ancient terms composed of such morphemes and have written about many of them […]
We often encounter fake "Oriental wisdom" that purports to come from the ancient sages. So much of it clogs the internet that it is very hard to keep track of what is genuine and what is false. And then there's the (in)famous pseudo-linguistics of the "Crisis = danger + opportunity" trope which has captured the […]
From Zihan Guo: A Japanese expression I came upon in a reading from Takami sensei's class reminded me of the "om" you mentioned weeks ago in our class. 阿吽の呼吸（aun'nokokyū あうんのこきゅう） It refers to the synchronization of breathing of sumo opponents before a match. I read about this in an article about an interview with a […]
Yesterday, while doing research for a paper on medieval Dunhuang popular narratives (biànwén 變文 ["transformation texts"]), I did a Google search for the Peking Library, where some of the bianwen manuscripts are kept. Instead of the national library of China in Peking / Beijing in the PRC, I was led to the Pekin Public Library […]
My first acquaintance with the word "karaoke" was back in the 1980s, when I was visiting my brother Denis, who was then a translator for Foreign Languages Press in Beijing. He lived in the old Russian-built Friendship Hotel, a very spartan place compared to today's luxury accommodations in big Chinese cities. There wasn't much unusual, […]
In various publications and Language Log posts over the years, I have collected scores of old polysyllabic words (e.g., those for reindeer, phoenix, coral, spider, earthworm, butterfly, dragonfly, balloon lute, meandering / winding, etc.), which proves that Sinitic has never been strictly monosyllabic, although that is a common misapprehension, even among many scholars. The reason […]
To comprehend what's going on in this post, you have to understand the basics of what an "otaku" is. DEFINITION: (fandom slang) One with an obsessive interest in something, particularly anime or manga. ETYMOLOGY: From Japanese オタク (otaku, “nerd, geek”), from お宅 (otaku, honorific for “you”), originally the honorific version of 宅 (taku, “home”). [VHM: […]
Given this: "Measure words for robots" (9/4/21) and this: "Arigatō" (9/3/21), I could not help but think of this:
There's probably no other Japanese word that is better known to the world than "arigatō". In this little essay, Kaki Okumura attempts to explain why "there is difficulty" means "thank you". This is something that I have often pondered myself, but is that all there is to it? And what about the alleged Buddhist aspects […]
Yesterday I went to Philadelphia's famed Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians. I hadn't been there for about 35 years, so it was nice to reacquaint myself with some favored old exhibits (human beings with long horns growing out of their forehead, fetuses at all stages of formation and deformation, bodies with extra heads […]
My brother Denis and I have long been intrigued by the use of the prefix yǒu 有 ("there is / are / exist[s]") in a wide variety of circumstances in Old Sinitic: e.g., before the word for family temples (yǒu miào 有廟), before the names of barbaric tribes (yǒu Miáo 有苗), and before place names […]