Language Log

Curse tablet found in Roman-era grave in France targets enemies by invoking Mars, the god of war
Excavation of a Roman-era cemetery in France yielded nearly two dozen lead tablets inscribed in Latin and Gaulish.
By Kristina Killgrove, Live Science (January 15, 2025)

It's interesting precisely where they positioned the curse tablet:

A skeleton found during excavations beneath a historic hospital in Orléans, France,
has a curse tablet between its legs. (Image credit: Service Archéologie Orléans (SAVO))

／
「日本で最古」の“文章”か…高知・南国市の遺跡から発掘の弥生土器に文字…2世紀後半〜3世紀中ごろに作られた「刻書土器」文章としては最古の歴史を塗り替える可能性も
＼https://t.co/rRJbBB2jgj#高知 #ニュース #テレビ高知 #KUTVニュース #KUTV #NEWSDIG

— KUTVテレビ高知@開局55周年 (@kutv_tvkochi) January 23, 2025

The merging of peoples, cultures, and languages at the heart of Eurasia

The Iron Gates (Darband), a 3-kilometer (1.9 mi) mountain pass that separated the Indo-Greek kingdoms from Central Asian nomads. The Graeco-Bactrian ruler Euthydemus (230–200 BC) built a great wall there to protect the kingdom. c. 130 BC a nomadic people, the Yuezhi, invaded Bactria swarmed the kingdom, and killed its last ruler.

The Iron Gates (Darband), a 3-kilometer (1.9 mi) mountain pass that separated the Indo-Greek kingdoms from Central Asian nomads.
The Graeco-Bactrian ruler Euthydemus (230–200 BC) built a great wall there to protect the kingdom.
c. 130 BC a nomadic people, the Yuezhi, invaded… pic.twitter.com/KZkVlVLory

— LiorLefineder (@lefineder) January 13, 2025

[This is a guest post by Chris Button]

Marco Rubio has been named Secretary of State by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, swiftly and unanimously approved by the United States Senate, and promptly sworn in by Vice President JD Vance.  When it comes to China, our most formidable foe, however, there is a hitch — Rubio is under a travel ban by the Chinese government.

Zěnme bàn 怎么办？("What to do?")

Clearly this will not do.  Even China knows that, so their Foreign Ministry has thought of a devilishly clever way to circumvent their own ban.

Beijing changes Rubio’s Chinese name, perhaps to get around travel ban
Changes to official translations are approved at a high level, and could be a way to ease sanctions indirectly.  By Yitong Wu, Kit Sung, and Chen Zifei, rfa
2025.01.21

China's morphosyllabic script confronts the world, and itself — with unique challenges.

Beijing has changed the rendering of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s name in Chinese, sparking speculation that officials might want to get around their own travel ban, in an apparent olive branch to President Donald Trump, analysts said on Tuesday.

Variety told us a few days ago that Bad Bunny's new album made it to first place on the Billboard 200 — "Bad Bunny Beats Taylor Swift in Extremely Tight Race to No. 1 on Albums Chart". In other coverage, Pitchfork's review leads with the assertion that "Bad Bunny synthesizes the past and present sound of Puerto Rico for an anthemic, cross-generational album", and connects the music to the island's social and political history.

My focus this morning is on the album's non-standard capitalization ("DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" = " I should have taken more photos"). We can start with a difference in editorial choices: Pitchfork follows the album's use of upper and lower case letters in its title, while Variety standardizes the spelling (“Debí Tirar Más Fotos”). The English translation in either case is of course the same, "I should have taken more photos".

Today's xkcd:

Mouseover title: "Can you pass the nackle?"

[I wrote this piece more than a year and a half ago, but neglected to post it because I was in the midst of a long run.  Nonetheless, it's still relevant and interesting, so I'm going ahead to post it now.  Since I was able to revise some small points and we garnered several interesting new comments, it was worth a second throw.]

"Linguists have identified a new English dialect that’s emerging in South Florida", by Phillip M. Carter in The Conversation (6/12/23)

Beginning sentences:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans.

In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance.

According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish.

Poor cattle, they suffer for / from their gallstones in more ways than one.  If you want to know why, read the previous Language Log posts on bezoars, for which see "Selected readings" below.

For linguists, one of the most interesting things about the Chinese term for "bezoar", niúhuáng 牛黃 ("cow yellow"), is that it is among the earliest attestable borrowings into Sinitic from Sanskrit, viz., gorocanā गोरोचना ("bright yellow orpiment prepared from the bile of cattle; yellow patch for the head of a cow; bezoar") — already in pre-Buddhist times.

Because they are so expensive and sought after by believers in TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), bezoars are back in the news again:

Cattle Gallstones, Worth Twice as Much as Gold, Drive a Global Smuggling Frenzy
A prized ingredient in China’s $60 billion traditional medicine industry, gallstones have become the must-have item among underground traders and armed robbers in Brazil

By Samantha Pearson, Wall Street Journal (Jan. 19, 2025)

A Brazilian pasture holds a potential fortune on the hoof.

There has been quite a ruckus over the impending ban on TikTok, a mainland Chinese short-form video hosting service, and its supposed replacement by REDnote (aka Xiaohongshu [XHS], aka Little Red Book, aka RedNote, aka RED), a Chinese social networking and e-commerce platform.  I think that much / most of the commotion is sheer hype to stir up business.  Nonetheless, since hundreds of millions of impressionable youths and clueless adults are all in a lather over this battle of the alien apps, I suppose we can't ignore them on Language Log.

The claims about the supposed impact of this switcheroo are outlandish at best — such as that hordes of Americans are scrambling to learn Mandarin so they can use REDnote (you don't just rush out to learn Mandarin so you can hop on an online app), that they are military applications being tapped by the Chinese government, and so forth.

That's about as much as I personally am prepared to say about the internet imbroglio, so I will hand the baton to two of my colleagues.

From Mark Sundaram and Aven McMaster at The Endless Knot, 50 minutes on "The Scandalous History of the Manhattan Cocktail":

Above is the cover of John DeFrancis's magnum opus, Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1989).  It has a stunning illustration consisting of the phonetic representation of the first six words of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address transcribed as follows: acoustic wave graph of the voice of William S.-Y. Wang, IPA, roman letters, Cyrillic, devanagari, hangul, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Arabic, katakana, Yi (Lolo, Nuosu, etc.), cuneiform, and sinographs (a fuller version of the cover illustration may be found on the frontispiece [facing the title page] and there is a generous explanation on pp. 248-251).

I don't order things online, but sometimes others do so for me, and I'm always amused / bemused by wording such as this:  "Your package will ship on 1/23/25". Normally, I would expect "your package will be shipped on 1/23/25" or "we will ship your package on 1/23/25".  Now, however, "Your package will ship on 1/23/25" seems to have become almost standard.

Here's a real-life example, received this afternoon:

We have received and begun processing your gift selection. Your gift will ship via United Parcel Service, to the address you confirmed during the ordering process. We expect your gift to ship within 2 weeks.