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Polysyllabism in Sinitic and (phonemic) syllable stress

AntC wrote: To your recent point on the 'slippery, slithery' article …   There's a town on Taiwan's East coast 'Taimali' / 太麻里鄉. This name is from the indigenous Paiwan language [also here for the people]. [see wikip]   I naively pronounced it with stress on the first syllable. I was roundly corrected by the Taiwanese […]

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How to call your relations

In the last few years I've noticed a number of apps that can be used to figure out the proper terms to refer to your relations in Chinese.  Of course, this is a problem in all languages.  For example, who is your "second cousin twice removed"?  Some people care about these things and are good […]

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A different kind of snake year

On the morning of Chinese New Year's Eve, WXPN (Penn's excellent radio station) had a nice program about the significance of the festival and some of the events that would be going on to celebrate it — including activities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. WXPN did its homework, and most […]

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AI systems still can't count

…at least not when simple properties of character-sequences are involved. For some past versions of this problem, see The ‘Letter Equity Task Force’” (12/5/2024). And there's a new kid on the block, DeepSeek, which Kyle Orland checked out yesterday at Ars Technica — "How does DeepSeek R1 really fare against OpenAI’s best reasoning models?". The […]

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Does handwriting still matter?

It's a subject that won't go away. When I was in high school, I concocted an embarrassingly sophomoric signature: I wrote that iteration of my youthful signature on the front flyleaf of my beloved Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (1960), which, from that year till today has been one of my most precious possessions. When I went away […]

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Slick, Slithery and Slippery

[myl: This is an inaugural post from Chu-Ren Huang, a new LLOG contributor.] The 29th of January will be the first day of the Year of the Snake according to the Chinese zodiac. Of all the twelve animals representing the zodiac, the choice of the snake may seem to be dubious to our modern sensibility. […]

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Diplo speak: double talk

With the changing of the guard at the State Department, the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and his counterpart in China's Foreign Ministry, Wang Yi, must needs have a dialog, a man-to-man conversation, so to speak.  As is customary with China's wolf warriors, however, Wang Yi was up to his old habits of giving […]

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Sino-American diplomatic slang in the mid-70s

[This is a guest post by Don Keyser] A true tale from nearly a half century ago … prompted by reading the mox nix posting to LL.  —–   My first of three Beijing postings was 1976-78 to the U.S. Liaison Office.  USLO was tiny — 25 total personnel (9 "substantive" [Chief, USLO; Deputy Chief, […]

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Mox nix

A contributor to one of the series I oversee wrote to me as follows: As always, feel free to edit as you see fit, and to use my name or not, depending on context. ("Mox nix" as the GIs like to say in Germany, showing off their German.)    Although I had never seen "mox nix" written […]

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Roman curse tablets

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 […]

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The earliest kanji in Japan?

/ 「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

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A Greco-Bactrian Great Wall in Central Asia

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 […]

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Zoroastrian "heaven"

[This is a guest post by Chris Button] I think I might finally have figured out heaven:    tiān 天 LMC tʰian, EMC tʰɛn, OC xjəm xiān 祆 LMC xian, EMC xɛn, OC xəɲ ~ xjəm   It's Pulleyblank's formulation (xj- > tʰ ; -jəm > -ɛn), but it also explains why x- is retained in 祆 because of it […]

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