Victor Mair passed away two days ago, on Sunday 6/28/2026. We'll have a proper series of memorial posts and links later, but for now, here's a Facebook post from his brother Denis, his Wikipedia page, and a link to LLOG posts written by or mentioning him.
I've been reading way too much Victor Mair. In the restaurant of my hotel in London I just saw an English girl wearing a T-shirt on which it said this: H O P E And I immediately thought, who is Ho Pe?
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Yesterday on WHYY's Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane interviewed Victor Mair about his translation of The Art of War. You can listen to the interview here. (I've created a new URI for the interview, because the one in their archive for the interview has a bad time offset, and starts you off about 8 minutes in.)
[VHM: N.B.: I had nothing to do with this. It's all between Gemini and Gemini, with J. P. Mallory acting as the amanuensis. He can also evoke the woman from Xiaohe or Cherchen Man (Ur David) via Gemini or one of the other platforms if you'd like to hear "Mair" conversing with them.] ========== The […]
As has often been mentioned on Language Log, Dunhuang is a desert oasis town at the far western end of the Gansu / Hexi Corridor. This is where the fabled Silk Road splits to head north and south around the vast Tarim Basin (filled with the extremely hot [summer] / cold [winter] / arid) Taklakamakan Desert. […]
When I first learned the name of this important port city in northeastern Taiwan, I was told that it was originally written with characters that mean "chicken coop; hen coop; rooster cage", Taiwanese "Kelang" (POJ Ke-lâng/Koe-lâng). I found that to be rather droll and thought that it was probably derived from the cramped geological formation […]
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-sixty-fourth issue: “Mythologies, Religions, and Peoples Outside Ancient China in the Classic of Mountains and Seas,” by Xiaofeng He. https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp364_Classic_of_Mountains_and_Seas.pdf
It's not every day that you get a chance to experience Old Uyghur (language; script). Recently, when I was looking through albums of photographs of medieval Buddhist wall-paintings, I spotted an Old Uyghur inscription: (click to embiggen) That's from a Five Dynasties (907-979) transformation tableau (biànxiàng 變相) depicting the story of the Buddhist saint, Mahāmaudgalyāyana, rescuing […]
Martin Schwartz called my attention to the Jiroft culture: The Jiroft culture, also known as the Intercultural style or the Halilrud style, is an early Bronze Age (3rd millennium BC) archaeological culture, located in the territory of present-day Sistan and Baluchestan and Kermān provinces of Iran. The proposed type site is Konar Sandal, near Jiroft […]
敦煌学大辞典第二版全新发布了！ New second edition of Dictionary of Dunhuang Studies!敦煌学不可或缺的工具 Indispensable tool for #DunhuangStudies郝春文 主编70%词条已修订了词汇量：241万 ➡️ 400万词条数：5,000 ➡️ 12,000 pic.twitter.com/vYLaYQAHgL — Neil Schmid 史瀚文 (@DNeilSchmid) January 15, 2025
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As a starting point for pierogi, here's a basic definition: Pierogi, one or more dumplings of Polish origin, made of unleavened dough filled with meat, vegetables, or fruit and boiled or fried or both. In Polish pierogi is the plural form of pieróg (“dumpling”), but in English the word pierogi is usually treated as either […]
Iskandar Ding and the Scythians are well known on Language Log. Now they come together in this reference to Christopher Beckwith's The Scythian Empire: What an excitingly bold book! Finally got the paperback edition. pic.twitter.com/R7M11MCNQ2 — Iskandar Ding (@iskdin) July 1, 2024 [click on the illustration to go to the X post and then click […]