"Lost in Translation? Understandings and Misunderstandings about the Ancient Practice of 'Sacred Prostitution'", Ancient Origins: Ishtar was sometimes called the Goddess Har since she was the mother of the harlots. These “harlots” were not prostitutes as we know them, but priestesses and healers. These harlots were holy virgins serving goddesses such as Ishtar, Asherah, or Aphrodite. […]
"Five common English words we don’t know the origins of – including ‘boy’ and ‘dog’", Francesco Perono Cacciafoco*, The Conversation (7/4/24) [*See the author's extraordinary academic profile here.] The author begins by describing the act of naming items in the world, the etymological study of words, the comparative method, the relationship of English to Germanic […]
"Significant energy source found under US-Mexico border", KXAN 6/23/2024 [emphasis added]: Researchers have found a significant source of geothermal energy underneath the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, which could lead to promising clean energy development in the rural region. […] “There’s a thin, 10- to 15-mile-wide region that runs parallel or along the Rio […]
By now, we have conclusively traced the path of the domesticated horse from the area around the southern Urals and Pontic Steppe through Central Asia to East Asia. It's time to pay more attention to another equid, this one not so glamorous, but still redoubtable in its own formidable way: Equus asinus asinus. Samira Müller, […]
Note from François Lang: "This is not photoshopped. I took this photo this afternoon in Rockville MD."
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-thirty-eighth issue: “Mapping the Language of Spices: A Corpus-Based, Philological Study on the Words of the Spice Domain,” by Gábor Parti. ABSTRACT Most of the existing literature on spices is to be found in the areas of gastronomy, botany, and history. This study instead investigates […]
If you can't make up your mind what to do about something, then in French you would say "je suis partagé": I'm torn or divided over it. You can't decide what to do about it. You can't make up your mind whether to be pleased or angry with something. But the verb "partager" means "to […]
[This is a guest post by Axel Schuessler] Some Old Chinese (OC) words that relate to religion, mythology and ritual, and words found in ritual literature (Yijing, Liji, Zhouli), have no Sino-Tibetan (ST) roots, but instead have connections with other language families. For comparison, the first section of this paper will list (§1) Sino-Tibetan […]
Over the past few months, U.S. political events have given Ben Zimmer opportunity for some fun etymologies in his WSJ column: mug shot, racketeering, listless. There are plenty more targets Out There — like candidate, from Latin candidus (“dazzling white, shining, clear”); or debate, originally from Latin dis- (“apart, in different directions”) + battuere (“to […]
I never heard of it in America or Europe (seems to be a quite recent phenomenon — by that name — but see below for the deeper history of the activity). Apparently it has taken off in China during the last year: Stooping Takes China by Storm as Zoomers Scour the Streets for Junk Cash-strapped […]
The word eggcorn was originally proposed in a LLOG post almost 20 years ago — "Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???", 9/23/2003. And the word is now recognized by most current English dictionaries and other relevant sources, which gloss it variously, e.g. — the Oxford English Dictionary, ("An alteration of a word or phrase […]
Sign on the elevator doors of a Taipei department store: