When I checked into a hotel on the east side of Pittsburgh yesterday afternoon, the manager told me he was from "Buckanen", West Virginia. I just assumed that he was using some local variant of "Buchanan", and it sounded very unusual to me, since the only pronunciation of "Buchanan" I've ever heard is /bjuːˈkænən/. When […]
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 […]
Prefatory note: In this post, I take the noun "vaccine" as the basic word under discussion, but also consider other cognate terms ("vaccinate", "vaccination"). Here's a standard dictionary entry for "vaccine": n. 1. any preparation of weakened or killed bacteria or viruses introduced into the body to prevent a disease by stimulating antibodies against it.2. […]
[This is a guest post by Rhona Fenwick] Though best-known for its titanic consonantal inventory, Ubykh also has an etymologically fascinating vocabulary, heavy with loans from a diverse array of sources. Many of these are drawn from the indigenous lexicons of its Circassian and Abkhaz sisters, but Circassian and Abkhaz both also acted as proxies […]
[This is a guest post by Chau Wu, with additions at the bottom by VHM and others] On the akinakes* (Scythian dagger / short sword) and Xiongnu (Hunnish) horse sacrifice Chinese historical records suggest that the akinakes, transliterated from Greek ἀκῑνάκης, may be endowed with spiritual significance in the eyes of ancient Chinese and Northern […]
No, that is not a typo for "A woman". It is meant to be the feminine gendered equivalent of "Amen". Rep. Emanuel Cleaver closes Congress’ opening prayer with ‘amen and awoman’ By Emily Jacobs, New York Post January 4, 2021 A House Democrat tasked with leading the body in an opening prayer for the new […]
This is something I wanted to write about back in mid-July, but it fell victim to my backlog of thousands of e-mails. Now, slowly, slowly, slowly, I'm catching up, and I find that it's still a worthy topic to post on. "‘China, master copycat’: uproar in Indonesia at Xinhua’s batik claim" Xinhua released a video […]
I've long been deeply intrigued by the word "macaque". It's an odd-looking term with a murky history, but somehow it just seems to fit the creature that it designates. American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed.: French, from Portuguese macaco, of Bantu origin; akin to Kongo makako, monkeys : ma-, pl. n. pref. […]
A couple of decades ago, in response to a long-forgotten taxonomic proposal, I copied into antique html Jorge Luis Borges' essay "El Idioma Analítico de John Wilkins", along with an English translation. This afternoon, a reading-group discussion about algorithms for topic classification brought up the idea of a single universal tree-structured taxonomy of topics, and […]
I was thrilled when I came upon this 3:04 YouTube video by chance on the morning of the mid-Autumn festival (October 1):
Review: "Poems Without an ‘I’", by Madeleine ThienNYRB October 8, 2020 Issue The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po)by Ha JinPantheon, 301 pp. The Selected Poems of Tu Fu: Expanded and Newly Translatedby David HintonNew Directions, 267 pp. Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetryby David HintonShambhala, 138 pp. I have […]
There's a Reddit page with this title: "Fully anglicised Japan, based off actual etymologies, rendered into plausible English". Feast your eyes: (source)
From the time I started learning Chinese more than half a century ago, I had a hard time lining up the many Chinese terms for different types of citrus with the corresponding words in English. For example, I always wanted to call oranges "júzi 橘子", but it is technically (botanically) more correct to call […]