New information about the Memorial Service for Victor Mair, Saturday 10/10 from 2:00 to 5:00pm: For those who can't attend in person at Swarthmore Friends Meeting (12 Whittier Place, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania), it will be available here through Zoom.
A memorial service for Victor Mair will be held at Swarthmore Friends Meeting (12 Whittier Place, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania) on the afternoon of Saturday, October 10, between 2:00 and 5:00.
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.)
People pronounce my surname all sorts of different ways — Myer, Mare, Meer, Mire, as in Golda Meir, etc., etc., with the number of syllables (one or two), accent, and vowel quality varying almost limitlessly — but I've never once in my life "corrected" anyone, because I think they're all legitimate. Think of the different […]
BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth program for 4/20/2010 deals with relations between Mandarin and English. Victor's segment of the program is about the role of pinyin. LL commenters may find a nit or two to pick with the program's online self-description, but Victor thinks they did a good job in weaving the interviews together […]
From the Wikipedia page on Pafnuty Chebyshev: The surname Chebyshev has been transliterated in several different ways, including Tchebichef, Tchebychev, Tchebycheff, Tschebyschev, Tschebyschef, Tschebyscheff, Čebyčev, Čebyšev, Chebysheff, Chebychov and Chebyshov (which provides the closest pronunciation in English to the correct pronunciation in old Russian). Chebychev is an erroneous mixture between English and French transliterations. 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