he machines, because humans are more likely than not to read it that way too] by Liú Yíngshèng 刘迎胜 (which you'd told me about). Having lost interest in the subject, I hardly ever even opened it. Now I have opened it. (Also I find that electronic editions are available from the shadow libraries and have downloaded it.)

In the Liu Yingsheng dictionary I find a comprehensive discussion of the origin of this lexical item. The idea that the name has anything to do with teaching children (referring to the version(s) containing “兒”) is virtually ridiculed. And the ur-form of the various names may be xiájīng 狹經.   [VHM:  IA has made a screen shot of this entry in the dictionary (pp. 36-41 of vol. 1).]
VHM:  To conclude this episode of my conversation with the reclusive IA, I asked him:

<in

He replied:

I really have no idea. (You ought not mistake me for someone with a great degree of coherent thinking.) Best that you use your own judgment and viewpoint.
I don't know how it should be incorporated, if at all, but to repeat myself, I am very much irritated by the infantilising and denigrating indignity done to the Perso-Arabic script by the wide-spread presentation of it (which I believe is on account of hanograph-mediated folk-etymology involving “兒”) as ''children's script' and the like. A logical consequence of such a presentation can result, consciously or unconsciously, in thinking of the Perso-Arabic script as something that adults unfortunately bereft of 'a proper knowledge' of hanography unfortunately had to resort to. The underpinning premise is that any Hannic speech-variety, if written at all, must of course be written in Hanographs. Phonographic representations … Perso-Arabic script, Pe̍h-ōe-jī,  or what have you … are but a sad cripple.

(I'm sure there are many who would find this viewpoint to be trivial and or madly eccentric/wrong.)

VHM:  Not me.  I find it to be brilliantly incisive and insightful. Selected readings

* "Persophone Muslim population in China" (4/2/24) — from Iskandar Ding
* "Ask Language Log: Syriac Christian tombstone inscription from Mongol period East Asia" (2/11/24) — also from Iskandar Ding
* "A Persian word in a Sinitic topolect" (3/10/20)"
* "Perso-Arabic and Sinitic Literacy" (6/19/09)
* "Café Sogdiana" (5/2/24)
* "Dungan: a Sinitic language written with the Cyrillic alphabet" (4/20/13) — Google Victor Mair Dungan Language Log for many more posts about this intriguing and linguistically important Sintic / Hannic language (Mandarin written in Cyrillic with numerous borrowings from Russian, Uyghur, and other non-Sinitic / Hannic languages)
* "Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform" (May, 1990)

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Language Log
AI voice-over?

On 5/8/2024, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) offered a "Graphical representation of how the precision cutting charges will be used on key bridge section":

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Several bits in the voice-over suggest that it was generated by a text-to-speech program — I'll note a couple of them below. And the failure to capitalize "Key Bridge" in the page's title might also be a symptom of AI-generation?
The first voice-over issue is the phrasing of the opening sentence:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

To refloat the motor vessel Dalí
the section of steel structure draped over it
and pinning it down must be removed.

Since the conjunction "draped over it and pinning it down" is a reduced relative clause, it's odd to have a strong phrase break after "over it".

And a bit later, the voice seems to place main word stress on the final syllable of "analyzed":

Your browser does not support the audio element.

First, salvage and demolition teams will have analyzed the structure,

Zeroing in a bit futrher:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Listen to the whole thing — what else do you hear?

Your browser does not support the audio element.

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Language Log
AI voice-over?

On 5/8/2024, the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) offered a "Graphical representation of how the precision cutting charges will be used on key bridge section":

Your browser does not support the video tag.

Several bits in the voice-over suggest that it was generated by a text-to-speech program — I'll note a couple of them below. And the failure to capitalize "Key Bridge" in the page's title might also be a symptom of AI-generation?
The first voice-over issue is the phrasing of the opening sentence:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

To refloat the motor vessel Dalí
the section of steel structure draped over it
and pinning it down must be removed.

Since the conjunction "draped over it and pinning it down" is a reduced relative clause, it's odd to have a strong phrase break after "over it".

And a bit later, the voice seems to place main word stress on the final syllable of "analyzed":

Your browser does not support the audio element.

First, salvage and demolition teams will have analyzed the structure,

Zeroing in a bit futrher:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

Listen to the whole thing — what else do you hear?

Your browser does not support the audio element.

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Language Log
Indigo and cabbage, part 2

The first part of this series, "Indigo and cabbage", written the day before Thanksgiving in 2023, is one of the most satisfying and fulfilling posts I've ever made.  This follow-up is even more of a delight, because here I get to introduce a new paper by anthropologist-linguist-textile expert Elizabeth J. W. Barber, and what a tour de force it is (see below).

Here I give an extended account of her scholarship, especially her early activities in the computer analysis of Chinese, because she was instrumental in helping to make that possible at its foundational stage.

She earned a bachelor's degree from Bryn Mawr College in Archaeology and Greek in 1962. Her chief mentor was Mabel Lang from whom she learned Linear B and who advised her honors thesis on Linear A. In addition to Lang, Wayland wrote her thesis under Emmett L. Bennett Jr. Her thesis used computer indices of the Hagia Triada Linear A texts in an attempt to decipher its signs and symbols. The computer indices were made via punched cards, a method which was preceded by the work of Alice E. Kober on Linear B. She earned her PhD from Yale University in linguistics in 1968. Her doctoral study at Yale University was supervised by Sydney Lamb, under whom she wrote her dissertation, "The Computer Aided Analysis of Undeciphered Ancient Texts."
Her books include: Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean (1992) — a monumental masterpiece Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (1995) The Mummies of Ürümchi (1999) When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth (2004; coauthored with husband Paul T. Barber) The Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance (2013) Resplendent Dress from Southeastern Europe: A History in Layers (2013) Two Thoughts with but a Single Mind: Crime and Punishment and the Writing of Fiction (2013; co-authored with husband P.T. Barber and Mary F. Zirin).

(Wikipedia)

From 1967 through 1969, Betchen (her nickname) was involved with The Chinese Linguistics Project at Princeton.  It was run by Frank Kierman, and the objective was to computerize a million-character corpus of Modern Vernacular Chinese, for teaching and analysis.  They hired her because she knew a lot about the computers of those days and was experienced in figuring out how to put weird scripts onto computers (having done Minoan Linear A as part of her PhD thesis).  There were two ways to go: give each character a unique number, or digitize the shape.  She was a pro at designing number systems for weird scripts.  On the other hand, the RAND Tablet (the original RAND Tablet cost $18,000 and was said to be "low cost") had just been invented, and the Mathematical Society in Providence had one, so she recalls a group from the Princeton project trekking up there to check it out.  You could draw the Chinese character–or any design–on the tablet and it would digitize it (with a much longer and more cumbersome number, but with lots of additional data about the shape encoded).

Also involved in the Princeton project were Jerry Norman from the University of Washington, whom we've often mentioned on Language Log, and his young colleague William Boltz, plus Hashimoto Mantaro, a graduate of the University of Tokyo and The Ohio State University,

Now for Betchen's new paper:

============ Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-fifth issue:

"Of Salt Men and Cloth: The Remarkable Textile History Preserved in Eurasian Salt-beds," by E.J.W. Barber. https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp345_salt_preserved_ancient_textiles.pdf
ABSTRACT

Ancient colored textiles are seldom preserved by anything exc[...]

ept salt or permafrost. Recent discoveries in collapsed areas of a salt mine in NW Iran have prompted this very brief comparison of the new finds, including their dyes, to the other two major Eurasian groups of salt-bed textiles.

—–

All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.

To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/

============

What does this new paper have to do with indigo and cabbage?  The last section is about dyes for blue, a favorite hue of humans.  The very last paragraph of that section reads as follows:

Sinologists have long wondered why the words for “blue” and “cabbage” in Chinese are homonyms: both 藍 lán in Mandarin. But just recently, perusing dye information about woad [VHM:  a common plant dye for blue] from Richard Laursen, Victor Mair noticed that woad is actually in the cabbage family, Brassicaceae (earlier called Cruciferae), and that rural people have long found ways to get blue coloring out of a number of types of cabbage (Mair 11/22/2023), especially the purple kind. Hence the unexpected homonyms. Thus, from all these textiles preserved in salt, we even have the solution of an interesting etymological conundrum.

And it includes one of humankind's favorite foods, which tastes good with a bit of salt sprinkled on and even better when turned into sauerkraut with the aid of salt. Selected readings

* "What's this pickled cabbage?" (5/25/12)
* "Conehead cabbage" (8/20/22)
* "Napa cabbage" (1/16/21)
* "Kimchee" (1/2/14)
* "What's this pickled cabbage?" (5/25/12)
* "The shrimp did what to the cabbage?" (9/11/06)
* "Wondrous blue" (5/9/22)
* "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22)
* "The colors of the seas and the directions" (4/28/21)
* "Grue and bleen: the blue-green distinction and its implications" (10/4/19)
* "Blue-Green Iranian 'Danube'" (10/26/19)

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
account for

If you account for something, you explain how it came to be the way it is.

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
louse up

to spoil something or make it fail

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torrid

Idiom of the Day
don't shoot the messenger

Don't get angry at or punish someone who is simply delivering bad or undesirable news, as he or she is not responsible for it. Watch the video

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Language Log
Taiwanese in France

On a wall at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales [National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations]) (established 1669) in Paris:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/inalco.jpg

Note that Taiwanese is referred to as "Taiwanais" in French and Tâi-gú / Tâi-gír / Tâi-gí  (MSM Táiyǔ in sinoglyphs.  According to the author of this article, where the photograph comes from, those designations are preferable to Bân-lâm-gí/gú 閩南語 (MSM Mǐnnányǔ) because, unlike Bân-lâm-gí/gú 閩南語 (MSM Mǐnnányǔ), they can directly bring the topic of discussion into the context of "Taiwan".  "In fact, the term 'Taiwanese' does clearly and directly represent a part of Taiwan's linguistic and cultural subjectivity."
Selected readings

* "Teaching Taiwanese in France" (8/17/23) — with a useful bibliography
* "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16)

[h.t. Chau Wu]

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Word of the Day
athirst

Definition: (adjective) Extremely desirous.
Synonyms: hungry, thirsty.
Usage: The young, enthusiastic student was athirst for knowledge.
Discuss

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Language Log
"Talking out of two ears"

From p. 224 of the transcript of the April 30 session of The People of the State of New York against Donald Trump, Defendant, where prosecutor Joshua Steinglass is questioning Keith Davidson, who was Stormy Daniel's lawyer at the time of the hush-money payment from Michael Cohen:

Q. During this time, were you also speaking with Michael Cohen on the phone?

A. Yes.

Q. How would you describe his demeanor during this time?

A. He was highly excitable. Sort of a pants on fire kind of guy. He had a lot of things going on. Frequently I would be on the phone with him, he would take another call, he would be talking out of two ears. Sort of like that movie with the dogs and squirrels.
I think Davidson probably meant "hair on fire", which is the normal idiom for being excited, rather than "pants on fire", which is the idiom for egregious falsehood. And it's clear what "talking of of two ears" means, logic aside. But I don't get the "movie with the dogs and squirrels" reference — any suggestions?

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Language Log
Arabic and the vernaculars, part 6

This post grew out of a comment I was making yesterday to a previous post about a wall at INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales [National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations]) (established 1669) in Paris that listed the many languages taught at that venerable institution.

As my eyes surveyed the mass of names on the wall, one thing struck me powerfully:  the large number of different Arabic languages.  This raised an interesting question:  common "wisdom" is that there is only one Arabic language, viz., Modern Standard Arabic [MSA], so how come there are so many different Arabic languages taught at INALCO?

Since the Arab vernaculars have been one of our favorite foci here at Language Log (see "Selected readings" below), I was interested to see how many different varieties of Arabic are represented on this wall:

Judéo-Arabe, Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic, Libyan Arabic (but that is MSA), Yemeni Arabic (also MSA, though it is generally considered to be a very conservative dialect cluster), Lebanese Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Arabe Littéral (which I take to signify written / literary MSA) in contrast to dialectal Arabic (though I'm not sure how it differs from regular MSA; perhaps it is hyper-conservative to a degree that it it not really "sayable", i.e., "writable but not sayable", cf. "Sayable but not writable" [9/12/13]; i.e., MWA [Modern Written Arabic]?).

I do not include Maltese because of the Romance superstrata, nor do I include Sorabe because that only refers to the script used to write the Austronesian language known as Malagasy, much as the Perso-Arabic script is used to write Sinitic Hui (Muslim) Mandarin.
It would appear that, to the teachers and administrators at INALCO, there must be sufficient differences among all these Arabic languages that they merit having separate offerings.

It seems that Arabic speaking countries possess a diglossia of MSA for formal, "proper" occasions and usage and a variety of vernaculars on a dialectal continuum for daily informal usage. SFAIK, only Egyptian vernacular has developed a widely used literary / written / cinematic form, even transcending its political borders to a certain degree. To what extent the other vernaculars are popular in music / song / TV, etc., in general, the situation must vary widely by country.

Worldwide, Arabic has about 372.7 million speakers (source), yet it has all of these different Arabic languages listed on the INALCO wall, despite the fact that theoretically and doctrinally there is only one (MSA).

Contrast that with India, which has a total population of 1.417 billion people, yet only has two or three languages represented on the INALCO wall, if you count Sanskrit, which is overwhelmingly a classical language.  Here at Penn, we teach virtually all of India's 22 official languages, at least 10 at any given time.

Urdu, which is mutually sayable with Hindi, but not mutually readable, is not taught at INALCO (source); with 230 million speakers, it is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world (source).
Hindi, which is taught at INALCO, has 615 million speakers and is the 3rd-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

Bengali is also taught at INALCO, probably because it is the official language of Bangladesh, has 272.7 million speakers and is the 7th-most widely spoken language in the world (source).

China has a total population of 1.412 billion people, of whom Ethnologue claims there are roughly 900 million speakers of Mandarin.  I don't believe it.  These are simply political propaganda figures put out by the CCP / PRC government.  At least half of those 900 million don't understand the other half.  It is telling that the wall refers to "Chinese" (Mandarin?) as Chinois in French and Zhōngwén 中文 (lit.[...]

, "central script / writing") in Sinographs.  Even if they're referring to "Mandarin" writ exceptionally large, Pǔtōnghuà 普通話 ("Common Speech") or Guóyǔ 國語 ("National Spoken Language") would be a better designation.

The INALCO wall also lists Cantonese, which certainly is a separate language, worldwide has nearly 100 million speakers.  Taiwanese (Táiyǔ 臺語) is listed on the wall and has approximately 15 million speakers.  Added to their related confreres on the mainland they constitute a group of approximately 50 million Minnan ("Southern Min") speakers.  I am pleased to see that the INALCO wall includes Uyghur, Mongolian, and Tibetan, all three of which non-Sinitic languages the CCP/PRC is actively trying to eliminate.
On balance, the INALCO wall reveals a great deal about the geopolitics of French language policy in the world today. Selected readings

* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 5" (8/20/22) — if you are interested in the problems raised in the current post, part 5 in the series is must reading.
* "Arabic and the vernaculars" (3/6/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 2" (3/8/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 3" (3/9/22)
* "Arabic and the vernaculars, part 4 — the case of Bible translations" (3/10/22)
* "Arabic as a macrolanguage" (10/21/18)
* "Arablish" (9/23/18)
* "Mutual intelligibility" (5/28/14)
* "Sayable but not writable" (9/12/13)
* "Sinitic is a group of languages, not a single language" (10/12/17)
* "Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages" (9/25/15)
* "Taiwanese in France" (5/11/24)
* "Sanskrit is far from extinct" (11/29/23)
* "Sanskrit resurgent" (8/13/14)
* "Spoken Sanskrit" (1/9/16)
* "'In Pāṇini We Trust'" (12/15/22)

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
yearn for

to want something very much

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
effing

used as a less offensive substitute for the highly-offensive taboo word "fucking"

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instigate

Idiom of the Day
land of plenty

A fictional or imagined utopian place where there is an abundance of everything needed to survive and flourish. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: bazaar

This word has appeared in 103 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?

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Word of the Day
plexor

Definition: (noun) A small hammer with a rubber head used in percussive examinations of the chest and in testing reflexes.
Synonyms: percussor, plessor.
Usage: When the doctor tapped my knee with the plexor, my reflex was so strong that I almost kicked him in the head!
Discuss

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Language Log
Tocharo-Sinica

Language Log has been fortunate to have had several guest posts and numerous comments by Douglas Adams, doyen of Tocharian studies in America (see "Selected readings" for a sampling).  Now, stimulated by the recent post on Chinese chariotry, he has written the following ruminations in response.

I read with interest the material on early Chinese chariotry.  It was far outside my competence to judge.  As you knew, I was most interested in the comment that was looking to the possibility of Tocharian > Chinese lexical borrowings.  As you also know, it has long been my suspicion that there was more west > east influence on Chinese language and culture than is generally realized.  And the "westerners" involved were most likely to have been Tocharians of one sort or another ("Tocharian D"?).  It's probably not only PIE pigs and honey that, via Tocharian, show up in Chinese.
It's a pity that the ancient Chinese, like the ancient Greeks, were so totally uninterested in the "barbarian" languages that were their neighbors.  We have our single sentence example of the Jie language recorded, not in a difficult Greek alphabet transcription, but rather in an inscrutable Chinese character transcription.  (Inscrutable because reconstructing pre-Middle-Chinese Chinese phonology makes reconstructing PIE phonology look like child's play.)  Adding to the problem of course is that Chinese phonology, at all times, renders that incorporation of foreign words possible only at the cost of (considerable) deformation.  Look, for instance, at how poor Buddhacinga's name is rendered (Fótúchéng 佛圖澄 [many people used to mispronounce that Fótúdèng]) (ca. 232–348 AD) .  Who would have guessed?

I'm still suspicious that the name given by the Chinese to the Kuchean royal house, Bai, may be connected to the homophonous designation of the "barbarian" rulers surrounding the nascent Chinese state on the North China Plain.  And, speaking of royalty, is it possible that wang 'king' might be from pre-Tocharian *wnatke (TchA nātäk 'lord'), which in turn might be cognate with Greek (w)anakt– '[Mycenean] king.' (TchA nāśi 'lady' would equally be the equivalent of Greek (w)anassa 'queen' from pre-Greek *wanakyā-, both irregularly related to 'king/lord' [where's the *-t-?].  The latter word survives in Modern Greek in pant-anassa 'all-queen,' an epithet of the Virgin Mary.)  But, even if true, who's going to believe it?

This is but a taste of what is to come.  Doug is preparing a paper that touches on one of these subjects at greater length.  It is tentatively titled "Resurrecting an Etymology: Greek (w)ánax ‘king’ and Tocharian A nātäk ‘lord’" and will probably appear in Sino-Platonic Papers sometime this summer.
Selected readings

* "Tocharian words for oil" (6/22/22)
* "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23) — lengthy, classified bibliography
* "Tocharian C: its discovery and implications" (4/2/19)
* "The geographical, archeological, genetic, and linguistic origins of Tocharian" (7/14/20) — with a comprehensive bibliography
* Hajni Elias, "The Southwest Silk Road: artistic exchange and transmission in early China", published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2024; Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, First View, pp. 1 – 26.  This article has impressed me to such a degree that I have rechristened the road she wrote about as "The Southwest Bronze Road".
* "From Chariot to Carriage" (5/5/24)
* "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)

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