Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
buckle up

to fasten a seatbelt in a car or on a plane

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
whopping | whopping great

extremely large, huge

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bogart

Idiom of the Day
(all) kidding aside

In all seriousness; being frank for a moment. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: reconnoiter

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

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Language Log
A Sino-Iranian tale of the donkey's Eurasian trail

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, Milad Abedi, Wolfgang Behr, and Patrick Wertmann, "Following the Donkey’s Trail (Part I): a Linguistic and Archaeological Study on the Introduction of Domestic Donkeys to China", International Journal of Eurasian Linguistics, 6 (2024), 104–144.  (pdf)

Abstract
How and when did domestic donkeys arrive in China? This article sets out to uncover the donkeys’ forgotten trail from West Asia across the Iranian plateau to China, using archaeological, art historical, philological, and linguistic evidence. Following Parpola and Janhunen’s (2011) contribution to our understanding of the Indian wild ass and Mitchell’s (2018) overview of the history of the domestic donkey in West Asia and the Mediterranean, we will attempt to shed light on the transmission of the beast of burden to Eastern Eurasia.
Due to its length, the paper is published in two instalments: Part I covers archaeological, art historical and textual evidence for the earliest occurrence and popularization of donkeys in China. Part II (in the fall issue) contains three sections: Two sections explore possible etymologies of ancient zoonyms for donkeys or donkey-like animals in Iranian and Chinese languages respectively. In a final discussion, possible ways of transmission for the donkey from the Iranian plateau to the Chinese heartland are evaluated with regard to the cultural, linguistic, and topographic conditions reflected in the previous parts.

For the linguistic nitty-gritty, we will have to wait till later this year for Part II, which has long been submitted, to come out, although already in Part I, bits and pieces have appeared, such as documentation that favored donkeys evidently came from the west outside the East Asian Heartland and were referred to by transcriptional names (pp. 115-116), indicating the borrowing of a foreign word.  Moreover, a fondness for white specimens (including among humans) is clearly reflected in the data, and this is a preference that goes all the way back to the oracle bones, as has been shown by Wang Tao (2007a 2007b), n. 49.  This is a predilection shared with PIE, for which see Anders Kaliff & Terje Oestigaard, "The Great Indo-European Horse Sacrifice:  4000 Years of Cosmological Continuity from Sintashta and the Steppe to Scandinavian Skeid", Occasional Papers in Archaeology, 72 (2020), Uppsala Universitet.  Thus, even here in Part I, we can see the intimate intertwining of language and culture, the epistemological dyad that is a central preoccupation at Language Log.
Selected readings

* "So many words for 'donkey'" (3/17/23) — almost as many as for "snow" in Finnish and Eskimo / Inuit / Yup'ik / etc. (must read [and watch the video])
* "How to pronounce the surname 'Mair' and other Doggie talk" (2/17/22)
* "'Little competent donkey'" (9/18/20)
* "Joshua Whatmough and the donkey" (9/1/09)
* "Flip Donkey Doodleplunk?" (2/22/18) —
* "Dialectology in 2020" (10/14/20) — "donkey's dick" (in the comments)

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Language Log
Violent destruction as excellence

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/AppleCrushingCreativity.png In the title of yesterday's post about the Apple ad where a giant industrial press compresses all human creativity into an iPad Pro, I started with the weak pun "Tim Cook crushes it" — which led me to think about  idioms where violent destruction conveys high praise, and to wonder about other cases of this metaphor, and the analogies across languages and cultures.
Wiktionary gives sense 4 of crush the gloss "To do impressively well at (sports events; performances; interviews; etc.)", with the example

They had a gig recently at Madison Square—totally crushed it!

The semi-dummy object it is an (apparently?) obligatory complication.  In answering "How did your show go?", "We totally crushed" doesn't work (at least for me) as a substitute for "We totally crushed it".

And experiencers as objects don't work at all — "The show crushed me" does not mean that I found it impressively good.

Crushing as a modifier is similarly negative — both for Wiktionary and for me. "The interview was crushing" means that the experience was devastatingly disheartening, not that it was an impressive success.

As for the history, the OED's entry for crush entirely lacks the "do impressively well" sense, suggesting that it's both American and relatively recent.

On the other hand, the OED gives smashing the gloss "Very good; greatly pleasing; excellent; sensational", with citations going back to this one in 1911:

When you get dressed up a bit, you'll do a smashing business.

This sense of smashing strikes me as British rather than American. Wiktionary says

As a synonym for wonderful, the term first appeared in early 20th-century USA, and possibly derives from the sense of smash used in smash hit and similar terms.

…but modifies the gloss in a way that matches my intuition:

(originally US, now British and Ireland) Wonderful, very good or impressive.

In any case, verbal smash doesn't seem to work like crush — "We totally smashed it" might convey the idea that our show went impressively well, but it seem unidiomatic at best.

The verb kill is somewhat like crush, and also somewhat different, as the Wiktionary entry documents. There's the sense "To amaze, exceed, stun or otherwise incapacitate", which is fine with experiencers as objects —  Wiktionary gives the examples

That night, she was dressed to kill.
That joke always kills me.

And there's also the sense "To succeed with an audience, especially in comedy", which works both with and without an it object:

When comics fail, they "die"; when they succeed, they "kill."
You really killed it at the Comedy Store last night.

Furthermore, killer as a modifier get the sense "Excellent, very good, cool" — but there's no similar development for the agentive forms crusher and smasher, as far as I can tell.

And verbal slay has developed similarly to kill, though I haven't encountered any references to "slayer apps" or "slayer bands".

Meanwhile, there are many other English destruction words that don't seem to have gone very far down this road at all: destroy, liquidate, pulverize, shatter, ravage, …

What about other languages?

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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
tear up

If you tear up a piece of paper, you tear it into several pieces.

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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
OD

to take an overdose of a drug

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zhuzh

Idiom of the Day
kids will be kids

Kids behave childishly or immaturely by nature, so it is unrealistic to expect otherwise. Watch the video

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Word of the Day
quagmire

Definition: (noun) Land with a soft muddy surface.
Synonyms: mire, morass, quag, slack.
Usage: We had some difficulty in reaching the point, owing to the intolerably bad paths; for everywhere in the shade the ground soon becomes a perfect quagmire.
Discuss

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Language Log
Perso-Arabic script for Mandarin, Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Taiwanese: sad cripples?

We have been intrigued by Iskander Ding since encountering him on X/Twitter a while back, several posts from his account having made it onto Language Log (see "Selected readings").

With a handle like his, where Iskandar is the Persian form of the name of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great (256–323 BC) and Ding has an unmistakable Sinitic / Hannic ring to it, we suspected from the start that he is a Hui (Chinese Muslim).  So far, though, we have not been able to track down the sinographs for his full Hannic name, which is a bit unusual, where even Mongols, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and other non-Sinitic people are compelled to take Sinographic names.

Iskandar Ding is currently writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Yaghnobi linguistics and culture at SOAS in London (see this page for basic information about him). Yaghnobi is an Eastern Iranian language spoken in the upper valley of the Yaghnob River in the Zarafshan area of Tajikistan by the Yaghnobi people. It is considered to be a direct descendant of Sogdian and has sometimes been called Neo-Sogdian in academic literature.

(source) Here is a 53 second video of ID announcing a talk on Perso-Arabic-script Hannic. Here is the 43.44 talk ("Xiao’erjing – Writing Chinese with Perso-Arabic Letters" – Iskandar Ding | PG 2022) as it actually happened.  IA comment:  "What he said throughout the talk was pleasing now and then — saying 'Eastern Turkistan' in Uighur for example…". Here is a 1 hour 22 minute interview with ID. If you click the link it will open at the 18:11 mark, where he speaks of Perso-Arabic-script Hannic . That part ends at 22:40.

The above is based largely on information provided by IA, and the following quotes IA directly:
[VHM prefatory note:  IA prefers "Hannic" to "Sinitic", "Mandarin", etc. and "Hanograph" to "Chinese character", etc.  In general, I have endeavored to follow his preferences for terminological usage.]

As much as I try to avoid spending (wasting) time on audio(-visual) media I did listen to the entirety of this interview. The interviewer — who fortunately speaks less and less as time goes on — is a bit clueless and at one point asks ID about the relationship of Cantonese to Mandarin — something that does not have the slightest to do with the Sogdian/Yaghnobi connection, the Persianate or anything else! The affable ID (somewhat clumsily) answers him anyway, the least valuable part of a not terribly taut interview. Apart from ID introducing his background at the beginning, the better parts are in the second half, about the Yaghnobis, ID's views on the the (mis-) understandings / translation-problems of the word 'Persianate', the Turco-Persian synthesis, and some other things of that nature.
With no great relevance to the above, and with the proviso that I have given almost no attention to this script and related research for over 20 years — I must say that I am irritated at the canonisation of “xiǎo'ér jǐn / xiǎo'ér jīng 小兒錦 / 小兒經” as the 'normalised' way to hanographically refer to this script. I was first introduced to the script as “xiǎo jīng 小經”; and then learned that it was also rendered as “xiāojīng 消經", as ”xiájīng 狹經“, as ”xiǎo'ér jīng 小兒經“, as ”xiǎo'ér jǐn 小兒錦“, as ”xiǎojǐn 小錦“ (no ”ér 兒“!), and as ”báizì jīng 白字經“, pretty much in that order. My non-expert and unprofessional suspicion is that ”xiǎo'ér jǐn / xiǎo'ér jīng 小兒經/小兒錦“ has become popular (which I mean in the worst sense of the word) on account of Wikipedia, and perhaps Ying-sheng Liu 劉迎勝* as well.
[VHM:  literal meanings of cited hanographs:
xiǎo 小 ("small, little, minor")

ér 兒 ("child")
jǐn 錦 ("brocade")

jīng 經 ("scripture")

xiāo 消 ("disappear, vanish; dispel")

xiá 狹 ("narrow")

bái 白 ("plain; white")

zì[...]

字 ("graph; glyph; character")
Of course, most of these characters could have many other meanings, but I list only the one(s) that come to mind first given the context.
It is evident that the sinographic / hanographic representations for the terms designating the Perso-Arabic script for writing Mandarin are fundamentally sound transcriptions, not translations, though the fact that the sinographs / hanographs used to write many of the syllables convey meanings that superficially seem to make some kind of sense in these expressions leads to regrettable misunderstandings.  This slippage between sound transcription and meaning translation annoys IA to no end (ditto for me).]
The question, for me [IA], is: what are (or rather, perhaps, were) the various areal realisations of the term by users who were (whether illiterate in Hanographs or not) unfamiliar with (or indifferent to) its Hanographic representations? The point is, I doubt that even in areas where the rhotic segment occurs / occurred* in this term the rhotic segment had anything more to do with 'sons' or 'children' than does the “兒” in Pekinese “xǎoguǎn'er 小館兒” ("small restaurant"). But true to the ways of folk-etmology, one sees ”xiǎo'ér jǐn / xiǎo'ér jīng 小兒經 / 小兒錦“ cutely-repugnantly 'translated' as 'children's script' and the like. This is a great blow against the dignity of the script.
I'd think that this hanographic “兒” really simply reflects what dialectologists might record in the first syllable as [ɕ] + [ iɔ , iɔo,  iao] (etc) + [ɹ] , and in which this rhotic final is non-syllabic.  [VHM:  I heartily concur with IA's analysis.]

*Some areas of the Northwest only have a vowel — [ɛ] or [ɯ] where Standard Hannic has the syllable /ər/.

1) Looking back at the Wikipedia article after all these years, I see:
According to A. Kalimov, a famous Dungan linguist, the Dungan of the former Soviet Union called this script щёҗин (şjoⱬin, 消經).
a) Well, this is good at least in so far as it attests to this lexical item in the Dungan script, but it gives no reason to believe that the morphemes in question are indeed 消 and 經 as opposed to something else. And there is no clue as to where Kalimov wrote this. At any rate, there's no rhotic in it.
b) I no longer have the one from the USSR era, but the КРАТКИЙ ДУНГАНСКОРУССКИЙ СЛОВАРЬ edition of 2009), on page 257 , has:
ЩЁҖИН (I II) книга толкования Корана.        [VHM: book of interpretation of the Qur'an]
The same, and likewise no rhotic. And finally, a rendition with tones. If I am not mistaken this phonologically corresponds to xiao1 jin3 and xiao1 jing3 in Standard Chinese.*  (Dungan merges final -n and -ng here. And phonetically this can simply be a nasalised vowel rather than an actual [n] or [ŋ], or so it seems to me from listening to Dungan.)
*[VHM:  IA supplements this with the following:
I meant of course tone-class, not pitch-value, and more accurately should have written 'xiao （平） jin（上） and xiao （平） jing（上）'
“平” rather than “陰平”: this is because Dungan (along with some other lects in the 中原官話 group) semi-merges (as pitch values) what in Standard Hannic are 陰平 and 陽平. Whether underlying 陰平 or 陽平 'surfaces' in Dungan (and thus two different pitch-values) depends upon the tone-class of the following syllable.
In this case (平 + 上, which is what 'I II' refers to ), the first syllable does indeed surface as 陰平. (So, pitch-wise, if I am not mistaken, this 'ЩЁҖИН (I II)' would sound like Standard Hannic 3+4 i.e. low + high falling.)
(About the tones, I have just refreshed my memory by quickly consulting the superlative 'Dungan' by Ольга Завьялова, in the Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics, 2017.)]
2) In 2014 I ordered and received the three volume work Xiǎoér jǐn yánjiū 小儿锦研究 (Research on Perso-Arabic script for Mandarin) [VHM:  machine translators give something like "Studies on Pediatric Brocade" — now you can see why IA and I detest the literalization / semanticization of that purely phonetic 儿, but you can't really blame t[...]

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.

➖ @EngSkills ➖

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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