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Language Log
OpenAI blocks API traffic from China
Screenshot of emails circulating on social media:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_405,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F636501e1-4000-4d41-87cf-9a208247ec30_585x857.png
Naturally, Chinese AI developers are seriously concerned about this exclusion. See this balanced report and many others with differing viewpoints available on the internet:
"Why has OpenAI blocked API traffic from China? What impact would this have on Chinese AI companies? Where does China stand on AI development?" Written by Rishika Singh, The Indian Express (July 11, 2024
They're missing the point why OpenAI puts China in the same category as Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Moreover, Chinese AI developers desperately need the cutting-edge technology of OpenAI and other American AI giants. So they ought to engage in some serious introspection to understand why OpenAI took this drastic move to pull out of China, as Google did in early 2010. In fact, in terms of access and security, I would say that things have gotten much worse during the intervening 14 years.
Selected readings
* "OpenAI's Chinese problem" (5/26/24)
* "The perils of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the PRC" (4/17/23)
* "Vignettes of quality data impoverishment in the world of PRC AI" (2/23/23)
[Thanks to John Rohsenow]
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Football Phrase Day 30: Super Sub
Euro 24 Football Language Phrase Day 30: Super Sub Day 30 saw the second semi final betweeen England and The Netherlands. The phrase we chose for this game is super sub. Don’t forget we have hundreds more explanations of football language in our football glossary and we also have a page full of football cliches. […]
The post Euro 2024 Football Phrase Day 30: Super Sub appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pull on
to put an item of clothing on, usually in a hurry
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Word of the Day
bridgehead
Definition: (noun) A forward position seized by advancing troops in enemy territory as a foothold for further advance.
Synonyms: foothold.
Usage: The soldiers made a brave attempt to secure a bridgehead behind enemy lines.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: compatible
This word has appeared in 131 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Language Log
Singing Presidents (a triumph of Chinese AI)
Wasn’t on my 2024 Bingo Card:
US Lawmakers: We need to ban $NVDA GPUs sales into China, or else they will lead in AI and boost their military.
Chinese social meme accounts burns through valuable Huawei Ascend compute, to make Biden and Trump sing Chinese folk songs about… pic.twitter.com/T03DwIZKp4
— Marcel Münch (@_mm85) July 9, 2024
They mouth such maudlin sentiments as "I love you, China", "I shed tears for you", "dear mother", etc.,etc.
Overall, their pronunciation sounds like that of native speakers, except for when they say "Zhōngguó 中国" ("China"). The vowel of the first syllable is "off", and the initial of the second syllable, which seems garbled / swallowed. They need to go back to first year for that.
Selected readings
* "ChatGPT writes VHM" (2/28/23)
* "Welcome to China" (3/10/14)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
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the term.
“Sales leaders would say, ‘Hey, you need to make sure you double-click on that’ with your prospects,” Sunshine says, meaning delve more deeply into any issues customers might raise, as in “Tell me more.”
As Mark Metcalf, who called this article to my attention, says: "The comments are worth the price of admission". Selected reading
* "On-the-job jargon" (9/7/23)
* "A century of complaints about business jargon" (9/15/13)
* "May I ask you a question?" (6/12/17)
* "Much ado: more about corporate jargon" (2/18/24)
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Learn English Through Football
Euro 2024 Football Phrase Day 29: Wonder Goal
In this football language post we look at the phrase 'wonder goal' after Spain's teenage-sensation Lamine Yamal's goal against France in the semi-final of the 2024 Euros
The post Euro 2024 Football Phrase Day 29: Wonder Goal appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Idiom of the Day
receive (one's) just deserts
To receive that which one deserves, especially a punishment or unfavorable outcome. (Note: The phrase is often misspelled as "just desserts," due to the pronunciation of "deserts" and "desserts" being the same in this context.) Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
jumpy
anxious, uneasy, on edge
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⚠️ Best of English Learning Channels
👉 @EnglishLearn
---------
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: varnish
This word has appeared in 20 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
(something) won't get (someone) anywhere
Something, typically a certain behavior, will not help someone progress or succeed in any way. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
mo
moment
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Institute, extracted and analyzed the samples for the study.
“This is not like testing the DNA of someone alive,” Silva told The BBC. “The DNA is very fragmented and damaged. However, we were able to [decode] enough of it. The first thing we saw was that genetically he was very different” from the Romano-British individuals they’d previously studied.
…
That still didn’t connect the dots, though. How could the scientists prove that he was born in Eurasia and immigrated to the place of his death?
For this, they examined his teeth. Even two millennia after his death, the tissue harbored chemicals in varying amounts at different layers. Offord Cluny underwent pronounced dietary changes at ages 5 and 9 and began to level out around 13.
…
The changes, the team found, followed chemical trends you could expect from a person adapting to available food sources while traveling west across Europe.
Millets and sorghum grains, scientifically called C4 crops, are plentiful in the region where Sarmatians lived. These dissipated in his diet as he matured. Wheat — more common in Western Europe — replaced them.
“The [analysis] tells us that he, and not his ancestors, made the journey to Britain. As he grew up, he migrated west, and these plants disappeared from his diet,” said Janet Montgomery of Durham University.
These results are extremely interesting and important because they show that Offord Cluny made this long trip from the Pontic-Caspian steppes to Britain, not just in one lifetime, but within the period of a few years.
The Iranian-speaking peoples who were present in Britain during the Roman period had a profound impact on many aspects of culture, e.g., the Arthurian story cycles and their associated images. Some of these men participated in the defense of Hadrian's Wall (begun in AD 122).
"The Sarmatians in Europe: Gravestone of a Sarmatian Horseman"
The term "Sarmatians" is believed to refer to various horse-riding peoples from the territory of present-day Iran. From the 3rd century BC, they settled in present-day southern Russia and Ukraine, where they displaced the Scythians. From the 3rd century onward, Sarmatian tribes also settled in the Roman Empire, often adopted Roman citizenship and served in Roman legions, having been hired as auxiliary troops. In Britain, for example, the Sarmatians defended Hadrian's Wall against the attacks of the Scottish Picts. The photograph shows the gravestone of a Sarmatian horseman from the Roman settlement of Deva Victrix (in present-day Chester in northern England).
images/cc363e14-292a-4ba9-a5be-a45ab712361d.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https://www.ieg-ego.eu/illustrationen/der-noerdliche-schwarzmeerraum/die-sarmaten-in-europa-grabstein-eines-sarmatischen-reiters/@@images/cc363e14-292a-4ba9-a5be-a45ab712361d.jpeg
Gravestone of a Sarmatian horseman who fought for the Romans in Britain, Grosvenor Museum, Chester, England, colour photograph, 2011, photographer: Wolfgang Sauber; image source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Some Rights Reserved Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
For a masterful treatment of the impact of Romano-Iranian forces on English tradition, see:
C. Scott Littleton and Linda A. Malcor, From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reassessment of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail (New York and London: Garland, 1994; rev. pb. 2000). In the British journal, Religion, 28.3 (July, 1998), 294-300, I [VHM] wrote a review in which I pointed out that the celebrated motif of a mighty arm rising up out of the water holding aloft the hero's sword can also be found in a medieval Chinese tale from Dunhuang. That review is available electronically from ScienceDirect, if your library subscribes to it. Otherwise, I think this version on the Web is a fairly faithful copy. Selected readings
* "A medieval Dunhuang man" (7/17/23)
* "The Ossetes" (7/25/21)
* "Ashkenazi and Scythians" (7/13/21)
* "Research reveals man born thousands of miles to the east traveled to Cambridgeshire 2,000 years ag[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: locus
This word has appeared in 43 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Language Log
Environmental effects on language change
Frazz for 7/8/2024 and 7/9/2024:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Frazz07082024.png
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/Frazz07092024.png
There's a long history of research (and a longer history of speculation) about the linguistic effects of temperature, altitude, genes, and other language-external factors. I dimly recall a lecturer (I think seriously?) suggesting that Grimm's Law was caused by the discovery of beer, although I haven't been able to find any traces of this in the literature, even as a joke.
A good review of the (non-alcoholic) topic can be found in Ladd, Roberts, and Dediu, "Correlational studies in typological and historical linguistics", Annual Review of Linguistics 2015.
In response to an earlier paper about geographical correlations between genes and tones, I wrote:
Just to underline one aspect of this discussion, I did a trivial little simulation, in which individual mutations were placed at random on a 20×20 grid, and then died, reproduced and migrated at random for 35 generations. (The grid was configured as a manifold, so that if you migrate off of one side, you come back in on the opposite one.) I ran 100 traits independently, and then looked at the geographical correlations among their population frequencies:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/TraitCorrelation1.png
The point was just that many of the correlations in that simulation are "statistically significant", but (by construction) the causal factors are not influences of the (imaginary) geography or the intrinsic biology of the (imaginary) people, but just the effects of assuming that languages change locally and the groups of people who speak them migrate and interact.
Which doesn't mean that geographical and biological differences don't have linguistic effects, just that (even strong) correlations are not enough to establish them.
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Idiom of the Day
on a lark
On a whim or fancy; for fun or as a joke. Watch the video
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
top
a man who takes the active role in gay or homosexual sex
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Language Log
Milk tea
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/nonhomo.jpg
(To appreciate the joke at the top of the image, it helps to be familiar with the "Nobody" meme. Here the meme is used to critique companies that engage in "pinkwashing" during Pride Month and then revert to their heteronormative ways as soon as June ends.)
Japanese writing on the labels:
Nonhomo ノンホモ
Hida 飛騨 city in Gifu Prefecture
gyūnyū 牛乳 ("milk"), also miruku ミルク
sutorētotī ストレートティー ("straight tea")
Notes by Nathan Hopson:
The brand is Hida (飛騨), produced by a dairy coop in Takayama, Gifu, part of the eponymous Hida region.
Non-homo = non-homogenized, of course.
It's a rather unfortunate consequence of the Japanese tendency to abbreviate with two moras (or two pairs, i.e., four).
I guess the good news (?) is that they sell plenty of homogenized milk, too, though it doesn't seem that homomiruku ホモミルク ("homogenized milk") is a back-formation anyone found useful enough to coin. It's just the default milk, full stop.
"nonhomogenized milk" 4,350 ghits
"non homogenized milk" 18,100 ghits
"unhomogenized milk" 15,000 ghits
"homogenized milk" 359,000 ghits
Selected readings
* "Homophonia" (7/31/14)
* "Homophonophobia" (2/7/15)
* "35 Kinds of Hot, Sexy Homophone Action", Mental Floss 7/31/2014
* "What's the Difference Between Homophonia, Homophobia, and Homophonophobia?" (8/1/14) in Lexicon Valley
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Language Log
Our journey journey
In "Peevable words and phrases: journey", 5/18/2024, Victor quoted Lisa Miller, "When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey’?", NYT 5/16/2024:
According to the linguistics professor Jesse Egbert at Northern Arizona University, the use of “journey” (the noun) has nearly doubled in American English since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online.
In PubMed, where we've been tracking other changes in word frequency lately, the change from 1990 to 2024 in the frequency of "journey" was 10.2 to 227.9 (per 100k articles), or a factor of 22.3 — which is a lot more than doubling:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PubMed_journey.png
And the rise has been going on long enough that we can't blame it on LLMs…
In the Corpus of Historical American English, the frequency of "journey" has been increasing since the 1940s (though the change between 1990 and the 2010s is more like 1.5 than 2, much less 22…) But before that, the frequency of "journey" fell pretty steadily from the 1840s onwards — and especially sharply after 1910. Perhaps this is because railroads and then the automobile turned lots of what used to be "journeys" into mere local trips?
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/COHAjourney1.png
Note that the first gloss for "journey" in Webster's 1828 dictionary is "The travel of a day", which makes sense since the etymology is from Latin diurnus. And a reasonable day's travel would have been maybe 10-15 miles on foot, and maybe 20-30 miles on horseback — whereas an automobile on decent roads could do 20-30 miles in less than an hour.
Google ngrams shows a similar pattern — with a factor of 3 from 1990 to 2019 :
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ngrams_journey.png
(I've asked the site to multiply by 10000 since that turns percentages into more useful frequency-per-million-word values.)
If you look at a sample of PubMed's recent contexts for "journey", you may get a clue about why the increase in frequency is so much greater there than in COHA and Google ngrams.
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Language Log
Click click
"Let’s ‘Double-Click’ on the Latest Cringeworthy Corporate Buzzword: You may want to examine or delve into the phrase, which has become pervasive in conference calls and grates on many; ‘It’s almost like a joke’", by Te-ping Chen and Nicholas G. Miller, WSJ (7/9/24)
One of the fastest-spreading corporate buzzwords in recent years, “double-click” is both polarizing and pervasive. Particularly on Wall Street, the figure of speech is now being used as a shorthand for examining something more fully, akin to double-clicking to see a computer folder’s contents. Some, like [Ruben] Roy, find the idiom obnoxious or twee. Double-click defenders say the phrase encourages deeper thinking.
Either way, it’s become a verbal tic du jour. Executives and analysts dropped double-click 644 times in corporate conference calls and events during the first half of the year, according to VIQ Solutions, up from 139 times in the same period of 2020.
“It’s almost like a joke. People are like, oh here we go with double-click,” says Roy, who’d been trying to avoid using the term when he accidentally let it slip. Colleagues, he says, haven’t let him forget it.
The new jargon makes Annie Mosbacher, an LA marketer, roll her eyes.
“Can’t we just say ‘this is an area we need to focus on?’” she says. “We regurgitate this sort of lingo as though it means something, and usually it’s about trying to be impressive more than anything else.”
Not so, dissents Ruben Linder, who runs a San Antonio audio and video production business:
“The term is simple, but it’s really profound,” he says. He tries to carve out time to go to a cafe twice monthly with a notebook and engage in reflection.
“I’ll double-click on my business, double-click on my life,” he says. “I double-click on everything now.”
I have to agree. Metaphorically speaking, "double-clicking" is not the same as "double-checking", which I do hundreds of times a day. I'm compulsive-obsessive about that, because I hate to lose things like my keys, my comb, my watch…. Tech-inflected buzzwords are especially apt to gain traction—think “network,” “bandwidth” or “take offline”—because they can sound smart or cutting-edge, says Doug Guilbeault, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who has studied corporate jargon.
The inventor of the literal double-click, former Apple designer Bill Atkinson, isn’t convinced. Reached while boating on a recent weekday, Atkinson, now retired, says he’s never heard anyone use double-click as a metaphor and would steer clear of such usage himself, preferring more straightforward language.
He adds that since inventing the function in 1979, he’s come to regret it. He now thinks an extra “Shift” button on the mouse would have been more user-friendly.
“The double-click was a mistake,” says Atkinson, who left tech in 1995 to pursue nature photography. Personally, he double-clicks less frequently these days, given the rise of mouseless devices like tablets and smartphones.
“I double-tap, or I tap,” he says. “I long-press.”
As technology evolves — and it changes rapidly nowadays — so do the buzzwords: they often quickly lose their buzz:
Buzzwords tend to come and go, says HR consultant Nancy Settle-Murphy, noting that other tech-inspired jargon, such as “RTFM”—or read the f—ing manual—are less commonly used today than they once were.
“There are fewer manuals now,” says Settle-Murphy, who recently installed a video doorbell at her home and notes it didn’t come with any pictures or diagrams.
But double-click is not so ephemeral as many other buzzwords, whose lack of longevity is remarkable:
Double-click has a long pedigree in the sales world. Matt Sunshine, head of the Center for Sales Strategy, which trains salespeople, says when he sold ad spots for a local radio station in Dallas in the 1990s, peers commonly used [...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
hold on (1)
to hold something like a railing or an overhead strap so you don't fall over
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Word of the Day
haply
Definition: (adverb) By accident.
Synonyms: by chance, by luck.
Usage: Her true feelings were betrayed by a word haply spoken and immediately regretted.
Discuss
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Language Log
Bilingual Chinese lesbian slang dictionary
"Siting Yao’s bilingual dictionary translates Chinese lesbian slang: The London-based graphic designer illustrates unique language expressions and humorous anecdotes in her colourful, graphic guide to queer code." By Ellis Tree, It's Nice That (4 July 2024)
Made for: “Chinese speakers who are interested in but unfamiliar with queer culture, English speakers who are interested in Chinese queer culture, and Chinese lesbians who want to celebrate their own culture”, Siting Yao’s publication Lesbian Slang in Chinese collates 40 amusing anecdotes and phonetic translations into a pocketable A7 dictionary. Presented in a bilingual format, with visualisations of each slang term or expression to “enhance connections between diverse audiences”, the publication aims to bridge cultural and linguistic divides through creative publishing methods.
The idea for the creation of the tiny but mighty Chinese dictionary “comes from my own experience as a Chinese lesbian”, Siting tells us. Realising that there was no systematic record of the Chinese slang terms she used every day, the designer wanted to create a way to share colloquial phrases to new audiences and document some of the language surrounding Chinese lesbian culture. “Our community has developed a unique culture and a lot of slang”, she says “Some of this slang has evolved as a way to avoid censorship, while others have origins in famous anecdotes and stories within the community”.
Not simply a translation of terms, the bilingual publication contains a colour-coded editorial system, tailoring the illustrated stories to both English and Chinese audiences: “When writing the Chinese sections, I focused on explaining the meanings and origins of the slang terms. For the English sections, I made sure to clarify the puns and phonetic nuances in the slang and included references to similar expressions in English to aid understanding,” Siting explains.
The dictionary’s distinct orange and green colour combo is inspired by the colours of “the lesbian pride flag” and one of the dictionary’s slang phrases: (júlǐjúqì 橘里橘气) which translates to “the smell of citrus aroma” – Siting explains that the phrase connotes the scent of oranges and is often used to “describe a flirtatious vibe between two women”. So by going all out on orange, the designer intended to “create a visual cultural symbol exclusively for Chinese lesbians”.
Her visuals on the other hand took from screen printed protest posters by the See Red Women’s workshop. “The feminist print collective’s use of visual media in activism greatly influenced my approach to visualising and communicating queer-feminist ideas,” Siting shares, leading her into the use of Risograph printing for the production of her book and accompanying one-page zine. As a print ephemera enthusiast, she tells us that the project may have also taken from the various “tickets and leaflets, to hardcover books and independent magazines”, that the designer always seems to find herself collecting.
Amply illustrated — in orange (with green), of course. The Chinese text is printed in orange and the English text in green. Very attractive and artistic.
Selected readings
* "The language of sexual minorities" (2/2/16)
* "Female voyeuristic literature on male homoerotic themes" (3/14/23)
* "λhttps://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/2665.png [love]" (5/14/11)
[Thanks to Mark Swofford]
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Language Log
The evolving PubMed landscape
Following up on "Are LLMs writing PubMed articles?", 7/7/2024, Cervantes suggested a factor, besides LLM availability, that has been influencing the distribution of word frequencies in PubMed's index:
As an investigator whose own papers are indexed in PubMed, and who has been watching the trends in scientific fashion for some decades, I can come up with other explanations. For one thing, it's easier to get exploratory and qualitative research published nowadays than it once was. Reviewers and editors are less inclined to insist that only hypothesis driven research is worthy of their journal — and, with open access, there are a lot more journals, including some with low standards and others that do insist on decent quality but will accept a wide range of papers. It's even possible now to publish protocols for work that hasn't been done yet. So it doesn't surprise me at all that words like "explore" and "delve" (which is a near synonym, BTW) are more likely to show up in abstracts, because that's more likely to be what the paper is doing.
I agree, although it remains unclear whether those changes have been strong enough to explain the effects documented in Dmitry Kobak et al., "Delving into ChatGPT usage in academic writing through excess vocabulary", arXiv.org 7/3/2024.
I'll add another factor related to Cervantes' comment, namely the changing distribution of PubMed's cited sources.
Looking over the list of sources for [delve] in PubMed, I saw quite a few whose representation in PubMed has been increasing rapidly. The table below lists the per-100k citation numbers by year for the first four that I looked into, along with their proportions of increase between 2022 and 2024:
StatPearls Heliyon medRxiv arXiv 2019 0 44.3 0 0 2020 0 139.1 45.8 2.9 2021 0 169.3 35.6 3.0 2022 54.0 227.9 18.8 1.3 2023 421.2 671.3 115.1 28.1 2024 1004.2 1005.3 133.3 39.3 2024/2022 18.6 4.4 7.1 30.2
At least in the case of arXiv, this is because PubMed is paying more attention — but in any case, those proportional changes are as large or larger than the ones that Kobak et al. used to argue for the role of LLMs. This doesn't mean that Kobak et al. are wrong, just that there are other things going on that should be taken into account.
Update — additional support for Cervantes' observation can be found in a comparison of counts for [exploratory] vs. [hypothesis] over the decades since John Tukey introduced "Exploratory Data Analysis" as an alternative to "hypothesis testing":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/PubMedExploratoryHypothesis.png
Plotting the ratio:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ExploratoryHypothesis1.png
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
appeal to
If something appeals to you, you like it.
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Word of the Day
lidless
Definition: (adjective) Watchful; vigilant.
Synonyms: sleepless.
Usage: He was vigilant—a lidless watcher of the public weal—and took great care to make sure that all was well with his neighbors.
Discuss
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o", Phys.org, by The Francis Crick Institute (more information available here)
[Thanks to Sunny Jhutti]
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Language Log
A Romano-Sarmatian soldier in circa 2nd c. AD Britain
We have occasionally mentioned Sarmatians on Language Log, but usually in association with the Scythians, of whom we have often spoken (most recently here, with extensive bibliography).
These two peoples of ancient times both spoke languages in the Iranian language family and lived in the area north of the Black Sea. The languages and cultures of the Scythians and Sarmatians were related but distinct. In particular their styles of warfare were different. The Scythians were noted as mounted archers. They may have been the inventors or one of the inventors of the stirrup. The stirrup enabled mounted archers to fire (shoot) arrows reasonably accurately while riding. The Scythians attacked in a mass firing of arrows. If their adversaries were not overwhelmed by the hail of arrows then the Scythians turned and rode to a safe distance for regrouping to mount another mass attack.
Most adversaries were overwhelmed by the Scythian battle tactics. It was only the Sarmatians who found a successful counter-strategy to withstand the Scythians. The Sarmatian warriors and their mounts were protected with armor. Usually the armor consisted of metal plates of bronze or iron sewn onto leather garments. This armor enabled the Sarmatians to withstand a Scythian attack. After a Scythian onslaught the Sarmatians would attack the Scythians with fifteen-foot-long lances. The Sarmatians were probably the originator of the armored knights of medieval Europe.
(source)
Before focusing on the single ca. 2nd c. AD Sarmatian who is the main subject of this post, we would do well to learn more about the Sarmatians themselves.
The Sarmatians (/sɑːrˈmeɪʃiənz/; Ancient Greek: Σαρμάται, romanized: Sarmatai; Latin: Sarmatae [ˈsarmatae̯]) were a large confederation of ancient Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 3rd century BC to the 4th century AD.
The earliest reference to the Sarmatians is in the Avesta, Sairima-, which is in the later Iranian sources recorded as *Sarm and Salm. Originating in the central parts of the Eurasian Steppe, the Sarmatians were part of the wider Scythian cultures.[3] They started migrating westward around the fourth and third centuries BC, coming to dominate the closely related Scythians by 200 BC. At their greatest reported extent, around 100 BC, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian seas as well as the Caucasus to the south.
(Wikipedia)
Now we have a detailed scientific report about one of those Sarmatian soldiers who made the roughly 1,500 mile trek to Romano-Britain during the early part of the first millennium AD. Ancient Skeleton From Southern Russia Surprises UK Scientists, by Sam Anderson, ExplorersWeb (December 27, 2023)
Offord Cluny 203645 was a complete, well-preserved male skeleton, buried without any personal effects in a Cambridgeshire ditch. A team led by the Francis Crick Institute could tell the remains were clearly ancient. But with no contextual clues to go on, they might have hit a dead end.
Updated forensic technology intervened, and provided the first biological proof of a certain, far-flung immigration pattern during the Roman Empire.
The man was a Sarmatian, and the team’s tests proved he made it from his homeland in what is now the southern Russia/Ukraine area to his final destination in the United Kingdom.
The article explains how the archeologists found where the man came from:
First, they extracted DNA from a tiny bone in his inner ear. This turned out to be his best-preserved body part containing the most complete DNA samples. Dr. Marina Silva, of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at the Francis Crick[...]
