35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Idiom of the Day
in front of (one's) nose
Immediately obvious or clearly apparent. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
brachypterous
Definition: (adjective) Having very short or rudimentary wings, as certain insects.
Synonyms: short-winged.
Usage: Some brachypterous insects evade predators by jumping short distances.
Discuss
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* "Caucasian words for tea" (1/26/17)
* "PIE *gene- *gwen-" (8/10/23)
* 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".
[Thanks to Geoff Wade]
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Idiom of the Day
inside and out
Thoroughly; down to the last detail. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
sepulcher
Definition: (noun) A chamber that is used as a grave.
Synonyms: burial chamber.
Usage: The archaeologists opened the sepulcher expecting to find ancient artifacts, but the burial chamber turned out to be completely empty.
Discuss
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Language Log
PP attachment ambiguity of the day
Chrisma Madarang, "Man Accusing CPAC Chair Matt Schlapp of Sexual Assault Was Paid $480,000: Report", Rolling Stone 3/27/2024:
Huffman claimed Mrs. Schlapp attempted to “impugn” his character in her response to the allegations against her husband, calling him a “troubled individual,” and alleged he had been dismissed from the campaign after lying on his resume in a group chat with neighbors.
That sentence ends with a sentence "he had been dismissed" embedded as the complement of the verb "alleged", followed by five consecutive prepositional phrases
* from the campaign
* after lying
* on his resume
* in a group chat
* with neighbors
A simplified version of the (I think) correct tree structure for those final 19 words is something like this:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/HuffmanAllegationTree0.png
But there are many alternative parses, including the tangled web at the end of the first garden path I took, which featured the idea that Huffman lied on his resume in a group chat with neighbors. Which was hard to make sense of, since such chats don't involve the exchange of resumes, at least in any neighborhood I've ever lived in.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to see what part of the full sentence your favorite LLM thinks that "in a group chat with the neighbors" modifies.
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Idiom of the Day
in all truthfulness
In one's sincere opinion; without any disingenuousness. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
rampart
Definition: (noun) A fortification consisting of an embankment, often with a parapet built on top.
Synonyms: bulwark, wall.
Usage: They stormed the ramparts of the city with ladders and catapults.
Discuss
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Language Log
Cetacean needed
From Philip Taylor:
A nice pun on Wikipedia’s ubiquitous "citation needed"
Wikipedia's list of cetaceans, which reads (in part):
Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin Tursiops erebennus
Cope, 1865 NE Unknown [cetacean needed]
Lovely pun indeed!
Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops erebennus) is a species of bottlenose dolphin that inhabits coastal waters in the eastern United States. This species was previously considered a nearshore variant of the common bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus.
(source)
Tamanend's bottlenose dolphin does indeed belong to the Infraorder Cetacea.
Selected readings
* "Sperm whale talk" (5/15/23)
* "Orca emits speech-like sound; reporters go insane" (1/31/18)
* "Moby Zipf" (6/1/19)
* "Alien encounters" (9/15/16)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: inexorably
This word has appeared in 49 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
in all seriousness
In one's sincere opinion; without any disingenuousness. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
fleecy
Definition: (adjective) Having soft nap produced by brushing.
Synonyms: napped, brushed.
Usage: Though the train was unbearably cold, she snuggled into the fleecy lining of her coat and promptly fell asleep.
Discuss
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(2020).
* "Bezoar" (8/2/21)
* "Official digraphia" (9/13/18)
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ilk 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".
Still under excavation and investigation by Chinese archeologists is the enormous new site of Shimao (coordinates are 38.5657°N 110.3252°E on the eastern edge of the Ordos), which stands at the cusp of the Bronze Age, has unmistakable affinities with Sanxingdui (coordinates 30.9916°N 104.2021°E) near Chengdu in the Southwest, and displays startling similarities to cultures that are thousands of miles away. Once Shimao is studied more fully, it will transform our understanding of the rise of East Asia civilization and its ties to the rest of Eurasia.
2. China Babel faced similar difficulties. It was based on ideas that I had first entertained in the 70s, indeed already in a nebulous way in the 60s. Namely, I envisaged that, through heightened intensity and increased speed of language contact, there would be more and more borrowing, especially from English into other languages, but also from other languages into each other and into English. I completed the first draft in the summer of 1986, when I seemed to have boundless energy, revised it in October 1986, did a second revision in March 1987, and a third revision in May 1990. I planned to submit it for publication in January 1994, but by that time I had become so enmired in mummies research that it ceased to occupy any active space in my mind. I started to think about it again around 2020 when the pandemic struck, but didn't push the idea of publication very hard because my closest friends advised me that, for reasons of political incorrectness, it would not be welcomed by academic arbiters. The primary grounds on which they predicted that it was too early for a book like China Babel is that it predicted the recognition of the major Sinitic topolects as full-fledged languages, not mere dialects of Mandarin, and that it foresaw the gradual Englishization of Mandarin until it gradually merged with the world language. China Babel still rests in a box in my basement, nearly four decades after I wrote it.
3. The Archeology of Lost Affection, a novel that is based on some photographic "shards" that I found in the desert near Qumul / Hami in Eastern Central Asia on May 25, 1998. It took me another year or two to write the book, including making a special trip back to China to check some details, particularly in the environs of Rizhao 日照, Shandong. The ms then moldered untouched in my basement until late 2020 when, under lockdown, having relatively more free time, I decided to go forward with its publication, which took place on May 25, 2021 from Camphor Press (apparently it's available on Amazon). Unlike the previous two items, Archeology was not politically or culturally sensitive, so I saw no harm in putting it before the public — two decades after it was written
As I said to a friend of mine when he asked about the eventual fate of my remaining unpublished manuscripts,
I don't mind waiting another 40 years when the times are more propitious — many of my Chinese students say they hope I will live to be 120! After all, my old friend, Zhou Youguang (1906-2017), main deviser of Hanyu Pinyin, lived to the age of 111, and I'm certain that he could have lived even longer had it not been for his deep disappointment over the failure of democracy to develop in China.
Meanwhile, willy-nilly, bits and pieces are leaking out, and colleagues are publishing their own hypotheses linking east and west. Selected readings
* "The role of long-distance communication in human history" (1/26/23)
* "Bronze, iron, gold, silver" (1/29/21)
* "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16)
* Andrew Sherratt, "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Re[...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
xerox
to photocopy something
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
pull over
If you're driving a car and you pull over, you move over to the side of the road and stop.
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Language Log
Bronze, writing, and communication in the ancient Caucasus
The Archaeology of Ancient Southwest Asia: Investigating the Human Past in the Vedi River Valley of Armenia
Professor Peter Cobb
School of Humanities
The University of Hong Kong
Date and Time: April 9, 2024 | 12:30-1:30 pm (HKT) / April 8, 2024 | 9:30-10:30 pm (PDT)
Venue: Lecture Hall at May Hall, HKU
Join us in person at May Hall or via Zoom using the following link: https://hku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_o2GPhTHGSYitY_9FcnFzbQ
(Light refreshments will be served for those attending the seminar in person) Abstract
This talk briefly introduces HKU's ongoing archaeological fieldwork in the South Caucasian country of Armenia. Located at the intersection of three continents, ancient Southwest Asia (also known as the Ancient Near East), saw many early developments in complex human society, from agriculture to writing and cities. In collaboration with the Armenian Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, HKU is researching a small area within the mountainous northern part of this region, the Vedi River valley of Armenia. This valley was always an important transportation route between the fertile Ararat Plain to the west and the resource rich mountain ranges to the east. Thus, in the Late Bronze Age, around 1500BCE, a local polity arose and fortified a prominent hill protecting the entrance to the valley, thus controlling mobility through the valley. This site, called the Vedi Fortress, was used until about 800BCE when it was likely burned and abandoned. However, given the prominence of the site and its existing monumental fortification walls, it was reused periodically, especially during the Late Antique/Early Medieval period of around 450-650CE, when Armenia was under Sassanian Persian Suzerainty. About the Speaker
Professor Cobb teaches courses on archaeological methods and theories and the archaeology of the ancient world, including experiential learning classes abroad. He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Armenia, Laos, and Turkey, and is currently the director of the Ararat Plain Southeast Archaeological Project (APSAP) in collaboration with the Armenian Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography. His research focuses on the Late Bronze and Iron Ages (ca 1600 BCE-600 CE) of the Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Southwest Asia (aka the Ancient Near East). Professor Cobb is a specialist in the analysis of ancient ceramics and in digital humanities (DH). He serves as a Deputy Director of the BA program in Humanities and Digital Technologies in the Faculty of Arts at HKU.
We've been talking a lot about the ancient Southwest and Bronze lately, but in China. Today we switch to Bronze Age archeology in Southwest Asia, and the topic is equally compelling. For those who join the talk by Professor Cobb, either online or in person, I encourage you to listen carefully to anything he may have to say about language and writing, and perhaps even ask a question or two on those subjects. Armenian (endonym: հայերեն (reformed), հայերէն (classical), hayeren, pronounced [hɑjɛˈɾɛn]) is an Indo-European language and the sole member of an independent branch of that language family. It is the native language of the Armenian people and the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian highlands, today Armenian is widely spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora. Armenian is written in its own writing system, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by the canonized saint Mesrop Mashtots. The estimated number of Armenian speakers worldwide is between five and seven million.
(Wikipedia) Selected readings
* "Where did the PIEs come from; when was that?" (7/28/23) — begins with a nice map (click to embiggen)
* "Of chains and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/27/21)[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: extravaganza
This word has appeared in 90 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
ump
umpire
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
take after
If you take after an older member of your family, you look like them or you have a similar personality to them.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: baffled
This word has appeared in 154 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
blast (1)
a great experience, a very enjoyable time
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
make up (1)
to invent a story or think of an explanation for something
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Language Log
Codices of Tetepilco
From Tlacuilolli*, the blog about Mesoamerican writing systems, by Alonso Zamora, on March 21, 2024:
*At the top left of the home page of this blog, there is a tiny seated figure (click to embiggen) with a sharp instrument held vertically in his right hand carving a glyph on a square block held in his left hand. Emitting from his mouth is a blue, cloud-like puff. Does that signify recognition the basis of what he is writing is speech?
"New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco"
They are beautiful: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/tetepilco.jpg Figure 1. Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco: a) Map of the Founding of San Andrés Tetepilco;
b) Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco; c) Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco
The newly discovered corpus was acquired by the Mexican government from a local family that wants to remain anonymous, but which were not collectors but rather traditional stewards of the cultural legacy of Culhuacan and Iztapalapa, and it is now stored at the library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico. It comprises three codices. The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco, as well as lists of toponyms to be found within Culhuacan, Tetepilco, Tepanohuayan, Cohuatlinchan, Xaltocan and Azcapotzalco. The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, is unique, as [philologist Michel] Oudijk remarks, since it is a pictographic inventory of the church of San Andrés Tetepilco, comprising two pages. Sadly, it is very damaged.
Finally, the third document, now baptised as the Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history in the vein of the Boturini and the Aubin codices, comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603. It seems to belong to the same family as the Boturini, the Aubin, the Ms. 40 and the Ms. 85 of Paris, that is to say, some of the main codices dealing with Aztec imperial history, and Brito considers it as a sort of bridge between the Boturini and the Aubin, since its pictographic style is considerably close to the early colonial one of the former, rather than the late colonial one of the latter. It comprises 20 rectangular pages of amate paper, and contains new and striking iconography, including a spectacular depiction of Hernán Cortés as a Roman soldier. In the Aztec side of things, new iconography of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina during his conquest of Tetepilco is presented (Figure 1).
Of course, new and very interesting examples of Aztec writing are contained throughout all these documents, including old and new toponyms, spellings of Western and Aztec names, and even some information that confirms that some glyphs formerly considered as hapax, as the chi syllabogram in the spelling of the name Motelchiuhtzin in Codex Telleriano-Remensis 43r, discussed in another post of this blog, were not anomalous but possibly conventional. Besides logosyllabic spellings, the presence of pictographs with alphabetic glosses in Nahuatl will be of great help to ascertain the functioning of this still controversial part of the Aztec communication system.
The last sentence quoted above will be of particular interest to historians of writing. I myself look forward to future communications on this topic. Selected readings
* "Was rongorongo an independent invention of writing?" (3/21/24)
* "Polynesian sweet potatoes and jungle chickens: verbal vectors" (1/18/23)
[Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: crucial
This word has appeared in 2,489 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
knackered (1)
very tired, exhausted
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
chat up
to talk to someone in the hope of beginning a romantic relationship with them
➖ @EngSkills ➖
lations with the West," in Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61.
* Barry Cunliffe, By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean: The Birth of Eurasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/8/16)
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 2" (3/12/16)
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 3" (3/16/16)
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 4" (3/24/16)
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 5" (3/28/16)
* "Of armaments and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 6" (12/23/17) — particularly pertinent, and also draws on art history as well as archeology
* "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 7" (1/11/21) –on the akinakes* (Scythian dagger / short sword) and Xiongnu (Hunnish) horse sacrifice
* "Of felt hats, feathers, macaroni, and weasels" (3/13/16)
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19) — details how the akinakes and other attributes of Saka / Scythian culture penetrated to the far south of what is now China; excessive sacrifices of horses in the south and in Shandong
* "The dissemination of iron and the spread of languages" (11/5/20) — with a lengthy section on the akinakes and its dispersion
* "Indo-European religion, Scythian philosophy, and the date of Zoroaster: a linguistic quibble" (10/9/20) — with an extensive bibliography
* "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19)
* "Of reindeer and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/23/18)
* "'Mulan' is a masculine, non-Sinitic name" (7/15/19)
* "Ethnogenesis of the Mongolian people and their language" (8/19/20)
* "Idle thoughts on 'gelding'" (8/3/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 3" (6/3/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics, part 2" (5/11/20)
* "The importance of archeology for historical linguistics" (5/1/20) — with a list of more than a dozen previous posts related to archeology and language
* "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
* "Indo-European 'cow' and Old Sinitic Reconstructions: awesome" (1/16/20)
* "'Horse Master in IE and in Sinitic" (11/9/19)
* "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19)
* "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
* "Of dogs and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (3/7/18)
* "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)
* "Galactic glimmers: of milk and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (1/8/19)
* "Mare, mǎ ('horse'), etc." (11/17/19)
* "Blue-Green Iranian 'Danube'" (10/26/19)
* "China and Rome" (2/24/19)
* "Old Sinitic reconstructions and Tibeto-Burman cognates" (4/18/16)
* "The 'whole mess' of Old Sinitic reconstruction" (12/14/20) — with scores of relevant posts listed in the "Selected readings"
* Victor H. Mair, “The Horse in Late Prehistoric China: Wresting Culture and Control from the ‘Barbarians’”, in Marsha Levine, Colin Renfrew, and Katie Boyle, ed., Prehistoric steppe adaptation and the horse, McDonald Institute Monographs (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003), pp. 163-187.
* Victor H. Mair, “Horse Sacrifices and Sacred Groves among the North(west)ern Peoples of East Asia”, Ouya xuekan 欧亚学刊 (Eurasian Studies), 6 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2007), 22-53; also available as chapter 11 in Victor H. Mair, China and Beyond: A Collection of Essays (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2013).
* Prods Oktor Skjaervø, "The Horse in Indo-Iranian Mythology", review of Philippe Swennen, "D'Indra à Tištrya: Portrait et évolution du cheval sacré dans les mythes indo-iraniens anciens", Journal of the American Oriental Society, 128.2 (April-June, 2008), 295-302.
* Saikat K. Bose, "The Aśvamedha: in the context of early South Asian socio-political development", Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, 25.2[...]
Language Log
China Babel
My basement is full of unpublished manuscripts. I call it the "Dungeon", because it is dark, dank, and crowded with books and papers — much worse than my office, which has achieved a fabled reputation for its crampedness — and very cold in the winter, though it does have a wonderful bay window on the eastern side where I can look out at the flora, fauna, and foliage to rest my eyes and mind from time to time.
Three of the most significant manuscripts in the Dungeon that remained unpublished for decades are:
1. West Eurasian and North African Influences on the Origins of Chinese Writing (tentative title) has been alluded to on Language Log several times during the last couple of decades, but I began to think about its main themes already in the 70s. The bulk of the research was done during the 80s, after which I locked it away in a strongbox that I've not touched since them, nor do I have any intention of doing so during the foreseeable future. Why? Because the intellectual infrastructure for serious consideration of such a paradigm-shifting work simply does not exist. Too many, I would even say most, scholars simply cannot accept the possibility of long distance cultural interaction. Back in the 70s and 80s when I laid out my positions, colleagues would say, "You make an interesting case for convincing parallels at the two ends of Eurasia, but how are they connected in the middle?"
When, in the 90s, I brought the Tarim Basin mummies to the attention of the world and undertook deep, broad research on a wide variety of aspects concerning them, I thought that I had discovered the smoking gun in the center of Eurasia. Our (including J. P. Mallory, Elizabeth J. W. Barber, Han Kangxin, et al.) archeological investigations were complemented by the remarkable, long-running series of studies on east-west exchanges by Yu Taishan that were carried out primarily with the use of Chinese historical sources, which he plumbed in a thoroughgoing way that had never been done before (many are available in English translations in Sino-Platonic Papers, including book-length volumes). But that was insufficient for the obdurate skeptics who also demanded that the dots connecting the two ends to the middle be filled in more decisively (though, in truth, we thought we had already gone a long way toward meeting that challenge).
Then, during the 00s, the situation improved markedly. Andrew Sherratt wrote his seminal "The Trans-Eurasian Exchange: The Prehistory of Chinese Relations with the West", which was published posthumously in Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006), pp. 30-61, that is especially important for the study of the spread of bronze technology from west to east. A few years later, with a Eurasian-wide purview, the pathbreaking article by Joyce C. White and Elizabeth G. Hamilton, “The transmission of early bronze technology to Thailand: new perspectives”, Journal of World Prehistory 22 (2009), 357–97 (Google Scholar) appeared.
Then came the 10s, which commenced the penetrating studies by Lucas Christopoulos linking up Greek, Central Asian, and East Asian cultural attributes through minute visual and textual comparisons, and the massive treatises of Brian Pellar on the astronomical derivation of the zodiac and writing systems based thereupon. These researches are bringing us ever closer to the fundamental premises upon which Origins was predicated.
Just this March (2024), while I was preparing this note, two scintillating new works burst upon the scene that tie east and west together more tightly than ever before:
a. Petya Andreeva, Fantastic Fauna from China to Crimea: Image-Making in Eurasian Nomadic Societies, 700 BCE-500 CE (Edinburgh: University Press, 2024).
b. Hajni Elias, "The Southwest S[...]
