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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
whack
to murder, esp. within the context of organised crime
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
come up (3)
to appear, occur, or become available
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hanziphiles (including perhaps he himself!) would take it as a swipe at the sinoglyphic writing system, and he didn't want to be a party to that! Selected readings
* "The economics of Chinese character usage" (9/2/11)
* "How many more Chinese characters are needed?" (10/25/16)
* "The infinitude of Chinese characters" (10/9/20) — with an extremely lengthy bibliography
* "Sino-Semitica: of gourds, cassia, and hemp and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (2/1/20)
* "Korean words for 'bottle gourd" (8/30/23)
* "Jichang Lulu" (9/26/22) — for rumbling intestines; the name reminds me of "hulu""Goblet word" (5/30/20)
* Victor H. Mair. "Southern Bottle-Gourd (hu-lu) Myths in China and Their Appropriation by Taoism." In Chung-kuo shen-hua yü ch'uan-shuo hsüeh-shu yen-t'ao-hui (Proceedings of the Conference on Chinese Myth and Legend). Han-hsüeh yen-chiu chung-hsin ts'ung-k'an (Center for Chinese Studies Research Series), No. 5. Vol. 1 of 2. Taipei: Han-hsüeh yen-chiu chung-hsin, 1996. Pp. 185-228.
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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)
➖ @EngSkills ➖
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 full gear
At the highest or maximum level of function, operation, or performance. Watch the video
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Word of the Day
wraith
Definition: (noun) Something shadowy and insubstantial.
Synonyms: ghost, specter, spook, shade.
Usage: He refused to venture near cemeteries, fearing he'd encounter wraiths, ghosts, and apparitions of all kinds.
Discuss
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Language Log
When "irrelevant" is not "not relevant"
Evan Boehs, "Everything I Know About the Xz Backdoor", 3/29/2024:
In April 2022, Jia Tan submits a patch via a mailing list. The patch is irrelevant, but the events that follow are.
[h/t Jonathan Lundell]
If you're not already aware, you can learn about the xz backdoor on reddit or on OpenSSF — from the second source:
A backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma was announced on the oss-security mailing list regarding the xz compression tools and libraries. Specifically, the issue with the xz libraries are with version 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, and users are urged to immediately stop usage and downgrade to xz-5.4.x.
This vulnerability in XZ Utils – the XZ format compression utilities included in most Linux distributions – may “enable a malicious actor to break sshd authentication and gain unauthorized access to the entire system remotely,” Red Hat warns. However, they note “Luckily xz 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 have not yet widely been integrated by Linux distributions, and where they have, mostly in pre-release versions.”
The obligatory screenshot:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/XzBackdoor.png
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Language Log
Cucurbits and junk characters
Christopher Rea came to Penn a few weeks ago and delivered this lecture:
"From Zhuangzi’s Gourd to Cinderella’s Pumpkin: Gua 瓜 as a Vehicle for the Imagination"
(2/22/24)
The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi tells us that one remedy for a lack of imagination is to take your gourd for a ride. Confucius makes a point about usefulness by comparing himself to a calabash. Gua 瓜—which include gourds, melons, pumpkins, squash, and bitter melon—abound in Chinese philosophy, art, poetry, historiography, and storytelling, notably in late imperial novels such as Jin Ping Mei, Journey to the West, and Story of the Stone. Why? Christopher Rea argues that gua have several qualities that account for their enduring popularity in the figurative imagination, including their sound, shape, seasonality, variety, and abundance.
This talk shares examples of how the cucurbitaceae—a vast family that is as diverse in its metaphorical usages as in its species—has been used in Chinese and other contexts as a vehicle for the imagination. The humble gua has been used to represent ideas of consequence, both physical (human anatomy, China, the earth) and conceptual (moral peril, wealth, glory days). Gua are a vehicle for rethinking the taxonomies that drive cultural historiography, the distinctions scholars make between here and there, this and that. In particular, this talk will focus on why gua associations tend to be overripe, and on how Chinese and non-Chinese sources have used melons and their kin to represent time itself. Here are some photographs of the cucurbitaceous corners of my office, with Chris holding a bottle gourd from my collection that he took to Harvard for a lecture the next day and then brought back to settle in his office at UBC in Vancouver.
During his talk at Penn, Chris showed this gourd-related sinoglyph that nobody among the thirty or so people in the room — most of them advanced students and teachers who were native speakers of Chinese — knew the sound or meaning of, though I could roughly surmise both its sound and meaning, viz., ráng / niáng; "flesh / pulp" (maybe with a touch of "rind"), but neither of which I was certain of, and guessing at what I thought might be its phonophore, though I was by no means sure of its exact sound, then speculating what I suspected might be its primary semantophore ("gourd") and secondary (superfluous) semantophore ("clothing; coat"), and smooshing them all together:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/rangniang.jpg
This is a freak character. It has no practical purpose. It may occur in an ultra-large dictionary like Kangxi (1716), which has 47,043 characters, but nobody knows for sure what it means or how it is pronounced. It is an excrescence on the sinoglyphic writing system. This is true of over half of all the extant hundred thousand plus sinoglyphs collected by the most obsessive hanziphiles. Consequently, in emulation of junk DNA, I call them "junk sinoglyphs".
One of the characteristics of cucurbits is that they have enormous numbers of seeds. So, next time you're mindlessly nibbling on watermelon seeds or pumpkin seeds, think of how many Chinese characters there are. Their number is limitless, and people keep creating new ones in a game of endless oneupmanship.
The economist, Rick Harbaugh, wrote a paper for my first international conference on Characters and Computers (1991 [see the book by that name edited by me]). It was a demonstration of the status enhancement value of the proliferation of Chinese characters. I was very enthusiastic about his paper and really wanted to include it in the book, but he wasn't ready to go with it at that time. In later years, I repeatedly tried to get him to publish it in Sino-Platonic Papers or elsewhere, but he wouldn't submit it anywhere. I think that [...]
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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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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