35152
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
redneck
a lower-class white person from a rural background
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Word of the Day
surreptitious
Definition: (adjective) Marked by quiet and caution and secrecy; taking pains to avoid being observed.
Synonyms: furtive, stealthy, sneaky.
Usage: She stole a surreptitious glance at him, but he, too, seemed to have been caught up by Rose's gay, good humor.
Discuss
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Idiom of the Day
be a different kettle of fish
To be entirely different in scope or description from someone or something that was just being discussed. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
vote off
If somebody is voted off something, they have to leave because not enough people voted to keep them on.
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Language Log
Problems with Japan's writing system, pt. 873
My, my, my!! Who'da thunk it?
Japanese beef brand faces marketing mess as kanji creates confusion
Japan Today (5/4/24)
The government of Ibaraki Prefecture has hit a marketing snag in the promotion of its local Hitachiwagyu Beef specialty after a survey showed a significant percentage of young Japanese adults cannot read the kanji characters in its name.
Japan boasts numerous wagyu luxury beef variants, most famously the Kobe Beef from Hyogo Prefecture in the country's west. The Hitachiwagyu name refers to Hitachi Province, the pre-1875 name for Ibaraki Prefecture.
The meat is sourced from Japanese Black cattle raised in the prefecture just north of Tokyo for 30 months.
But a national online survey conducted with 300 participants in December showed some 57 percent of people in their 20s and 43 percent in their 30s were unable to correctly identify the kanji characters for "Hitachi."
Older respondents fared better, with 33 percent of those in their 40s, 35 percent of people in their 50s and just 22 percent of individuals in their 60s offering the wrong answer.
…
A majority of people in their twenties don't know how to read the characters for the "Hitachi" of "Hitachiwagyu", where "wagyu" is a word for Japanese luxury beef that even many Americans know, and Hitachi is, of course, a world-famous multinational conglomerate whose name is written with two very simple, common kanji, 日立, meaning "sun" and "stand erect", whereas the "Hitachi" of this particular brand of beef is written with two completely different kanji, 常陸. These are both relatively simple and common, with the meanings "frequent / common (!)" and "land / shore"). This unusual reading of 常+陸 as "hitachi" comes from the old name of a former province located in and forming a large part of present-day Ibaraki Prefecture, whence this special wagyu beef originates. It is also the name of a famous Sumo wrestler during the early 1900s who hailed from this area.
This is not a matter of character amnesia. Rather, it is a case of large portions of the populace not knowing how to pronounce the kanji in this particular word, though they may (or may not) know how to pronounce them in other contexts.
Selected readings
* "Mix and match Japanese orthography" (4/17/24)
* "Further mystification of the Japanese writing system" (5/22/22)
* "Is a bad writing system a Good Thing?" (5/19/11)
* "Character Amnesia" (7/22/10)
* "Black hair and cattle" (2/16/22)
[Thanks to Mark Swofford]
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iss., University of Pennsylvania, 2013.
* Robert Drews, Early Riders: The Beginnings of Mounted Warfare in Asia and Europe (London / New York: Routledge, 2004)
* Juha Janhunen, “The horse in East Asia: Reviewing the Linguistic Evidence,” in Victor H. Mair ed.,The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man; Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 1 of 2, pp. 415-430
* Kristen Pearson, "Chasing the Shaman’s Steed: The Horse in Myth from Central Asia to Scandinavia" (free pdf), Sino-Platonic Papers, 269 (May, 2017), 1-21.
* David Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel and Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)
* Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)
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Football Language Cliché: If you’d offered me that…
Читать полностью…
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
flame
to attack someone by posting an abusive message in an online forum or message board
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Word of the Day
plexus
Definition: (noun) A structure in the form of a network, especially of nerves, blood vessels, or lymphatics.
Synonyms: rete.
Usage: The bullet missed his cardiac plexus by an inch, leaving all the nerves intact.
Discuss
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istorical reality, but that in the face of those cultural relics without written records, we cannot only use the limited handed down documents as the frame of reference for interpreting them, but should rely on the hard work of the historian to interpret them. The hard work of the author has created a new frame of reference that is helpful for analyzing possibilities.
We should not only use the limited number of handed down documents as a frame of reference for interpreting [the archeologically recovered cultural relics], but should rely on the hard work of historians to create a new frame of reference for them that is conducive to the analysis of possibilities.
(GT translation with modifications)
(citation courtesy of Petya Andreeva)
Both the dispersal of the winged lion across Eurasia and the radical reenvisioning of the development of Chinese history as having much more to do with the south than traditional accounts would have it possess important implications for future research on East Asian civilization and language. It will take many years to reassess these new insights. Meanwhile, they have already helped me understand better problems that have puzzled me for decades, such as why the first poet in Chinese history known by name (Qu Yuan [339-278 BC]) came from the south, why the vast majority of archeologically recovered classical period manuscripts have been recovered in the south (esp. Chu), why the founder of the epochal Han dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), Liu Bang (256-195 BC), and his closest competitor, Xiang Yu (232-202 BC), in defeating the brief (221-207 BC) eponymous (for "China") far (over 1,000 km) northwestern, semi-barbarian Qin dynasty ʣəɲ 秦 (Old Sinitic Minimal [OSM] reconstructed pronunciation) were both from the same southern state of Chu where the first Sinitic / Hannic poet came from.
Perhaps we should henceforth refer to "China" (< Qin) as "Tshraq" (OSM of "Chu"). The Sinoglyph for Tshraq / Chu is 楚. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cb/%E6%A5%9A-oracle.svg/60px-%E6%A5%9A-oracle.svg.png oracle bone form https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/%E6%A5%9A-bronze.svg/60px-%E6%A5%9A-bronze.svg.png Western Zhou bronze inscriptional form
The word is of Mon-Khmer derivation and had the meaning "thorn".
Source: Axel Schuessler 2007, 2009
And we should look more intensively and extensively at words like píxiū 貔貅 ("winged lion-like chimera"), bìxié 辟邪 ("a chimaera-like figure common in Chinese and Persian art"), and its homophone bìxié 避邪 ("ward off evil spirits"), to go beyond the pathbreaking work of Jerry Norman and Tsu-Lin Mei in demonstrating Sinitic borrowing from Austro-Asiatic. Selected readings
* "Revelation: Scythians and Shang" (6/4/23)
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
* "China Babel" (3/26/24) — Southwest Bronze Road; Shimao and long distance cultural transmission; Scythian linkage of Eurasian nomadic societies
* Victor H. Mair, with contributions by E. Bruce Brooks, "Was There a Xià Dynasty?", Sino-Platonic Papers, 239 (May, 2013), 39 pages.
* Andrew Chittick, "Vernacular Languages in the Medieval Jiankang Empire", 250 (July, 2014), 25 pages.
* Norman, Jerry; Mei, Tsu-lin (1976). "The Austroasiatics in Ancient South China: Some Lexical Evidence" (PDF). Monumenta Serica. 32: 274–301. JSTOR 40726203.
* "What is the difference between a dragon and a /lʊŋ³⁵/?" (2/10/24)
* "The foreign origins of the lion dance and words for 'lion' in Sinitic" (1/14/22) — "Nearly every government building in China is guarded by a pair of lions flanking the front door. The same is true of major banks and other public buildings and even private houses in many other countries around the world. This is a custom that may be traced back to Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire (c. 1650 BC-c. 1178 BC), where an imposing pair of lions guards the gateway leading to the palace. Bear in mind that Hittite is the oldest attestable Indo-Euro[...]
t will undoubtedly cause huge repercussions and shocks in the academic world. Did ancient Chinese civilization first originate in the Jianghan-Huaihe River Basin and then spread from south to north; or did it first originate in the Yellow River Basin and then spread from north to south? The view of this book is that it is the former, which is very different from the traditional view, but it is true. It is reasonable and well-founded. Scholarship prior to the Qing Dynasty's research on China's ancient history before the Western Zhou Dynasty was basically based on a few handed-down documents such as Sima Qian's Historical Records of the Han Dynasty. Historical Records begins with "Basic Annals of the Five Emperors". The five emperors are Huangdi (Yellow Emperor), Zhuanxu, Emperor Ku, Yao, and Shun; the second is "Benji of Xia", which first talks about Dayu; the third is "Benji of Yin". The centers of political activities of Yao, Shun, Xia, and Shang are generally considered to be in today's Shanxi and Henan. Thanks to the discovery and research of oracle bone inscriptions over the past hundred years, the academic community has gained a reliable understanding of the history of the Yin/Shang Dynasty. However, as for the history of the Xia Dynasty, the academic community is still at a loss due to the lack of written evidence of the corresponding era.
When the Erlitou site in Yanshi, Henan was excavated in the middle of the last century, academic circles defined it as an urban site from the Xia Dynasty to the early Shang Dynasty. Such an ancient history research background makes scholars take it for granted that the spread path of China's ancient civilization was from the north to the south. Later discovered sites in the Yangtze River basin similar to the Erlitou culture were interpreted by scholars as the spread of Xia and Shang culture to the south. This book quotes [archeology official] Qiao Yu's opinions and puts forward a different view: research on the population and land utilization around Erlitou shows that the population and settlement density there have always been very thin, and the land utilization is also very low. Erlitou belongs to a farming culture. With enough farmland and residential areas, the agricultural society lacked the motivation to expand outwards; there were not many weapons at the Erlitou site, and there were no ethnic groups that made a living by war. How did they expand their influence outwards?
After the discovery of ancient city sites such as Qujialing and Shijiahe in Hubei, the prototype of an ancient united city-state in the Han River Basin has emerged. In other words, the Jianghan Plain had formed a complete national civilization before the Bronze Age. The so-called "Erlitou Culture" is actually the cultural aspect produced by the Hanshui Civilization in the Bronze Age and affected the Zhengluo area, mainly originating from the south. Archeology has proven that civilization in ancient China did not spread from north to south, but from south to north.
The legendary holy kings and heroes such as Yao, Shun, and Yu are the result of the merger of myths from different traditional sources. Shun and Yu were not originally heroes born in the north. For example, Shun was called "Lord of the Xiang" in The Songs of Chu, and his two wives were called "Lady Xiang". They were all regarded as the gods of the Xiang River, and the Xiang River was the the southern part of the Qujialing cultural range. Thr Historical Records says that the ancestor of Chu came from Zhuanxu, while the Bamboo Chronicles records the genealogy of the holy king and says: "Zhuanxu gave birth to Bo Gun." Gun is the father of Dayu. In this way, Dayu was originally the ancestor and hero of the Chu people. . Huainanzi "Benjing" says: "At the time of Shun, Gonggong raised the flood…Shun then asked Yu to dredge the three rivers and five lakes, open up Yique, guide the Xianjian, level the land, and so that the waters could flow into the Eastern S[...]
Language Log
Software testing day
Today's xkcd:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/software_testing_day_2x.png
Mouseover title: "The company tried to document how often employees were celebrating Software Testing Day, but their recordkeeping system kept mysteriously crashing."
Caroline Davies, "‘They thought I was a child’: US airline repeatedly registers 101-year-old as baby", The Guardian 4/28/2024:
A 101-year-old woman has been frequently mistaken for an infant because an airline’s booking system was unable to compute her date of birth.
The woman, named only as Patricia, was born in 1922, but the American Airlines system apparently does not recognise that year, defaulting instead to 2022, the BBC reported.
We should keep in mind that recent hires were infants — or not yet conceived — at the time of the infamous Y2K panic.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
icky
unpleasant in colour or taste
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Word of the Day
listless
Definition: (adjective) Marked by low spirits; showing no enthusiasm.
Synonyms: dispirited.
Usage: A subtle change had transformed her from the listless woman he had known into a being who, for the moment, seemed palpitant with the forces of life.
Discuss
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: rueful
This word has appeared in 34 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
have out
If you have something out, like a tooth or an organ, it's removed from your body.
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: etymology
This word has appeared in 31 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
axe | ax (1)
to dismiss someone from a job (v.) | dismissal from a job (n.)
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Word of the Day
ferrule
Definition: (noun) A metal ring or cap placed around a pole or shaft for reinforcement or to prevent splitting.
Synonyms: collet.
Usage: The walking stick was quite old, and the large brass ferrule at its tip was worn down and dented.
Discuss
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Language Log
New frontiers in dataset corruption
In a comment on yesterday's "Software testing day" post, ernie in berkeley offered a nice "QA Engineer walks into a bar" joke, and pointed us to its origin in an old xkcd comic "Exploits of a Mom":
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/exploits_of_a_mom.png
…which in turn reminded me of an old problem, discussed in "Excel invents genes", 8/26/2016:
Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren and Assam El-Osta, "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature", Genome Biology 2016:
The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions.
This was a problem a dozen years ago when I worked on information extraction from biomedical literature — it's amazing to me that it still goes on. The authors note that
Automatic conversion of gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers is a problematic feature of Excel software. The description of this problem and workarounds were first highlighted over a decade ago [1]—nevertheless, we find that these errors continue to pervade supplementary files in the scientific literature. To date, there is no way to permanently deactivate automatic conversion to dates in MS Excel and other spreadsheet software such as LibreOffice Calc or Apache OpenOffice Calc. We note, however, that the spreadsheet program Google Sheets did not convert any gene names to dates or numbers when typed or pasted; notably, when these sheets were later reopened with Excel, LibreOffice Calc or OpenOffice Calc, gene symbols such as SEPT1 and MARCH1 were protected from date conversion.
It's shocking that biologists ever relied on Excel as a database system, and even more shocking that they're still doing it.
And of course this is adjacent to the problem of wrong row or column numbers in data analysis, and the wider problem of Cupertinos and other autocorrect effects, and so on.
I don't have time this morning to check whether MS has finally fixed the issue of Excel inventing new gene names (and similar things in other research areas) — or at least provided and documented a setting to allow researchers to turn off such "helpful" re-interpretations.
But it occurs to me that the rise of LLM "AI" means that there will soon be (the opportunity for) many new types of dataset corruption, as legions of clueless (or at least context-agnostic) developers enlist the intervention of helpful AIs everywhere…
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Language Log
From Chariot to Carriage
In our studies of the transmission of Indo-European language and culture across the Eurasian continent, one of the most vital research topics is that of horse-drawn wheeled vehicles. During this past semester, I taught one of the most satisfying courses of my entire half-century career, namely, "Horses and humans". Among the many engrossing subjects that we confronted are the nomenclature for wheeled vehicles, how horses were hitched to them, and so forth. Many of these questions are now authoritatively answered in the following paper by three of the world's most distinguished scholars of equine equipage.
———————
Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-forty-fourth issue:
"From Chariot to Carriage: Wheeled Vehicles and Developments in Draft and Harnessing in Ancient China," by Joost H. Crouwel, Gail Brownrigg, and Katheryn Linduff. https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp344_chariot_to_carriage_in_ancient_china.pdf
ABSTRACT
Chariots drawn by horses harnessed in pairs under a yoke appeared in China, without apparent local antecedants, in burials of the late Shang dynasty (ca. 1200–1045 bce). The system of paired draft and their characteristic design – two large, multi-spoked wheels set on a long axle placed centrally under the wide body – remained virtually unchanged for nearly a thousand years. By the time of Emperor Qin Shihuang (ruled 221–210 bce), covered traveling vehicles in which the passenger could sit or recline had been developed. The two superb bronze models from his tomb have enabled a study of the details of their construction and harnessing. Under the Western Han dynasty (206 bce–9 ce), an innovative type of vehicle emerged – the prestigious, lightweight carriage for swift personal transport drawn by a single horse between shafts, harnessed with a breaststrap. Like the chariots, they were driven from the box; the occupants knelt or reclined rather than stood. Though the use of breast traction continued to be the traditional form of harnessing horses, mules and donkeys in China, the fast carriages in their turn went out of fashion after the end of the Eastern Han period (24–220 ce), to be replaced by a stately, slower-moving vehicle with a single draft animal between the shafts, controlled by an attendant on foot.
—–
All issues of Sino-Platonic Papers are available in full for no charge.
To view our catalog, visit http://www.sino-platonic.org/
——————
Selected readings
* "Got wheels" (11/4/23)
* "'The old man at the pass loses his horse'" (5/2/20)
* Robert S. Bauer, “Sino-Tibetan *kolo 'Wheel',” Sino-Platonic Papers 47 (Aug. 1994), 1-11. (free pdf)
* Mair, Victor H. "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.
* "Archeological and linguistic evidence for the wheel in East Asia" (3/11/20)
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
* "Horse culture comes east" (11/15/20)
* "Mare, mǎ ('horse'), etc." (11/17/19)
* "Once more on Sinitic *mraɣ and Celtic and Germanic *marko for 'horse'" (4/28/20)
* "Some Mongolian words for 'horse'" (11/7/19)
* "'Horse Master' in IE and in Sinitic" (11/9/19)
* "'Horse' and 'language' in Korean" (10/30/19)
* "Of horse riding and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (4/21/19) — lengthy, major post with citations to and quotations from linguists, archeologists, historians, and other prominent scholars of the horse and wheeled vehicles
* "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/18)
* Wan, Xiang. "The horse in pre-imperial China." Ph.D. d[...]
Idiom of the Day
a kernel of truth
A singular element of truth or wisdom within a greater story, narrative, speech, or claim, especially when most or all other elements are fictitious or of questionable veracity. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
do in
to cause someone to feel very tired or worn out
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pean language, older yet than Tocharian and Sanskrit."
* Mayor, Adrienne (2011) [2000]. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691150130.
* Mayor, Adrienne (2022). Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691211183.
* Mayor, Adrienne; Heaney, Michael (1993). "Griffins and Arimaspeans". Folklore. 104 (1–2): 40–66. doi:10.1080/0015587X.1993.9715853. JSTOR 1260795.
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ea." "Three rivers" and "Five Lakes" are not northern scenery. In contrast, in the north, the risk of floods in the Wei and Fen river basins was very low. The climate in the middle reaches of the Yellow River is quite dry, and there was an obvious tendency toward aridity in the north during the Xia era. Therefore, it is difficult for Weifen or Zhengluo areas to create the myth of water control. The author believes that the center of political activities of the Xia Dynasty should be in the south. Specifically, it is most likely to be in the Xia River in Hubei (see Shui Jing Zhu (Annotations on the Classic of Waters), now named Changxia River. According to Shui Jing Zhu, the lower reaches of the Han River were all known as "Xia River"), and it was located in the Jianghan Plain. Many ancient cities in Qujialing and Shijiahe stood near the Xia River. In ancient times, due to the topography, there were frequent floods here. Water control was in great need, and the ancestors of Qujialing indeed had already devised the engineering system for water control was. In this case, why don’t we regard the city sites such as Dengjiawan or Jingnan Temple as the Xia Kingdom where Dayu controlled water?
The author also proposes that among the civilizations before the Yin-Shang Dynasty, there existed a pre-Chu civilization. Its scale, tradition and degree of nationalization were probably the highest and most glorious among all ancient civilization groups at that time. This means that the cultural tradition of Chu should be older than that of other countries, especially earlier than the tradition of Shang and Zhou rulers who came from the north to the south. So, why is the history we see today not like this? And the original history is missing? The author believes that the history handed down to the world is often written by the victors, which is bound to be mixed with the ideas based on the victors. The ideology of viewpoints even obscures the truth of the original history. The era when these handed down documents were written began in the Zhou Dynasty, and they were recorded using the characters of the Yin and Zhou civilizations, so they must represent the position of the northern ethnic group from which the nobles of the Yin and Zhou Dynasties came. Judging from the development process of various cultures in China, the northern ethnic groups developed later and their history is relatively young. From the Yin and Zhou dynasties, they gradually promoted the vast city-states into a unified political power and became the so-called "winners" of history. Therefore, they also have the right to express history and can write a history that promotes their own power and "virtue" and pass it down to the world. They borrowed the ancient myths of the southern ethnic groups and regarded Shun and Yu as the holy kings of their own ethnic group. But even so, in the orthodox history centered on the north, there are still clues that allow us to discover that the ancient south was actually civilized earlier than the north. In other words, although the mythology we generally recognize today seems to be a unified history at first glance, in fact, the original source of each mythical story and sacred hero in it is probably the result of the intersection and merging of the sacred histories of many different ethnic groups.
The above is the main line and theme of this book. Although these views are bold and shocking, they are not whimsical arguments, but are put forward by what I think is a serious and rigorous academic work. After this book is published, it will inevitably be criticized or criticized, and it may even be "beaten black and blue", but I believe that this book will become an immortal historical masterpiece. In the past hundred years of Chinese historical research, our academic community has been lacking this kind of historical research works that combine dense data with big thinking methods. Its significance is not mainly whether the conclusions in the book are completely consistent with h[...]
Language Log
Winged lions through time and space
We're talking about the griffin / griffon / gryphon (Ancient Greek: γρύψ, romanized: grýps; Classical Latin: grȳps or grȳpus; Late and Medieval Latin: gryphes, grypho etc.; Old French: griffon), "a legendary creature with the body, tail, and back legs of a lion, and the head and wings of an eagle with its talons on the front legs". (source)
Wolfgang Behr called my attention to an interesting paper by Olga Gorodetskaya (Guō Jìngyún 郭静云) and Lixin Guo 郭立新, who teach at National Chung-cheng University in Chiayi, Taiwan and at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, which hints at early West-East (Mesopotamia-East Asia) contact, an ongoing concern of ours here at Language Log:
Liǎng hé liúyù ānzǔ shényīng zài dìguó shíqí de yǎnbiàn jì yīngshī yìshòu xíngxiàng de xíngchéng
两河流域安祖神鹰在帝国时期的演变暨鹰狮翼兽形象的形成
"The evolution of the Anzu condor in Mesopotamia during the imperial period and the formation of the image of the griffin-winged beast
The paper is available from Academia here. Although the text is in Chinese (11 pages of small print in three columns), it is replete with scores of illustrations (mostly drawings of seals and seal impressions), and has a lengthy bibliography consisting of dozens of publications, mostly in European languages and again mostly about seals and their impressions. Abstract
From the Akkadian Empire to the Neo-Assyrian Empire, new ethnic groups continued to enter and gain control over Mesopotamia. Political changes brought about shifts in the religious system, causing the decline of the belief in Anzu, the lion-headed eagle in Sumerian civilization. The image of Anzu underwent a transformation from a flying gryphon to a gryphon with the characteristics of eagle wings and talons. Its religious connotation also developed in a negative direction, becoming a monster that causes a great flood or steals the book of life, requiring gods or heroes to overcome, control, shoot. or subdue it. In the context of this era of changing beliefs, ancient sacred beasts are seen as pseudo-beliefs that need to be overcome.
[Key words] Anzusia, ancient beliefs, eagle worship, lion worship, personal god
(GT translation with modifications)
During the first millennia BC and AD, we find parallel beliefs and images all the way across Eurasia. One of the most conspicuous is the píxiū 貔貅 (Old Sinitic [Zhengzhang)] /*bi qʰu/). Not only do these hybrid creatures have an alien appearance, their binomial name sounds non-Sinitic. Píxiū 貔貅 are important as architectural ornaments and stone sculpture (often monumental) already from the Han period (202 BC–9 AD; 25–220 AD) for their supposed apotropaic properties.
See also bìxié 辟邪 ("a chimaera-like figure common in Chinese and Persian art") and its homophone bìxié 避邪 ("ward off evil spirits").
Olga Gorodetskaya is said to be a controversial figure in the PRC. Judging from the article surveyed above, it is not too hard to guess why. Below, let us take a look at a review of a major book of hers that reveals more aspects of her archeohistorical stance that might prove problematic for nationalistic investigators.
Jiāng Guǎnghuī 姜广辉, "Zhōngguó wénmíng de yuántóu shì běifāng háishì nánfāng 中国文明的源头是北方还是南方" ("Is the origin of Chinese civilization in the north or the south?"), Zhōnghuá dúshū bào 《 中华读书报 》(12/4/13), 10:
The content of the 500,000-word book, Xia, Shang and Zhou: From Myth to Historical Fact, before me is not as romantic as the title. The whole book is almost a collection of archaeological briefings in recent decades, but the system of the book, the views and conclusions, are extremely explosive and shocking. I cannot specifically predict how many scholars will oppose or support its main points after the book is published, but i[...]
Idiom of the Day
be on track
To progress or develop as planned, scheduled, or expected. Watch the video
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
give back
If you give something back, you return it to whoever you got it from.
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Funny Or Die (Youtube)
Don't Do This After Sex (Bless These Braces)
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➖ @EngSkills ➖
Idiom of the Day
keep (one's) socks on
To remain patient and calm, especially when beginning to become angry or upset with impatience. Usually said as an imperative. Watch the video
➖ @EngSkills ➖
