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Idiom of the Day
in the last analysis
When everything has been considered; when all the facts are known or the truth has come to light. Watch the video
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Language Log
Skinning a bear with Rosanne Barr
…vs. having a video conversation with her…
Attachment ambiguity of the week: "RFK Jr. says he dumped dead bear in Central Park after ditching plan to skin it in bizarre video with Roseanne Barr", NY Post 8/4/2024.
The Berkeley Neural Parser thinks that he planned to skin the bear in a video with Rosanne Barr:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/BarrBear1.png
(Presumably with her as co-skinner with him, not co-skinnee with the bear…)
But of course the headline writer meant for the PP "with Rosanne Barr" to modify "a bizarre video", and for the resulting PP "in a bizarre video with Rosanne Barr" to modify "RFK Jr. says [he dumped dead bear in Central Park after ditching plan to skin it]".
SpaCy comes to the same conclusion.
[h/t J.W. Brewer]
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and cultural ideology. Wang seems conscious of this when responding to a question from the WSJ author about whether Beijing could use a reinterpretation of the Yuezhi to make territorial claims in the region. Wang replies, ‘Such a notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument’.
Yet at the same time Wang seems to be promoting an implausible nationalistic claim of Uzbek responsibility for the establishment of the Kushan Empire. Wang notes that his results ‘match up with the needs of China and Uzbekistan’, and the article concludes with the following statement: ‘Being able to trace the origins of the Kushan Empire to local people rather than outsiders feeds a tale of national resurgence after a period of foreign dominance that lines up favorably with Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet efforts to write its own history’. Undoubtedly many thousands of local people – farmers, merchants and urban residents – were a significant element of the demographic makeup of the multicultural Kushan Empire, which stretched from Uzbekistan to the Ganges, and from the Iranian Plateau to Xinjiang. But to claim the founders of the empire were Uzbeks half a millennium before Turkic-speaking peoples even began to make their mark on the stage of Eurasian history does no service whatsoever to the credibility of the exciting and flourishing modern nation of Uzbekistan.
Craig Benjamin
benjamic@gvsu.edu
5 August 2024
Brief Bibliography
* Benjamin, C., The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria, Silk Roads Studies Series vol. XIV, Turnhout: Brepols, 2007.
* Falk, H., ed., Proceedings of the Symposium on the History of the Kushans on the Basis of Literary Evidence, Seminaris Conference Center, Berlin, December 2013, Mainz: Mainz Academy of Literature and Culture, 2016.
* Hill, J., Through the Jade Gate to Rome: A Study of the Silk Roads 1st to 2nd Centuries CE, Vol. I, 2nd edition. An annotated translation from the Houhan Shu, John E. Hill, 2015.
* Hulsewe, A.F.P. and Loewe, M.A.N., China in Central Asia. The Early Stage: 125B.C. – A.D. 23. An Annotated Translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty, Leiden: Brill, 1979.
* Litvinsky, B.A. and Altman-Bromberg, C., ‘The Archaeology and Art of Central Asia: Studies from the Former Soviet Union’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 8 (1996).
* Mallory, J.P. and Mair, V.H., The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.
* Sima Qian, Shi Ji (trans. B. Watson), Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian – Han Dynasty II, New York: Columbia University Press, Revised edtn. 1993.
* Zadneprovsky, Y.A., ‘Migration Paths of the Yueh-chih based on Archaeological Evidence’, Circle of Inner Asian Art Newsletter No. 9 (April 1999) pp. 3 ff.
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Language Log
Rethinking the Yuezhi?
[This is a guest post by Craig Benjamin, the leading authority on Yuezhi history. It is a follow-up to "Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language" (8/4/24)]
"China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back: The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs", by Sha Hua, WSJ (7/29/24).
A recent article published in the Wall Street Journal concerning attempts by Chinese and Uzbek archaeologists to unearth material evidence of the Yuezhi and early Kushans makes interesting reading. The author prefaces their account by placing the work of the archaeologists in the context of Xi Jinping’s efforts to expand the scope and influence of Chinese civilization, arguing that the efforts of Chinese researchers in various global locations ‘has the potential to change the field of archaeology itself, along with China’s place in the sweep of human history’. However, rather than promoting the influence of Chinese civilization in Central Asia, the archaeologists appear to be intent upon advancing nationalist claims in support of China’s Belt and Road partner Uzbekistan by arguing, on the basis of very slender evidence, that the Kushans ‘were descendants of the local population’.
The article focuses on the work of Wang Jianxin, a Chinese archaeologist based at Northwest University in Xi'an. Wang has apparently long been fascinated with the Silk Roads, and in particular with the impact of the migration of the Yuezhi from the borderlands of ancient northwestern China to Bactria, essentially southern Uzbekistan and northern Afghanistan today. According to the article, Wang and his team have been digging for several years in Uzbekistan, most recently at a site known as Chinortepa, close to the so-called Iron Gates of ancient Sogdia. The article states that, based on the artifacts he has discovered and the location of these discoveries, Wang now believes that our understanding of the nature and role of the Yuezhi in the history of ancient Central Asia might be incorrect, and that the Yuezhi might not have been founders of the Kushan Empire after all.
Such a startling thesis, which is clearly at odds with the consensus view held by most Yuezhi specialists, needs to be evaluated in light of the evidence Wang has assembled. Wang’s assertion that the field of Silk Roads Studies is dominated by Western scholars, and that it was time to ‘add China’s voice to the field’ might hold some merit, but it is hardly the fault of Western (and also Russian and Japanese) scholars if Chinese interest in the field has been slow to develop. And of course it is ancient Han Chinese annals – the Shiji, Han Shu and Hou Han Shu – that are fundamental to the story of the Yuezhi and their role in founding the Kushan Empire. None the less, Western scholars should welcome greater Chinese engagement in the field.
According to the article, after Wang signed an agreement with the Uzbek Academy of Sciences in Samarkand, the joint Chinese-Uzbek team unearthed ‘dozens of hitherto unknown nomadic settlements in Uzbekistan, stunning other archaeologists in the field’. It would be helpful if reports of these stunning discoveries were more widely disseminated through appropriate academic journals because so far information on these excavations has been difficult to access. The article’s implication that these settlements can be attributed to the Yuezhi is apparently based on Wang’s skill in ‘using rock paintings to identify sites’, but to the best of this author’s knowledge rock paintings (petroglyphs?) are not something generally associated with Yuezhi mortuary sites. But Wang’s reported preference of searching for graves ‘in flat terrain, orchards or farmland’ rather than digging up the numerous tepe mounds that dot the landsc[...]
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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Idiom of the Day
lap of the gods
A state beyond possible human control, intervention, or responsibility; a state or condition that is or will be decided by nature or fate. Usually used in the phrase "in the lap of the gods." Watch the video
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Language Log
What AI is (not) good for?
Deep Learning "AI" systems are doing ever more impressive things, although there continues to be plenty of skepticism Out There about the underlying technologies.
And now there's increasing skepticism about the economic impact. An 8/2/2024 Atlantic article has the title "The Generative-AI Revolution May Be a Bubble", and the subtitle "Tech firms have been spending historic amounts of money on AI—but will it pay off?" A recent Goldman-Sachs report had the title "GEN AI: TOO MUCH SPEND, TOO LITTLE BENEFIT?", featured in a 7/24 Washington Post article "Big Tech says AI is booming. Wall Street is starting to see a bubble."
One idea about AI socio-economics has always been that wider and wider swaths of the world's population will want to pay for its participation in their daily lives, replicating the successes of social media and portable networked devices. But even if this is true, there are some hiccups along the way, such as Google's "Dear Sidney" Olympics ad:
There was a lot of negative reaction to that ad, for example Alexandra Petri, "I hate the Gemini ‘Dear Sydney’ ad more every passing moment", and Caroline Nimbs Nyce's "Google Wins the Gold Medal for Worst Olympic Ad" — so much that Google quickly pulled it. Here's the start of the WSJ's 8/2/2024 summary, "Google Pulls Olympic-Themed AI Ad After Failing to Stick the Landing":
Google pulled an Olympics-themed ad for its AI chatbot after it sparked backlash from viewers that the messaging was impersonal and dystopian, the latest misstep by Alphabet’s search giant in its rollout of the technology.
The advertisement, called “Dear Sydney” and created in partnership with Team USA, featured a father who uses Gemini, a chatbot based on Google’s most advanced technology, to help his daughter write a letter to Team USA track runner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
Critics online said the ad was tone-deaf because it took an innocent childhood experience—writing a heartfelt letter of admiration to a role model—and turned the task over to an algorithm. Parents especially were quick to note that a letter written by generative artificial intelligence detracts from the sentimental value it has when personally written by a child.
That article ends with a reference to an earlier tone-deaf advertisement from another Tech giant:
Apple apologized in May for an ad that depicted an array of creative tools being crushed —including a piano and colorful paint brushes—saying it fell short of the company’s standards, after some critics said the ad highlighted their concerns that AI could replace human creativity.
(See "Tim Cook crushes it everything", 5/9/2024…)
Cory Doctorow has coined the metaphorical term "centaur" for the application of these ideas in the workplace ("The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us", 8/2/2024):
A centaur is someone whose work is supercharged by automation: you are a human head atop the tireless body of a machine that lets you get more done than you could ever do on your own.
A reverse-centaur is someone who is harnessed to the machine […]
There's certainly a lot of centauring Out There. But the main effect of several such out-sourced innovations in my own workplace has been to force many departments and centers to hire new human employees to deal with the bureaucratic "help" thus provided, which semi-automatically monitors lots of newly-tracked details through badly-designed interfaces to ill-fitting data models. Which is not a very good imitation of the 19th-century successes of industrial automation…
This seems to be a problem with the people designing, selling, and buying such systems, rather than with the underlying technologies. But as long as administrative productivity is defined by bureaucrats, I don't think it will be easy to fix the problems.
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ually referring to 1st millennium Bactria, as well as the Takhar province of Afghanistan. The Tókharoi are often identified by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan Empire.
Müller's identification became a minority position among scholars when it turned out that the people of Tokharistan (Bactria) spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, which is quite distinct from the Tocharian languages. Nevertheless, "Tocharian" remained the standard term for the languages of the Tarim Basin manuscripts and for the people who produced them. A few scholars argue that the Yuezhi were originally speakers of Tocharian who later adopted the Bactrian language.
The name of Kucha in Tocharian B was Kuśi, with adjectival form kuśiññe. The word may be derived from Proto-Indo-European *keuk "shining, white". The Tocharian B word akeññe may have referred to people of Agni, with a derivation meaning "borderers, marchers". One of the Tocharian A texts have ārśi-käntwā as a name for their own language, so that ārśi may have meant "Agnean", though "monk" is also possible.
Tocharian kings apparently gave themselves the title Ñäktemts soy (in Tocharian B), an equivalent of the title Devaputra ("Son of God") of the Kushans.
And what languages did the Tocharians speak?
The Tocharian languages are known from around 7600 documents dating from about 400 to 1200 AD, found at 30 sites in the northeast Tarim area. The manuscripts are written in two distinct, but closely related, Indo-European languages, conventionally known as Tocharian A and Tocharian B. According to glotto-chronological data, Tocharian languages are closest to Western Indo-European languages such as proto-Germanic or proto-Italian, and being devoid of satemization predate the evolution of eastern Indo-European languages.
Tocharian A (Agnean or East Tocharian) was found in the northeastern oases known to the Tocharians as Ārśi, later Agni (i.e. Chinese Yanqi; modern Karasahr) and Turpan (including Khocho or Qočo; known in Chinese as Gaochang). Some 500 manuscripts have been studied in detail, mostly coming from Buddhist monasteries. Many authors take this to imply that Tocharian A had become a purely literary and liturgical language by the time of the manuscripts, but it may be that the surviving documents are unrepresentative.
Tocharian B (Kuchean or West Tocharian) was found at all the Tocharian A sites and also in several sites further west, including Kuchi (later Kucha). It appears to have still been in use in daily life at that time. Over 3200 manuscripts have been studied in detail.
The languages had significant differences in phonology, morphology and vocabulary, making them mutually unintelligible "at least as much as modern Germanic or Romance languages". Tocharian A shows innovations in the vowels and nominal inflection, whereas Tocharian B has changes in the consonants and verbal inflection. Many of the differences in vocabulary between the languages concern Buddhist concepts, which may suggest that they were associated with different Buddhist traditions.
The differences indicate that they diverged from a common ancestor between 500 and 1000 years before the earliest documents, that is, sometime in the 1st millennium BC. Common Indo-European vocabulary retained in Tocharian includes words for herding, cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, horses, textiles, farming, wheat, gold, silver, and wheeled vehicles. Prakrit documents from 3rd century Krorän, Andir and Niya on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain around 100 loanwords and 1000 proper names that cannot be traced to an Indic or Iranian source. Thomas Burrow suggested that they come from a variety of Tocharian, dubbed Tocharian C or Kroränian, which may have been spoken by at least some of the local populace. Burrow's theory is widely accepted, but the evidence is meagre and inconclusive, and some scholars favour alternative explanations.
(Wikipedi[...]
actria, the Kushanas (Chinese: 貴霜; pinyin: Guìshuāng), began to subsume the other tribes and neighbouring peoples. The subsequent Kushan Empire, at its peak in the 3rd century AD, stretched from Turfan in the Tarim Basin in the north to Pataliputra on the Gangetic plain of India in the south. The Kushanas played an important role in the development of trade on the Silk Road and the introduction of Buddhism to China.
The Lesser Yuezhi migrated southward to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. Some are reported to have settled among the Qiang people in Qinghai, and to have been involved in the Liang Province Rebellion (184–221 AD) against the Eastern Han dynasty. Another group of Yuezhi is said to have founded the city state of Cumuḍa (now known as Kumul and Hami) in the eastern Tarim. A fourth group of Lesser Yuezhi may have become part of the Jie people of Shanxi, who established the Later Zhao state of the 4th century AD (although this remains controversial).
Many scholars believe that the Yuezhi were an Indo-European people. Although some scholars have associated them with artifacts of extinct cultures in the Tarim Basin, such as the Tarim mummies and texts recording the Tocharian languages, there is no evidence for any such link. [VHM: See this post and the many references herein.]
Three pre-Han texts mention peoples who appear to be the Yuezhi, albeit under slightly different names.
*
* The philosophical tract Guanzi (73, 78, 80 and 81) mentions nomadic pastoralists known as the Yúzhī 禺氏 (Old Chinese: *ŋʷjo-kje) or Niúzhī 牛氏 (OC: *ŋʷjə-kje), who supplied jade to the Chinese. (The Guanzi is now generally believed to have been compiled around 26 BC, based on older texts, including some from the Qi state era of the 11th to 3rd centuries BC. Most scholars no longer attribute its primary authorship to Guan Zhong, a Qi official in the 7th century BC.) The export of jade from the Tarim Basin, since at least the late 2nd millennium BC, is well-documented archaeologically. For example, hundreds of jade pieces found in the Tomb of Fu Hao (c. 1200 BC) originated from the Khotan area, on the southern rim of the Tarim Basin. According to the Guanzi, the Yúzhī/Niúzhī, unlike the neighbouring Xiongnu, did not engage in conflict with nearby Chinese states.
* The epic novel Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven (early 4th century BC) also mentions a plain of Yúzhī 禺知 (OC: *ŋʷjo-kje) to the northwest of the Zhou lands. [VHM: An important new publication on this early text will be announced in Language Log within a few days.]
* Chapter 59 of the Yi Zhou Shu (probably dating from the 4th to 1st century BC) refers to a Yúzhī 禺氏 (OC: *ŋʷjo-kje) people living to the northwest of the Zhou domain and offering horses as tribute. A late supplement contains the name Yuèdī 月氐 (OC: *ŋʷjat-tij), which may be a misspelling of the name Yuèzhī 月氏 (OC: *ŋʷjat-kje) found in later texts.
In the 1st century BC, Sima Qian – widely regarded as the founder of Chinese historiography – describes how the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) bought jade and highly valued military horses from a people that Sima Qian called the Wūzhī 烏氏 (OC: *ʔa-kje), led by a man named Luo. The Wūzhī traded these goods for Chinese silk, which they then sold on to other neighbours. This is probably the first reference to the Yuezhi as a lynchpin in trade on the Silk Road, which in the 3rd century BC began to link Chinese states to Central Asia and, eventually, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and Europe.
(Wikipedia)
VHM: For a book-length scholarly history of the Yuezhi, see the recent work by Craig Benjamin listed in the "Selected Readings" below. Asii
The Asii, Osii, Ossii, Asoi, Asioi, Asini or Aseni were an ancient Indo-European people of Central Asia, during the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE. Known only from Classical Greek and Roman sources, they were one of t[...]
that the Chinese are putting forward:
The extent to which present-day politics hovers over China’s archaeological ambitions became clear during a Wall Street Journal reporter’s encounter with an Uzbek researcher at the ruins of an ancient Kushan city near Chinor.
“Tell the Chinese that they will not find any traces of the Chinese here,” he said.
…
Asked whether Beijing could use the Yuezhi to make territorial claims, Wang said the notion was absurd because the nomads are a historical people and no one serious would put forth that argument.
It's a generously long article of nearly seventeen hundred words and fifteen large, clear illustrations of the site and the artifacts recovered from it, with an ingenious semi-interactive map (I recommend that readers check out each of the overlays that scroll by the features to which attention is being drawn), but there is not a single word about the language(s) of the people(s) and the region.
While we may not be able to say with complete confidence what the language of the Yuezhi was like, we should not overlook this question altogether, since important issues of origins, migrations, ethnicity, and culture are linked to it, and many of these counter the Chinese narrative.
It has long been held that the Yuezhi may have spoken Tocharian, after Hittite the second oldest Indo-European (IE) language. Tocharian was lost to science (human knowledge and awareness) for a millennium, but was rediscovered in Eastern Central Asia (ECA) — now called Xinjiang ("New Borders") Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) by the PRC / CCP government — only around the turn of the 20th century, making it the easternmost IE language. Strangely, however, Tocharian has unmistakable affinities with northwestern European languages.
Whether the Yuezhi spoke Tocharian or not, Tocharian words were borrowed into Sinitic beginning already in BC times, and some Sinitic terms passed into Tocharian as well. Here are lists of such cross-lingual words compiled by two Tocharian specialists:
Hannes Fellner, "In my view, the most secure early Tocharian-Chinese loanwords for now are":
Old Chinese ⇒ Proto-Tocharian
– OC *C.rˤap [MC lap 臘 là ‘winter sacrifice] ⇒ PT *rap [TB rāp twelfth month]
– OC *t.man-s [MC mjonH 萬 wàn ‘10.000’] ⇒ PT *tmānä [TB tmāne TA tmān ‘10.000’]
– OC *lˤuʔ [MC dawX; 稻 dào] ⇒ PT *kləw [TB TA klu] ‘rice, paddy’
Proto-Tocharian ⇒ Old Chinese
PT *ankwaṣ (TB aṅkwaṣ) ‘asafoetida’ (⇐ PIr. *Hangu-ǰatu- ‘asafoetida’) ⇒ OC *ʔaj N-qʰwəj-s MC ˈa ngjwjH 阿魏 ā wèi ‘asafoetida’
PT *mjətə ⇒ OC *mit > MC mjit > 蜜 mì ‘honey’
PT *krætswæ 'coarse woolen cloth' (TB kretswe TA kratsu) ⇒ OC *krat-s MC kjejH 罽 jì
Douglas Adams, "Here are my picks for the most likely Tch loanwords in Chinese":
TchB mit (PTch *mjätä) ‘honey’ = Chinese mi (AC *mjit)
ä = high central unrounded vowel
This is the “gold standard” Tch > Chinese loanword. I think everyone has agreed since Polivanov suggested the Chinese word had PIE antecedents 100 years ago.
TchB ṣecake/TchA śiśäk ‘lion’ = Chinese shīzi (AC *srjij-tsjɨʔ)
(PTch *ṣe/icäke)
Here we have historical (Chinese) evidence that it’s a borrowed word in Chinese—from the (then) language of Kashgar. That may mean that Tch borrowed the word from the same source or that the “Kasgarian” of the Han-era was a Tocharianoid language (or, indeed, a dialect of TchB).
TchB tsain/TchA *tsen ‘arrow’ = Chinese jiàn ‘small bamboo used for arrows’
(ancient PTch borrowing from Proto-Iranian *dzaina-)
Temporally and geographically unlikely that Chinese borrowed the word directly from Iranian.
TchB yakwe/TchA yuk ‘horse’ = Chinese jū ‘colt, yg horse’ (AC *kyo)
TchB kleṅke ‘vehicle’/TchA klaṅk ‘riding animal’
= Chinese shèng ‘quadriga’ (AC kə.ləŋ-s)
TchB puwe ‘spoke’ = Chinese fú ‘spoke’ (AC *puk [...]
Language Log
Yuezhi archeology without concern for Tocharian language
We have entered a new chapter in the history of the so-called Silk Road. What has happened? For the first time in the history of the field of Silk Road Studies, Chinese archeologists have gone out into the field beyond their own political borders. They are leading their own expeditions and carrying out their own excavations in other countries. An American archeologist who has worked in the stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) for three decades and is out there exploring and excavating right now — always slowly and patiently — and who has close ties to the local archeologists, tells me that the region is crawling with Chinese archeologists who are working in support of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for which see below. As a result, they are now in a position to interpret their discoveries as they see fit, and that takes a radically different approach from what scholars have been saying, among other things, about an elusive people known as the Yuezhi for the last century and more.
"China Reaches Back in Time to Challenge the West. Way, Way Back: The country’s archaeologists are striking out along the Silk Road to trace the reach of ancient Chinese civilization, disputing long-held beliefs", by Sha Hua, WSJ (7/29/24).
One of their flagship efforts is unfolding in Central Asia, a region where empires clashed and intersected for centuries, and where Western archaeologists have long dominated.
Under clear blue skies in May, Chinese and Uzbek researchers gathered around a 10-foot-deep trench dug into a terrace overlooking the village of Chinor, along Uzbekistan’s Surxondaryo River.
Inside the trench, a young Chinese archaeologist examined soil extracted with a tube-shaped spade as his Uzbek counterpart stood at the edge of the dig, explaining the team’s work to the village mayor. Scattered around them were 24 other dig sites, all ancient graves containing artifacts that challenged long-held assumptions about the region’s history.
The site, called Chinortepa, was discovered by a team under the direction of Wang Jianxin, a 71-year-old archaeologist based at Northwest University in the central Chinese city of Xi’an, the eastern starting point of the Silk Road.
Wang had long argued that the international understanding of the Silk Road—a term popularized in the 19th century by a German explorer—was dominated by Western scholars who naturally tended to focus on exploring how the West had influenced other cultures along the route.
“I want to add China’s voice to the field,” Wang said in an interview.
The scholar has spent two decades studying the Yuezhi [月氏], a group of nomadic herders who had roamed the grasslands of present-day northwestern China during the first millennium B.C. After a major defeat at the hands of another nomadic tribe in the second century B.C., they fled west, eventually settling in Central Asia—the first people from the East to do so, according to historical records.
Wang long wondered what happened to the Yuezhi after they left China, and he started exploring excavation possibilities in Central Asia as early as 2009. In 2013, three months after Xi announced the Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]*, Wang reached an agreement with Amridin Berdimurodov, then director of the Institute of Archaeology at Uzbekistan’s Academy of Sciences in Samarkand, to launch a joint study of ancient nomadic cultures in Central Asia.
[*VHM: Shortly after Xi became paramount leader in November, 2012; it is obvious how vitally important this massive trade project is in Xi's plans for global domination.]
Over the next decade, Wang’s team uncovered dozens of hitherto unknown nomadic settlements in Uzbekistan, stunning other archaeologists active in th[...]
Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fall apart
If something falls apart, it breaks into pieces or parts start falling off.
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Word of the Day
sanctimonious
Definition: (adjective) Feigning piety or righteousness.
Synonyms: holier-than-thou, pharisaic, pietistic, self-righteous.
Usage: With a sickeningly sanctimonious smile and a tap of the fork on her glass, she began the first meeting of the Society of Suburbanites Saving the World.
Discuss
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Language Log
Mongolian text-to-speech, online transliterator of Cyrillic to classical script
From IA:
By way of introduction to what you see below under the asterisks, regarding the (not-always) technical reasons for the paucity of webpages in Mongolian script, see some of the comments here, especially the one at the top (Greg Pringle).
I might mention that the president of Mongolia's webpage in Mongolian script — which he links to — only displays correctly for me in Chrome, not in Firefox and not on my iPhone (Safari).
*******
Google Translate (set to: English –> (Cyrillic) Mongolian), no audio
Transliterate Cyrillic Mongolian to classical Mongolian
Websites in classical Mongolian
(Cyrillic) Mongolian TTS — the brief video demonstration here is veyr impressive
These are awe-inspiring resources.
Selected readings
* "Script origin and typology, part 2" (7/5/24)
* "Mycological meandering: vernacular variora" (7/4/19)
* Anshuman Pandey, "Final proposal to encode Old Uyghur in Unicode" (pdf) (12/18/20) — very informative, both historically and linguistically; a learned, scholarly composition pandey@umich.edu pandey.github.io/unicode
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
bite off
to separate something from whatever it's attached to by biting it
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Word of the Day
stalwart
Definition: (adjective) Having or marked by imposing physical strength.
Synonyms: hardy, sturdy, stout.
Usage: Athos sprang into the boat, which was immediately pushed off and which soon sped seawards under the efforts of four stalwart rowers.
Discuss
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Language Log
Watermarking AI output, again
Deepa Seetharaman & Matt Barnum, "There’s a Tool to Catch Students Cheating With ChatGPT. OpenAI Hasn’t Released It.", WSJ 8/4/2024:
OpenAI has a method to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper. The company hasn’t released it despite widespread concerns about students using artificial intelligence to cheat.
The project has been mired in internal debate at OpenAI for roughly two years and has been ready to be released for about a year, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. “It’s just a matter of pressing a button,” one of the people said.
What OpenAI wrote on 5/7/2024 — "Understanding the source of what we see and hear online" ("Update on August 4, 2024") — suggests that the method is relatively easy to circumvent:
* Our teams have developed a text watermarking method that we continue to consider as we research alternatives.
* While it has been highly accurate and even effective against localized tampering, such as paraphrasing, it is less robust against globalized tampering; like using translation systems, rewording with another generative model, or asking the model to insert a special character in between every word and then deleting that character – making it trivial to circumvention by bad actors.
* Another important risk we are weighing is that our research suggests the text watermarking method has the potential to disproportionately impact some groups. For example, it could stigmatize use of AI as a useful writing tool for non-native English speakers.
See also Umar Shakir, "Google’s invisible AI watermark will help identify generative text and video", The Verge 5/14/2024:
Google’s DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, took the stage for the first time at the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday to talk not only about the team’s new AI tools, like the Veo video generator, but also about the new upgraded SynthID watermark imprinting system. It can now mark video that was digitally generated as well as AI-generated text.
Some details are available on Google Deep Mind's SynthID page:
Finding a robust solution to watermarking AI-generated text that doesn’t compromise the quality, accuracy and creative output has been a great challenge for AI researchers. To solve this problem, our team developed a technique that embeds a watermark directly into the process that a large language model (LLM) uses for generating text.
An LLM generates text one token at a time. These tokens can represent a single character, word or part of a phrase. To create a sequence of coherent text, the model predicts the next most likely token to generate. These predictions are based on the preceding words and the probability scores assigned to each potential token. […]
This process is repeated throughout the generated text, so a single sentence might contain ten or more adjusted probability scores, and a page could contain hundreds. The final pattern of scores for both the model’s word choices combined with the adjusted probability scores are considered the watermark. This technique can be used for as few as three sentences. And as the text increases in length, SynthID’s robustness and accuracy increases.
Obviously this method depends on knowing what release of what generative model was used. And even then, the same "globalized tampering" interventions will presumably work here as well — though if and when these methods are generally accessible and used, naive cheaters will be caught.
Another approach — alas even easier for "bad actors" to circumvent — is the Content Authenticity Initiative and the C2PA protocol. This protocol is analogous to (various countries') food labeling requirements.
Last year's LLOG AI Watermarking posts:
“Watermarking text”, 7/25/2023
“ROT-LLM?”, 7/28/2023
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ape of Uzbekistan does indeed have the potential to enhance our understanding of the lifeways of both nomads and sedentary communities in the region, so should be welcomed.
However, Wang’s arguments for seriously reevaluating the role of the Yuezhi in founding the Kushan Empire are less helpful. It is impossible to definitively attribute graves discovered in the region to the Yuezhi, although Wang seems confident in doing so. Even the so-called podboi tombs discovered by Russian and Chinese archaeologists at various locations corresponding with the itinerary of Yuezhi migration as outlined in the Han sources cannot be definitively attributed to the Yuezhi, although the description in the article of the tombs discovered by Wang around Chinortepa (‘where corpses were buried in underground pits with little chambers to their side’) does sound remarkably like podboi tombs. Podbois have also been excavated in Gansu in Western China and in Bactria by archaeologists over the past several decades. Those found in Bactria can be tentatively dated to the period of probable Yuezhi occupation of the region, and they have yielded a range of artifacts associated with militarized nomads, including swords and daggers, mirrors, jewelry and belt-buckles. But the artifacts apparently discovered by Wang at Chinortepa and used to illustrate the article – a ceramic vase, an unidentified bronze coin, and a ‘Kushan eggshell kept in a cigarette packet’ (?) – are hardly conclusive in providing any sort of attribution to the tombs.
Wang then contrasts these podboi tombs with other types of tombs his team has discovered near Kushan fortresses (which ones are not identified in the article) that apparently show evidence of Zoroastrian funerary practices. This leads Wang to the conclusion that ‘the Yuezhi and the founders of the Kushan empire weren’t the same people’. Wang believes that the Chinor graves were those of either local farmers who had been influenced by the Yuezhi, or Yuezhi who had integrated into farm life. He concludes that the Yuezhi weren’t bloodthirsty colonizers but ‘rather coexisted peacefully with the local population’. This latter conclusion is undoubtedly correct, and in no way at odds with our understanding of Yuezhi occupation of the region. I reached a similar conclusion in my 2007 monograph on the Yuezhi:
After the disruption and uncertainty of continuous migration, the (Yuezhi) had arrived in a fertile region ideally suited to irrigation agriculture and animal husbandry, and here they intended to stay. These were not transitory, destructive, migratory invaders, but a large confederation of semi-sedentised pastoralists and agriculturists intent upon occupying, controlling and facilitating the continuing prosperity of the Surkhan Darya region. Hence they were careful of the crop lands, established themselves near to the strategic river crossings, and occupied at least one (and probably several) of the pre-existing fortified settlements as a base from which to complete their subjugation both of the northern Bactrian region, and de facto of the former Greco-Bactrian realm south of the Amu Darya. … The ruling Yuezhi dynasty itself would have seen another advantage in leaving pre-existing crop lands unmolested – they knew how to exploit them by taking modest tributes so as not to undermine the wealth of rural populations. (C. Benjamin, 2007, p. 204)
Scholars of ancient Central Asia, particularly of Yuezhi and Kushan studies, should welcome the work of joint Chinese-Uzbek archaeological teams in the region. Important archaeological discoveries have been made in the region in the past but these have been piecemeal lately and we should all hope that this Chinese interest in the region yields new discoveries that help further flesh out the compelling tale unfolded by the authors of the Han Dynasty chronicles, supported by the work of so many archaeologists, numismatists and language specialists. But such discoveries must not be interpreted according to nationalist political [...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: labyrinthine
This word has appeared in 61 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
march on
to walk in a group towards a place in order to protest against something or to demand something
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Word of the Day
gabby
Definition: (adjective) Tending to talk excessively.
Synonyms: chatty, garrulous, loquacious, talkative, talky.
Usage: Mary's gabby friends kept her apprised of all the neighborhood gossip.
Discuss
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a)
For fuller treatment, see Proto-Tocharian language and Tocharian languages
Many scholars identify the Yuezhi with the Tocharians. Based on the historical and linguistic evidence cited above, the likelihood of that being so looms rather large. The Chinese were borrowing IE lexical items already in the first millennium BC from a people (Tocharians) who in historical times (1st millennium AD) lived in Eastern Central Asia [ECA]) and whose language bore phonological and morphological resemblances to northwestern European peoples and whose culture (e.g., diagonal twill woolen plaids) bore resemblance to the same peoples at around the same time (roughly 1000 BC).
Those diagnostic linguistic and cultural traits did not reach the Tarim Basin by flying through the air or rising up out of the ground. Somebody brought them to the Tarim Basin, which was one of the last places on earth to be inhabited by humans who came from somewhere, and the Sinitic speakers further east borrowed elements of their language and culture. Selected readings
* "Tocharian Bilingualism and Language Death in the Old Turkic Context" (12/21/23) — with a lengthy bibliography divided into three sections: origins and affinities; the language, the people, and their history; archeology and language
* Craig G. R. Benjamin, The Yuezhi: Origins, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria (Louvain: Brepols, 2006).
* "Of jackal and hide and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (12/16/18)
* "The Wool Road of Northern Eurasia" (4/12/21) — with lengthy bibliography on archeology, linguistics, the horse, etc.
* "Horses, soma, riddles, magi, and animal style art in southern China" (11/11/19)
* Victor H. Mair, ed., The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 vols. (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998).
* J. P. Mallory and Victor H.Mair,The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
[h.t. Adrienne Mayor and John Tkacik; thanks to E. Btuce Brooks, Julie Wei, Nick Tursi, and Zihan Guo]
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he peoples held to be responsible for the downfall of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. In Greek Mythology they were the children of Iapetus and Asia.
Modern scholars have attempted to identify the Asii with other peoples known from European and Chinese sources including the: Yuezhi, Tocharians, Issedones/Wusun and/or Alans.
(source)
So, who were the Tocharians after all?
The Tocharians or Tokharians (US: /toʊˈkɛəriənˌ –ˈkɑːr-/ toh-KAIR-ee-ən, -KAR-; UK: /tɒˈkɑːriən/ to-KAR-ee-ən) were speakers of the Tocharian languages, Indo-European languages known from around 7,600 documents from around AD 400 to 1200, found on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern-day Xinjiang, China). The name "Tocharian" was given to these languages in the early 20th century by scholars who identified their speakers with a people known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi (Latin: Tochari), who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC. This identification is now generally considered erroneous, but the name "Tocharian" remains the most common term for the languages and their speakers. Their actual ethnic name is unknown, although they may have referred to themselves as the Agni, Kuči, and Krorän or as the Agniya and Kuchiya known from Sanskrit texts.
Agricultural communities first appeared in the oases of the northern Tarim circa 2000 BC. Some scholars have linked these communities to the Afanasievo culture found earlier (c. 3500–2500 BC) in Siberia, north of the Tarim or Central Asian BMAC culture. The earliest Tarim mummies date from c. 1800 BC, but it is unclear whether they are connected to the Tocharians of two millennia later.
By the 2nd century BC, these settlements had developed into city-states, overshadowed by nomadic peoples to the north and Chinese empires to the east. These cities, the largest of which was Kucha, also served as way stations on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of the Taklamakan desert.
For several centuries, the Tarim basin was ruled by the Xiongnu, the Han dynasty, the Tibetan Empire, and the Tang dynasty. From the 8th century AD, the Uyghurs – speakers of a Turkic language – settled in the region and founded the Kingdom of Qocho that ruled the Tarim Basin. The peoples of the Tarim city-states intermixed with the Uyghurs, whose Old Uyghur language spread through the region. The Tocharian languages are believed to have become extinct during the 9th century.
Around the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists recovered a number of manuscripts from oases in the Tarim Basin written in two closely related but previously unknown Indo-European languages, which were easy to read because they used a close variation of the already deciphered Indian Middle-Brahmi script. These languages were designated in similar fashion by their geographical neighbours:
*
* A Buddhist work in Old Turkic (Uighur), included a colophon stating that the text had been translated from Sanskrit via toxrï tyly (Tωγry tyly, "The language of the Togari").
* Manichean texts in several languages of neighbouring regions used the expression "the land of the Four Toghar" (Toγar~Toχar, written Twγr) to designate the area "from Kucha and Karashar to Qocho and Beshbalik." Friedrich W. K. Müller was the first to propose a characterization for the newly discovered languages. Müller called the languages "Tocharian" (German Tocharisch), linking this toxrï (Tωγry, "Togari") with the ethnonym Tókharoi (Ancient Greek: Τόχαροι) applied by Strabo to one of the "Scythian" tribes "from the country on the other side of the Iaxartes" that overran the Greco-Bactrian kingdom (present day Afghanistan) in the second half of the 2nd century BC. This term also appears in Indo-Iranian languages (Sanskrit Tushara/Tukhāra, Old Persian tuxāri-, Khotanese ttahvāra), and became the source of the term "Tokharistan" us[...]
where -k is an old derivative suffix)
TchA turs-ko (ko = ‘cow’) = Chinese zhōu ‘carriage-pole’ (AC *tru)
TchB kuke/TchA kuk* ‘heel, nave’ = gū ‘nave’
interesting Tch metaphor to see the nave of a wheel as its heel.
The “horse terminology” is taken more or less straightaway from Blažek and Schwarz’ Early Indo-Europeans in Central Asia and China. Innsbruck, 2017. (Baxter and Sagart is by far the most extensive investigation of loanwords in the ancient languages of Inner Asia and China that I know of. It should have made a bigger splash than it has.) This group of words is important (and to a certain extent mutually self-confirming) because it encompasses a particular semantic field.
There are other words, e.g., wang ‘king,’ which are admittedly more speculative. [VHM: Adams will soon be publishing an article about this in Sino-Platonic Papers.]
And, of course, the big difficulty, as always, is the necessity of a word borrowed into Chinese having to undergo “monosyllabification.” The second big difficulty is the wild range of Ancient Chinese pronunciations reconstructed. (The ones given above are a bit eclectically drawn from those wide-ranging possibilities.). Baxter and Sagart give lots more Chinese words that they would see as borrowings from Tocharian. I think they are probably right in many cases, but it’s just so difficult to tell.
As Douglas Adams aptly says, the word for "honey" is the gold standard for Tocharian borrowing into Sinitic:
Possibly from Proto-Tocharian *ḿətə, from Proto-Indo-European *médʰu (“mead”). Cognate with Tocharian B mit (“honey”), English mead, German Met (“mead”), Swedish mjöd (“mead”), Sanskrit मधु (madhu, “honey”), Ancient Greek μέθυ (méthu, “wine”), Polish miód (“honey”), Russian мёд (mjod, “honey”), Old Church Slavonic медъ (medŭ, “honey”).
(Wiktionary)
The Sinitic word for "honey" (mì 蜜) occurs already in the celebrated anthology of southern poetry known as the Chu ci 楚辭 (Elegies of Chu; Songs of the South), attributed to the first Chinese poet known by name, Qu Yuan 屈原 (c. 340 BC–278 BC). It is also in the works of the thinker Xunzi 荀子 (c. 310–c. after 238 BC).
Since Tocharian "honey" is in Sinitic by the first millennium BC, this shows how plugged into Transeurasian IE language dynamics East Asia was at such an early time. As for material culture, to give just one example, glass and faience beads have been found widely distributed across East Asia already by around 800 BC.
So, who were the Yuezhi after all?
The Yuezhi (Chinese: 月氏; pinyin: Yuèzhī, Ròuzhī or Rùzhī; Wade–Giles: Yüeh4-chih1, Jou4-chih1 or Ju4-chih1;) were an ancient people first described in Chinese histories as nomadic pastoralists living in an arid grassland area in the western part of the modern Chinese province of Gansu, during the 1st millennium BC. After a major defeat at the hands of the Xiongnu in 176 BC, the Yuezhi split into two groups migrating in different directions: the Greater Yuezhi (Dà Yuèzhī 大月氏) and Lesser Yuezhi (Xiǎo Yuèzhī 小月氏). This started a complex domino effect that radiated in all directions and, in the process, set the course of history for much of Asia for centuries to come.
The Greater Yuezhi initially migrated northwest into the Ili Valley (on the modern borders of China and Kazakhstan), where they reportedly displaced elements of the Sakas. They were driven from the Ili Valley by the Wusun and migrated southward to Sogdia and later settled in Bactria. The Greater Yuezhi have consequently often been identified with peoples mentioned in classical European sources as having overrun the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, like the Tókharoi (Greek Τοχάροι; Sanskrit Tukhāra) and Asii (or Asioi). [VHM: see below on the Asii] During the 1st century BC, one of the five major Greater Yuezhi tribes in B[...]
e region.
Their success stemmed in part from Wang’s years of experience searching for traces of the Yuezhi in China, and his skill in using rock paintings to identify possible excavation sites.
There were many different nomadic cultures represented in the sites that Wang Jianxin and his colleagues have been uncovering — Iranian, Greek / Hellenic, Tocharian, Turkic, etc. — from different time periods. They certainly cannot all be lumped together as Yuezhi.
Though Wang himself is immersed in the ancient past, his discoveries in Uzbekistan align well with Beijing’s present-day efforts to portray China as a benevolent player in the region.
The Chinortepa site sits around 30 miles west of a mountain pass through which, roughly 2,000 years ago, the Yuezhi are believed to have arrived on the northern banks of the Oxus River, nowadays known as Amu Darya.
At the time, the land was part of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, a far-flung eastern outpost of ancient Western civilization known for its Greek-style art and cities. According to the most commonly accepted version, a Yuezhi army of tens of thousands of horse-mounted archers easily defeated the fading kingdom, and eventually established the Kushan Empire, which grew powerful and wealthy by facilitating trade along the Silk Road between the Roman Empire to the west and the Chinese Han Empire to the east.
Wang and his team believe that the idea that the Yuezhi simply overran the land, and subjugated the local population and were the forefathers of the Kushans, is wrong.
The proof, Wang says, is in the ground.
Tombs previously discovered near Kushan fortresses, cities and shrines were often aboveground vaults filled with disorderly piles of bones. Archaeologists say that suggests that the Kushans—like the local population before the arrival of the Yuezhi—practiced, as one of their burial forms, defleshing of the dead, whereby bodies of the deceased were left to rot or be devoured by animals before the bones were swept away or stored in mausoleums.
Those tombs are nothing like the Yuezhi graves around Chinortepa, where corpses were buried in underground pits with little chambers to their side.
Wang takes that as evidence that the Yuezhi and the founders of the Kushan Empire weren’t the same people. Rather, he argued, the Kushans were descendants of the local population.
After being defeated by another nomadic group called the Xiongnu in 176 B.C., the Yuezhi fled west. In 126 B.C., a Chinese emissary recorded encountering the Yuezhi in Bactria, southwest of the Ferghana Valley. He tried to persuade them to join an alliance against the Xiongnu but they declined.
The Kushan Empire (~ 30 A.D. to 375 A.D.), which the Yuezhi were thought to have established after a conquest of Bactria, was renowned for its wealth, flourishing urban life and extensive mercantile activities facilitating trade on the Eurasian continent. It also helped spread Buddhism from India to Central Asia and China.
The site where Wang Jianxin’s team is digging is located near the Iron Gates of Sogdiana, a mountain pass the Yuezhi traveled through on the journey to Bactria. The graves he discovered there suggest the Yuezhi may not have founded the Kushan Empire after all.
The graves challenge conventional wisdom in other ways. Where the Yuezhi preferred to bury their people at the foot of mountains, the graves near Chinor were on the plain. The offerings discovered inside were also fewer and smaller than those typically found in Yuezhi burial sites.
Based on those differences, Wang’s team concluded that graves belonged to either local farmers who had been influenced by Yuezhi nomads or Yuezhi who had begun to integrate into farm life.
According to Wang, that suggests the Yuezhi weren’t bloodthirsty colonizers but rather coexisted peacefully with the local population.
Not everybody subscribes to the narrative [...]
Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
yob | yobbo
an aggressive, impolite, crude person
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Idiom of the Day
land-poor
Owning a large amount of land that is unprofitable and being without the means to maintain it or capitalize on its fertility. Watch the video
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Learn English Through Football
Football Language: Grudge Match (2024 Olympics)
In this football language post we look at the phrase 'grudge match' as France take on Argentina in the quarter-finals of the 2024 Olympics
The post Football Language: Grudge Match (2024 Olympics) appeared first on Learn English Through Football.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
funky (2)
having strong dance rhythms
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Idiom of the Day
the lady of the house
A woman who looks after and runs the house; the matriarch of a family or household. Watch the video
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