Hangul and Buddhism
January 16, 2026 @ 7:56 am · Filed by under Uncategorized
We’ve seen numerous blockbuster videos from Julesy, but this one is the most explosive ever:
"This might be the most hated film in Korea" (11:55)
Seal Script in Unicode
January 15, 2026 @ 10:22 am · Filed by [V…
Hangul and Buddhism
January 16, 2026 @ 7:56 am · Filed by under Uncategorized
We’ve seen numerous blockbuster videos from Julesy, but this one is the most explosive ever:
"This might be the most hated film in Korea" (11:55)
Seal Script in Unicode
January 15, 2026 @ 10:22 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Writing systems
**Draft Minutes of UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) Meeting 185 ** **Cupertino, California, United States — October 27-29, 2025 ** **Hosted by Apple in Cupertino and virtually ** UTC #185 Agenda Revision date: November 26, 2025
https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25226.htm#185-C3
Amber in the east
January 12, 2026 @ 9:20 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and archeology
Well, now, for all those doubting Thomases who insist that there was no contact between western Eurasia, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia in antiquity:
"The Amber Trade along the Southwestern Silk Road from 600 BCE-220 CE." Lü, Jing et al. Palaeoentomology 8, no. 6 (December 29, 2025): 679-682. https://www.mapress.com/pe/article/view/palaeoentomology.8.6.10.
An ant inside Baltic amber Unpolished amber stones Read the rest of this entry »
"Stopping the palace evolve"
January 12, 2026 @ 7:34 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Syntax, Variation
P.O. wrote to ask for help in analyzing this phrase from season 2, episode 5 of The Crown:
They’re stopping the palace evolve in keeping with the rest of the world.
A comprehensive overview of 漢 in East Asian languages
January 11, 2026 @ 12:37 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Classification, Language and ethnicity, Names
Since it indicates the official language and main ethnicity of China, this character is of utmost linguistic and political importance for readers of Language Log.
Prompted by Philip Taylor (commenting on this post [first item in the list of "Selected readings" below]), this ample response from ChatGPT would seem to cover all the bases for what 漢 means.
One important meaning of 漢 omitted in the above generous overview is pejorative, "a bad guy", as shown by this entry in Wiktionary. Although, in this term, èhàn 惡漢 ("villain; scoundrel; bad guy"), 漢 is explicitly modified by the negative adjective 惡, 漢 by itself can have derogatory implications, somewhat like "hombre" ("man") in "mock Spanish" when used disrespectfully.
Where North Korea is headed: Kim Ju Ae
January 10, 2026 @ 9:37 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and politics
Androcentric China will have to live with this potentially formidable woman, just as they’re having to deal with Prime Minister Takaichi.
"Is North Korea’s ‘princess’ walking a path toward succession?", Nikkei staff writers, NikkeiAsia (11/25/25)
This is a most impressive article, based on AI analytics of more than 14,000 hours of footage that highlights the elevation of Kim Jong Un’s daughter.
Online lookup tool for Vietnamese character usages
January 10, 2026 @ 7:33 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Pronunciation, Writing systems
Knowing full well that 漢文 ("Sinitic Writing; Classical Chinese; Literary Sinitic") is pronounced Hànwén in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM), Kanbun in Japanese, and Hanmun in Korean, I wanted to know how it is pronounced in Vietnamese, and was directed to this resource, "Another Nôm Lookup Tool based on Unicode", where I learned that it is Hán văn.
A new socio-political promo
January 10, 2026 @ 7:17 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Artificial intelligence, Language and politics, Rhetoric
Jesse Ventura has had a successful career as a pro wrestler, actor, and politician — all largely built on the foundations of his mastery of pro wrestling rhetoric. And recent events have brought him back into the public eye. His Jan. 8 interview on the Minneapolis Fox News channel got 2.7 million likes and more than 47 thousand comments on TikTok, lots of play on other news-ish outlets, 295k views and more than 7400 comments on YouTube, and 3.7 million views and more than 1400 comments on X.
See "The art of the promo" (10/31/2020) for some background on this rhetorical style, including its role in Donald Trump’s career. And if you haven’t listened to Ventura’s interview, you should do so as background for this post.
Battery-Powered Prayers
January 8, 2026 @ 2:56 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Language and archeology, Language and religion, Language and technology
[This is a guest post by Alexander Bazes]
I was delighted to discover this well-researched (and very entertaining) YouTube video about the Baghdad Battery by Penn Museum archaeologist Dr. Brad Hafford (I have reached out to him with my recent article on Sino-Platonic Papers and welcome his criticism).
"The Baghdad Battery? Archaeologist Reacts!" (33:02)
Towards the end of his lecture (~25:00), Dr. Hafford discusses a likely ritualistic role played by the Baghdad Battery and similar objects that have been found at the archaeological sites of Tel Umar and Csestiphon. I find his explanation quite plausible given that the devices from Tel Umar were found in close association with other ritual objects, including three incantation bowls (Waterman, Leroy. "Preliminary report upon the excavations at Tel Umar, Iraq." 1931, 61-62). I find Dr. Hafford’s discussion of Sasanian-period incantations written on papyrus and lead sheets particularly interesting, as I believe it was probably the corrosive capabilities of the Baghdad Battery and similar artifacts that were employed by its users for ritual purposes. For example, I speculate that the artifact discovered at Csestiphon, which contained ten bronze tubes, each filled with rolls of papyrus and sealed, was intended to produce a corrosive effect on the outside of the tubes, thereby releasing the prayers inside.
Chomsky and the origins of AI research
January 8, 2026 @ 6:31 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Artificial intelligence, Philosophy of Language
Melissa Heikkilä, "LeCun: ‘Intelligence really is about learning’", Financial Times 1/2/2026:
(The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up)
LeCun’s lightbulb moment came as a student at the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique in Paris in the 1980s, when he read a book about a debate on nature versus nurture between the linguist Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, a psychologist. Chomsky argued that humans have an inbuilt capacity for language, while Piaget said there is some structure but most of it is learnt.
“I’m not gonna make friends saying this . . . ” he tells me, “but I was reading this and I thought everything that Chomsky . . . was saying could not possibly be true, [because] we learn everything. Intelligence really is about learning.”
AI research — or neural networks, as the technology was then called, which loosely mimic how the brain functions — was practically a dead field and considered taboo by the scientific community, after early iterations of the technology failed to impress. But LeCun sought out other researchers studying neural networks and found intellectual “soulmates” in the likes of Geoffrey Hinton, then a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.
Oreoreoreoreo
January 7, 2026 @ 10:51 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Etymology, Language and food, Names
Christian Horn writes:
Oreo cookies are famous and widely known.
I never attached the name "Oreo" to single piecesof the cookie, but once you start this is possible: