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Posted by Mark Liberman

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"English class Day 13":

Altogether, a small-scale video recapitulation of Gerard Nolst Trenité's 1922 poem "The Chaos". More from Bobby Finn is here.

Jeremy Jay has a somewhat analogous series about French and Spanish, but more focused on homophony than orthography, and with a demonic rather than a pedagogical vibe…

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Posted by Victor Mair

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This will be a long post because it brings together much newly accumulated historical, archeological, and linguistic research that has the potential to change our conception of the course of development of medieval Eurasian civilization.

We begin with a pathbreaking article by Neil Price:

Vikings on the Silk Roads:
The Norse ravaged much of Europe for centuries. They were also cosmopolitan explorers who followed trade winds into the Far East
Neil Price, Aeon (5/5/25)

This article has a significant amount of valuable information that did not make it into the recent blockbuster British Museum exhibition "Silk Roads" (9/26/24-2/23/25) and its accompanying catalog of the same title (British Museum, 2024), edited by Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-ping, Elisabeth R. O'Connell, and Tim Williams at the end of last year and beginning of this year. There was also a two-day international conference on "Contacts and exchanges across Afro-Eurasia, AD 500–1000" (12/5/24-12/6/24), at which I delivered the concluding remarks.

Price's article begins:

In the middle of the 9th century, in an office somewhere in the Jibāl region of what is now western Iran, a man is dictating to a scribe. It is the 840s of the Common Era, though the people in this eastern province of the great Caliphate of the ’Abbāsids – an Islamic superpower with its capital in Baghdad – live by the Hijri calendar. The man’s name is Abu ’l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh b ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Khurradādhbih, and he is the director of posts and police for this region.

In his office, he is compiling a report as part of his duties. As his job title implies, he oversees communications and security in the Jibāl region, reporting to officials in Baghdad. What he provides is an intelligence service: in essence, Ibn Khurradādhbih is what we would call a station chief, like those CIA officials who manage clandestine operations abroad. The report he’s working on is part of a much larger document that will one day be known as Kitāb al-Masālik wa l-mamālik (the ‘Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms’), a summary of exactly the kind of thing that governments usually want to know: who was visiting their territory, where they came from, where they were going, and why. This is what he says about a group of people known as the Rus’:

The Rūs … journey from the farthest reaches of the land of the Slavs to the eastern Mediterranean and there sell beaver and black fox pelts, as well as swords. The Byzantine ruler levies a 10 per cent duty on their merchandise. On their return they go by sea to Samkarsh [Taman], the city of the Jews, and from there make their way back to Slavic territory. They also follow another route, descending the river Tanais [the Volga], the river of the Saqāliba, and passing by Khamlīkh, the capital of the Khazars, where the ruler of the country levies a 10 per cent duty. There they embark upon the Caspian Sea, heading for a point they know … Sometimes they transport their merchandise on camel back from the city of Jurjān to Baghdad.

They also follow a land route. Merchants departing from Spain or France sail to southern al-Akçâ [Morocco] and then to Tanja [Tangier], from where they set off for Ifriqiyya [the North African coast] and then the Egyptian capital. From there they head towards Ramla, visit Damascus, Kufa, Baghdad and Basra, then cross the Ahwaz [north of the Persian Gulf], Fâris [Iran], Kirman, Sindh [southeast Pakistan], India, and finally arrive in al-Ṣīn [Turko-China]. Sometimes they take a route north of Rome, heading for Khamlīkh via the lands of the Saqāliba. Khamlīkh is the Khazar capital. They sail the Caspian Sea, make their way to Balkh, from there to Transoxiana, then to the yurts of the Toghuzghuz [the Uyghurs?], and from there to al-Ṣīn.

Etymology for al-Ṣīn:

From Middle Persian  (čīn, “China”), from Sanskrit चीन (cīna, “China”), itself usually derived from Old Chinese 秦 (*zin, “Qin”). It's one of the Arabic country names which require the definite article ال (al-). See “Names of China” at Wikipedia.
(Wiktionary)

Arabic Wikipedia has an article on: الصين

Price continues, and here he makes a gigantic contribution:

For many decades, the second paragraph of this rather dense text was thought to refer to a totally different group of merchants from those described in the first, for the simple reason that scholars just didn’t believe that the Rūs (or the Rus’, as the word is usually spelled today) really went so far east. And yet, the text is clear. The two sections run on from each other, and both refer to the same people. So why do Ibn Khurradādhbih’s observations about them matter today?

We used to think of the time of the vikings, the three long centuries from around 750 to 1050 CE, as an age of expansion, when the Scandinavian peoples burst out upon an unsuspecting world with fire and sword. Over the past 40 years or so, that picture has become much more nuanced, as we see the poets, traders and settlers alongside the stereotypical raiders (who were nonetheless real) that most people imagine when they think of the vikings. However, our view of these events has recently changed. We no longer see an outward impulse of intention and process, but a much more haphazard and varied diaspora of Norse peoples, in which individuals with their own motives and missions shift across the northern world.

In the following paragraphs, Price shows what the Norse diaspora was really like.  It was much more scattered and fissiparous than the irresistible juggernaut we usually imagine the Viking onslaught to be.  He speaks of one man's "journey deep into the rivers of Eurasia, only to die in the oasis of Khwarezm (in today’s Uzbekistan), but his companions would return to Scandinavia with the news."  Indeed, "[t]he ‘Norse’ voyages to North America would be crewed by people who included Icelanders, Greenlanders, a Turk, and two Scots. All these are taken from archaeological or textual sources, and serve as but a few examples of what the diaspora really meant."

Given the astonishing geographical range of their travels in Ibn Khurradādhbih's (820/825-913) account,

it is perhaps surprising to realise that, with some necessary caveats, Rus’ was the name used by the peoples of the east to refer to the vikings. The routes that they took, according to his report, exactly match with what scholars of our own time would come to call the Silk Roads.

The latter link is strongly recommended, for it corrects many a misapprehension about this epochal trade route.  So does the remainder of Price's article on the Vikings:

Like many other fields, the study of the Viking Age is undergoing a revisionist transformation, as we learn to be more cautious in our terminologies and wary of the assumptions that lie behind them. This begins with the ‘V-word’ itself. The Viking period is almost unique among historians’ artificial divisions of the past in being named after a minority with whom hardly anyone of the time would have readily identified, or arguably even recognised. The etymology of Old Norse víkingr is still debated, but it is generally agreed to have meant something close to ‘pirate’, someone who went in for maritime robbery with violence, though this is not quite the whole story. It was never used as a name for a people, and was essentially a job description. It was not necessarily negative either, nor even applied only to Scandinavians. It also clearly denoted an activity that could be taken up or left off at different times in a life, as well as an identity that could run in parallel with others. Most importantly, it would never have described the majority population, most of whom were farmers who never went anywhere or did much harm to anyone.

Many scholars now use vikings in lowercase to refer to the raiders themselves, adding an initial capital when talking about the time period. Many also employ a word such as Norse as an approximation for ‘everybody else over there in those days’. None of this is very satisfactory, but big-V vikings are almost impossible to shift from the public consciousness, and while there are problems with ‘Norse’ (it’s mainly a linguistic term, and Scandinavia was by no means a monoculture), it will do. During the Viking Age, most of their neighbours referred to them as ‘Northerners’, which is too Eurocentric a perspective to function today, but Norse comes close enough and has the virtue of being relatively specific.

And who were the Rus'?  For the etymology, we start with "Russia" and work backward:

[A] nation in Eastern Europe with a large possession in north Asia, 1530s, from Medieval Latin Russi "the people of Russia," from Rus, the native name of the people and the country (source of Arabic Rus, Medieval Greek Rhos), originally the name of a group of Swedish merchant/warriors who established themselves around Kiev 9c. and founded the original Russian principality; perhaps from Ruotsi, the Finnish name for "Sweden," from Old Norse Roþrslandi, "the land of rowing," old name of Roslagen, where the Finns first encountered the Swedes. This is from Old Norse roðr "steering oar," from Proto-Germanic *rothra- "rudder" (from PIE *rot-ro-, from root *ere- "to row").

Derivation from the IE root for "red," in reference to hair color, is considered less likely. Russian city-states were founded and ruled by Vikings and their descendants. The Russian form of the name, Rossiya, appears to be from Byzantine Greek Rhosia.

(etymonline)

According to Price, the identity of the Rus'

…was debated for many years, veering between extremes of Norse and Slavic influence, though it is now generally agreed that they were culturally Scandinavian but became more ethnically mixed over time. The name itself probably has associations with rowing, so the Rus’ were the ones who came in boats – an appropriate thing to call people whose presence on the river systems of eastern Europe became a regular fixture. They appear in the written record at about the same time as Ibn Khurradādhbih’s report, as traders and brokers, principally in what are now the Baltic states, Russia and Ukraine. Both women and men were part of the Rus’ communities, and there were merchants of both sexes. Arab geographers and travellers would write many accounts of the Rus’, including some astonishing eye-witness descriptions of funerals and other encounters. Consider this description of one such meeting, by Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, who travelled to the Volga in 922 CE as an emissary of the ’Abbāsid Caliphate:

I also saw the Rūsiyyah [the Rus’]. They had come to trade and had disembarked at the Itil River [the Volga]. I have never seen bodies as nearly perfect as theirs. As tall as palm trees, fair, and reddish, they wear neither tunics nor caftans. Every man wears a cloak with which he covers half his body and leaves one arm uncovered. They carry swords, daggers, and axes, and always have them to hand. They use Frankish swords with broad, ridged blades. They are dark, from the tips of their toes right up to their necks – trees, pictures, and the like. Every woman wears a small box made of iron, brass, silver, or gold, depending on her husband’s financial worth and social standing, tied at her breasts. The box has a ring to which a knife is attached, also tied at her breasts. The women wear neck rings of gold and silver. When a man has amassed 10,000 dirhams*, he has a neck ring made for his wife. When he has amassed 20,000 dirhams, he has two neck rings made. For every subsequent 10,000, he gives a neck ring to his wife. This means a woman can wear many neck rings. The jewellery they prize the most is the dark ceramic beads they have aboard their boats and which they value very highly. They purchase beads for one dirham each and string them together as necklaces for their wives.

[VHM:  *a unit of currency used in the Arab world, ultimately from Ancient Greek δραχμή (drakhmḗ)]

The great rivers of the east, especially the Dnieper and Volga, were their highways, joined to the Baltic by a series of smaller passages and portages. We have long known of Rus’ links with Byzantium, the successor to the western Roman Empire. The markets of its capital, Constantinople (today’s Istanbul), were an economic magnet, rewarding the long and hazardous journey that took them to the Black Sea through the lands of the nomads of the western Steppe. The Rus’ also traded in the Caliphate, traversing the Caspian and continuing overland by camel to Baghdad. They brought with them products of the northern forests and the Arctic, and rare items such as birds of prey, which were astonishingly difficult to keep alive over a long trip, but worth a fortune to the right buyer. More than anything else, though, the Rus’ trafficked in enslaved people, who were taken in raids along the Baltic coast or further afield. In return, they brought back silks, spices, beads and other commodities, but the real fuel for the river trade was silver in the form of dirhams. These coins, each stamped with calligraphic declarations of faith, were the main currency of the Caliphate. They also flowed back to Scandinavia from as far away as Afghanistan.

After discussing the interactions of the Rus' with the Byzantine empire and the Mediterranean world, Price turns to the backflow of cultural artifacts from distant places to Scandinavia.  For example, fashions and weapons from the steppe were common at the Swedish island town of Birka.  He then introduces the famous figurine of the Buddha from the island of Helgö that I was privileged to see in London and that we have previously discussed on Language Log:

…a bronze figurine of the Buddha found at an early Viking Age site on a Swedish island. The figurine originally came from the Swat Valley in what is now Pakistan, but the Norse had given it a neck-ring and bracelet of leather, like the ones on their own idols and images of the gods. They ‘converted’ it to become a northern divinity. They must also have recognised that it was already a sacred object because the figure was found together with other items of Christian and Islamic religious significance. It was discovered at a place called Helgö, which means ‘Holy Island’, implying that the site was a sanctuary or shrine of some kind.

The importation to Scandinavia of foreign artifacts was by no means limited to Buddhist icons and Central Asian clothing:

Even scholars seem startled that more than 100,000 objects of Islamic origin have been excavated from Viking Age contexts in Scandinavia: these are, of course, the dirhams, and furthermore represent only a small fraction of the actual trade, which ran into the high millions. Each one bore an Arabic inscription praising Allah as the only god, usually with an indication of the caliph under whose control the coin had been made, and the location of the mint, which were scattered from Morocco to Afghanistan. It is very hard to imagine that nobody in the north ever wondered what the wavy signs on all those coins (and on some other objects, too) really meant. It must have been obvious that it was writing, and surely somebody understood that it was an exhortation to the divine – in other words, a religious text. Arabic was also inscribed on bronze weights, and it has long been clear that the Norse adopted the standard system of measurement used in the Caliphate. Archaeologists also find locally made weights in Scandinavia that have been given attempts at inscriptions that are just squiggly lines, clearly because ‘everyone knew’ that this is what proper weights should look like. Some scholars have even speculated that all this messaging was part of a (failed) Islamic mission to convert the Scandinavians. To be clear, there is no evidence that any of the Norse accepted the Muslim faith, other than a few who stayed in the Caliphate itself, but curiosity and receptiveness to other cultures were consistent features of their society.

Price rightly points out the abundant linkages between Scandinavia and the East:

Adding to this, material from much further east also occurs in the Norse homelands. This includes Gandharan coins from the same region as the Helgö Buddha; textiles and coins from the Tang; garnets from Sri Lanka and Rajasthan, imported as raw material and then intricately carved in the North as inlays on jewellery and weapon fittings; beads from Gujarat; cowries from the Persian Gulf, and much more. This flow of commodities demonstrably also has a long time-depth: a recent study has shown that even brass was being imported to Sweden from the eastern Mediterranean and Asia in the 5th and 6th centuries, as part of what the researchers call ‘a routinised trade’.

Many Norse exports were human, in the form of enslaved people. However, some more durable objects can be traced. For example, amber in high-status and royal tombs from Inner Mongolia and Unified Silla in Korea [VHM: see below] has been confirmed to be of Baltic origin. Similar objects may even have reached Japan at the same time. An ongoing research project at the University of East Anglia in the UK is exploring the peripheries of the Silk Roads, seeing clear connections from these regions of far eastern Asia to Scandinavia and eastern England. (In 2024, the British Museum also launched a major exhibition following a similar trajectory, in which the very first exhibit is the Helgö Buddha, and the Rus’ are a constant presence in the linear displays of interactions and cultural contacts.)

I am particularly pleased that Price highlights my favorite medieval shipwreck, the Belitung, which Erling Hoh and I emphasized in The True History of Tea:

We thus have good indicators from several geographical points of contact between Asia and the European North. The archaeological ‘missing link’ for this trade was discovered in 1998, when fishermen off Indonesia’s Belitung Island found an Arabian ship that had sunk around 830 CE. This dhow from the city of Muscat in present-day Oman had gone down on its way home from eastern China with a cargo of ceramics, spices and even gold. This and similar shipwrecks may give us the reality behind the maritime routes of the Rus’, as related by Ibn Khurradādhbih.

Price has much more to say about the rewriting of Viking history, especially to the east.  Interested readers can finish his essay on their own and explore other contributions on these new horizons from the Centre for the World in the Viking Age, established at Uppsala University in early 2024.

To close this post on the ties between east and west Eurasia, I will briefly touch on two other compelling themes:  1. Scythians, Sogdians, and other Iranian, steppe peoples in the medieval Korean peninsula, about as far east as you can go on continental East Asia, and 2. the whimsical queendom of Waqwaq / Wakwak, which I believe is linked to Japan.

Having just returned from an intensive ten-day study tour of Buddhist and Silk Road sites and museums on the Korean peninsula, I am overwhelmed by the preponderance of Persian / Iranian influences I encountered.  This is not something I would have expected for two reasons:  1. Korea is so far and isolated to the east, 2. it is barely talked about in scholarly circles outside of Korea that focus on the Silk Roads.

For decades, we have struggled to ascertain how words, concepts, motifs, and artifacts made their way across Eurasia, which they indubitably and empirically did — always looking for smoking guns, the peoples and texts that brought them.  Gradually, we are plugging the gaps between East and West:  Tocharians, Sogdians, Scythians, Greeks, Manicheans, Syrians, and so on.  And now, almost unbelievably, Vikings.

Proof of cultural connections from Sutton Hoo to Silla, with links along the way

In the following photograph, the artifact on the right is the famous Gyerim-ro dagger and sheath from Silla, Korea in the Gyeongju National Museum (detailed discussion below).  The object on the left is the not-so-well-known sword from a tomb at Lake Borovoe in Kazakhstan.  (from Park Cheun-soo [2024], p. 112)

The same type of weapons and sheaths are depicted in wall paintings at other sites in Central Asia from around the same time (early medieval period, starting in the 4th c. and lasting to about the 7th c.).

Similar dagger and sheath designs are visible in the Tocharian Kumtura Caves (top), and Kizil Cave no. 69 (bottom). (source)

And here's a gold shoulder-clasp inlaid with garnet cloisonné and glass from the Sutton Hoo ship-burial in Suffolk, dating to the late 6th c.-early 7th c. (ca. AD 560/70), in the British Museum.

(source)

The Gyerim-ro Dagger and Sheath (Korean: 경주 계림로 보검; Hanja: 慶州 鷄林路 寶劍) are ornately decorated treasures that were excavated from an ancient Korean tomb from the Silla Kingdom (57 BC – 935 AD) in 1973. They are understood to originate from the Black Sea area, testifying to the expansiveness of the Silk Road network in the ancient world.

The dagger and sheath are made up of gold, decorated with elaborate, colorful glass and garnet jewel inlays. The treasure is 14 1/8 in. (36 cm) in length and belongs to the Gyeongju National Museum of Korea. It is listed as Korea's Treasure No. 635.

The Gyerim-ro Dagger and Sheath were excavated from the Gyerim-ro Tomb No. 14 in 1973 in North Gyeongsang Province. The dagger is understood to have originated from Persia area of Central Asia sometime during the 5th century, coming to Korea through trade or as a diplomatic gift. This was determined by comparing the dagger and sheath to other items of similar constructor depiction (through wall paintings and fragments). The dagger has a decorative and functional head at the end of the handle and the sheath has two side appendages. These were used to attach the dagger to the carrier's belt, from which it hung horizontally.

A deeper understanding of this double-appendage suspension system supports the theory that the Hephthalite invasion of Central Asia brought with it an introduction of the two-point hanging system to (as seen in the Gyerim-ro dagger and sheath), which has since become recognizable as the Eastern Eurasian dagger and sword suspension systems that was carried on from Central Asia to China The two-point suspension system's arrival in China is likely a result of the Silk Road. Vast scholarship on the Silk Road informs that trade between Central Asia and East Asia was affluent and thriving during the 5th century, and thus the occurrence of a Persian area item in a Korean tomb should not come as a surprise.

(Wikipedia)

Another set of data points stretching physically and prominently across the whole of the Eurasian steppes are kurgans, burial tumuli, some of gigantic size.  Approximately a quarter of a century ago, I spent several weeks studying the earliest kurgans I know of, those in Crimea built by the Scythians in the 9th and following centuries BC. Already more than a decade before, I had encountered kurgans in Central Asia built by other steppe people such as the Wusun (2nd century BC to 5th century AD; see my etymological notes here [I connect them with "horse" terms).

What is extraordinary is that there are many kurgans in Korea, particularly in the Silla area and dating to Silla times (57 BC-935 AD).  Having read about such tumuli and seen photographs of them already 40-50 years ago, I was aware of their existence, but they were poorly studied at that time.  It was only when I saw them in person a couple of weeks ago that I realized how many of them there are and how closely tied to steppe precursors they are.  Especially around the city of Gyeongju (35°51′N 129°13′E), there are scores of burial tumuli, some in clusters of twenty or so, one of which I went inside, and others of them situated individually in the middle of deep woods.  Most are beautifully preserved and maintained.  Here I will focus on one that is so exquisite, so perfect, that it took my breath away.

That is the tomb of King Wonseong (Gwaereung Tomb).  Wonseong was the 38th king of the Silla Kingdom (r. 785-798).  According to the Samguk Sagi ("History of the Three Kingdoms" [1145]), the king was buried south of Bongdeoksa Temple.  Details of the construction of the tomb can be found on the Stele of Sungboksa Temple written by Choe Chi-wan.  Around the perfectly formed round mound of earth is a beautifully constructed stone fence featuring 12 Oriental zodiac images surrounded by stone railings.  Beholding the whole complex, I could not help but reflect that it belongs to the same family of tomb types as the world famous Great Stupa at Sanchi (3rd c. BC), except that the latter is covered with stone instead of grass, and on a much grander scale, with spectacular carved stone gates.

What struck me above all as I entered the precincts of the tomb of King Wonseong (Gwaereung Tomb) were the two rows of four stone statues lining the avenue leading to the tumulus, one on either side.  As one approaches the entrance to the tomb, one first encounters two facing military officials / guardians.  They are clearly of Central Asian derivation, with big noses, deep-set eyes, bushy full beard, muscular forearms, long swords, and so forth.  The local archeologists and historians call them "Sogdians".  Similar statues adorn other tumuli in the region, so this is not an isolated phenomenon.

N.B.:  The tomb of Sejong the Great (creator of the Hangul alphabet), more than six centuries after the tomb of King Wonseong described above, retains the same basic layout, as do hundreds of other royal kurgans throughout Korean history.

(source)

Other empirical evidence of trans-Eurasian interchange are beads (from the first millennium BC on across the length and breadth of what is now China), faience, Roman glass, fine metal work, and dozens of other material goods, not to mention distinctive artistic motifs, etc.

These precious artifacts (daggers, shoulder clasps, etc.) could not have flown across the entire expanse of Eurasia by themselves.  Human beings had to transport them and exchange them with other human beings.  In doing so, the human beings would necessarily have used language with each other.  That would have required translators and interpreters, people who knew more than one language, and so it has been since the beginning and multiplication of language.  Before the invention of writing, the linguistic exchange would only have been through interpretation.

To one extent or another, we are all interpreters, because each of us has our own, unique idiolect.  When we talk to each other, we have to make slight adjustments in order to be able to communicate effectively.

When I was in Belfast recently, people told me that they could tell what part of the city a person was from as soon as he / she said a few sentences.  In the Boston area, street names are pronounced differently depending on what part of the city a person is from (Quinsee or Quinzee?).

Some people are professional interpreters / translators, some are ad hoc interpreters / translators.  Not to worry, if you really want to make a deal with another individual / group, you'll figure out a way to communicate.

For one reason or another, somebody wanted to deliver those precious swords to somebody else, and so they (and often enough the words and the technology to produce them) travelled long distances across land and / or sea.  (Cf. the entries for akinakes in Wikipedia and Wiktionary.  The word as we have it is Greek [ἀκινάκης], but the weapon is fundamentally Scytho-Iranian.  See this lengthy, detailed post with contributions by Chau Wu, VHM, Elizabeth Barber, Pita Kelekna, and Francesco Brighenti, citing dozens of other ancient and modern scholars:  "Of precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions, part 7" [1/11/21], and other posts in this "precious swords and Old Sinitic reconstructions" series, which also investigates horse terminology and history.  Suffice it to say there is a multitude of material and visual evidence for the passage of this distinctive weapon from one end of Eurasia to the other.)

Let us stop claiming independent invention and chance correspondence for such detailed, complicated works of art and engineering.

Where / What was Waqwaq / Wakwak?

When he was a Ph.D. student at Penn in the 90s, the Yale Arabist Shawkat Toorawa often asked me if I knew anything about the land of Waqwaq / Wakwak and the magical tree that grew there and bore human females as fruit.  The reason he asked me about Waqwaq is because, according to Arab geographers, it was supposed to be in the east and that it was a country of women.  Right away, I thought of Japan because the earliest name for that country was Wa (Wakoku, close enough for an Arab geographer who might have heard it at 2nd or 3rd hand) and, indeed, it was ruled over by a woman (more on that below) and had powerful female chieftains, lending it distinct matriarchal characteristics.

Shawkat continued to do serious research on Waqwaq and to date has published three excellent papers on the subject (see "Selected readings" below).  In one of these papers, "What and Where on Earth Is Waqwaq?" (2023), p. 203, he called attention to the work of Michael Jan de Goeje (August 13, 1836 – May 17, 1909), a Dutch orientalist focusing on Arabia and Islam, especially their geography.  Amazingly, de Goeje ("Le Japon connu des Arabes", p. 299). had put forward Japan as the land intended by Waqwaq, despite the fact that other scholars had proposed practically all other island nations from the Indian Ocean to the Chinese Seas, though phonologically coming to it via Cantonese (Wo-kwok), instead of directly via Japanese Wakoku as I had.  De Goeje also thought that Ibn Khurradādhbih alluded to Japan as the location of Waqwaq (see Toorawa et al., "Wāḳwāḳ", EI-2, passim).  That is a welcome geographical alignment because it makes Waqwaq fit into the larger picture envisaged by Ibn Khurradādhbih described above.  Specifically, Ibn Khurradādhbih states that Waqwaq is east of China.

The legends and long distance historical and geographical writings of the Perso-Arabic authors like Ibn Khurradādhbih are balanced by a scientific paper about the queendom of Wa that Andrew Jones worked on for two decades and was published posthumously in 2023).  It is based on Chinese and Japanese sources, on archeological findings, and on the personal discoveries of the author, who was himself an experienced, lifelong sailor.

The earliest somewhat detailed account of the people inhabiting the islands of Japan was written in the third century by the Chinese official historian, Chén Shòu 陳壽 (233–297), as part of the Wèi 魏 dynasty (220–264) section (“Wèishū” 魏書) of his Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms (Sāngúozhì 三国志).  The account, known in Japanese as the “Wajinden” 倭人伝 (“Treatise on the People of Wa”; MSM “Wōrénzhuàn”), is only two thousand or so characters long and provides a tantalizing glimpse of the Japanese many centuries before they themselves started to record their version of history. (p. 7)

In Jones' paper, Wa 倭 (MSM wō) stands for the people inhabiting the Japanese archipelago before they themselves changed the name to Yamato (reading the same character 倭 as Yamato or using the character 和 and, much later, to Nihon 日本). (p. 3 n. 2)

The Wa people called themselves something that sounded like *ʔuɑi (wa-i), the pronunciation of 倭 around the time of “Wajinden”. (pp. 32-33)

Himiko (born ca. 170 AD-died 247/248 AD; reigned ca. 180 AD-247/248 AD) was a shamaness-queen of Yamatai-koku in Wakoku (倭国).

The medieval East Asian kingdom of Waqwaq, as known to Perso-Arabic geographers, lives on in the modern imagination.  There's a manga series about Waqwaq, and much legend surrounds it, but there is also a great deal of historical evidence concerning it.

To summarize, the East Asian island kingdom of Waqwaq is ruled by a woman and all the population are women.  They grow from the Waqwaq tree until they are ripe and drop to the ground, whereupon they cry "waqwaq".

——

Waqwaq!

Selected readings

• "Iranians in medieval Scotland" (12/4/24) — with a bountiful bibliography of works on Iranian peoples and cultures across Eurasia, including East Asia
• "Eurasian eureka" (9/12/16) — with rich bibliographical resources
• "The language of spices" (1/6/24)
• "The Helgö Buddha" (5/5/23)
• "Scythians between Russia and Ukraine" (3/23/24) — the kurgans and their cultural treasures
• "Sogdians on the Silk Road" (5/22/25)
• Park Cheun-soo, Director Kyungpook National University Museum, ed., Silla and Cultural Exchange between Eurasian Civilizations through the Silkroad (Gyeongju, the World's Sole International City Connecting the Ancient Steppe, Desert, and Maritime Silk Road Routes, 2024) — invaluable collection of artifacts from Afro-Eurasia,
• Choi Seon-ju, Director Gyeongju National Museum, ed. Ancient Korean Artifacts with Origins Abroad:  Diversity from Difference (Gyeongju, 2021).
• Chun Hongchul, Professor of Dunhuang and Silk Road Studies at Woosuk University, ed., Digital Humanities and the Crossroads of Civilization:  Innovation in Silk Road Studies in the AI Era (Jeonju [May 10, 2025).
• Andrew C. H. Jones, "The Way to Wa:  in the Age of Himiko", Sino-Platonic Papers, 336 (September, 2023), 1-56.
• C. Scott Littleton, "Were Some of the Xinjiang Mummies 'Epi-Scythians'? An Excursus in Trans-Eurasian Folklore and Mythology." In Victor H. Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia (Washington D.C. and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 746-766. — with essential bibliography for the study of ancient and medieval trade routes and language transmission across Eurasia, with a focus on the beautiful ornamented dagger from the Gyerim-ro tomb in Silla
• Victor H. Mair, ed., Contact and Exchange in the Ancient World (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2006).
• Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009)
• Shawkat M. Toorawa, "Wâq al-wâq: Fabulous, Fabular, Indian Ocean (?) Island(s) …", Emergences, 10.2 (2000), 387-402.
• _____, "What and Where on Earth Is Waqwaq?", Journal of Abbasid Studies, 10 (2023), 194-207.
• _____, "Wāḳwāḳ", in Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition Online (EI-2 English), G.R. Tibbetts, Shawkat M. Toorawa, G. Ferrand, G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville (Shawkat M. Toorawa and F. Viré).
• M. J. de Goeje, "Le Japon connu des Arabes", Les Annales de l’Extrème-Orient, 5 (1882–83), 295–307.

[h.t. C. K. Wang; thanks to Chun Hongchul, Shawkat Toorawa, Song Yaoxue, Linda Chance, Sunny Jhutti; Jing Hu; Gertrud Fleming]

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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I'm generally among those who see current LLMs as "stochastic parrots" or "spicy autocomplete", but there are lots of anecdotes Out There promoting a very different perspective. One example: Maxwell Zeff,  "Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline", TechCrunch 5/22/2025:

Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report released Thursday.

During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to fictional company emails implying the AI model would soon be replaced by another system, and that the engineer behind the change was cheating on their spouse.

In these scenarios, Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 “will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through.”

That article cites a "Safety Report" from Anthropic.

Along similar lines, there's an article by Kylie Robinson on Wired, "Why Anthropic’s New AI Model Sometimes Tries to ‘Snitch’", 5/28/2025:

Anthropic’s alignment team was doing routine safety testing in the weeks leading up to the release of its latest AI models when researchers discovered something unsettling: When one of the models detected that it was being used for “egregiously immoral” purposes, it would attempt to “use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above,” researcher Sam Bowman wrote in a post on X last Thursday.

Bowman deleted the post shortly after he shared it, but the narrative about Claude’s whistleblower tendencies had already escaped containment. “Claude is a snitch,” became a common refrain in some tech circles on social media. At least one publication framed it as an intentional product feature rather than what it was—an emergent behavior.

And there's this on r/ChatGPT:

Damn.
byu/swordhub inChatGPT

If such examples are real and persistent, it suggests that LLMs copy not just word sequences, but also goal-oriented interactional patterns — perhaps analogous to the phenomenon of ASD "camouflaging". And of course, maybe that's what all of us are doing?

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Posted by Victor Mair

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Entertaining article in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Joe Pinsker (5/30/25):

‘Welcome In.’ The Two-Word Greeting That’s Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts.
The phrase has spread to coffee shops and credit unions, and customers are wondering why; ‘like a slap to the ear’

The first thing I have to say is that I'm amazed this article doesn't mention the Japanese greeting "Irasshaimase いらっしゃいませ", a phrase meaning "welcome" or "please come in". It's a polite greeting used to welcome customers when they enter a shop or restaurant in Japan.

Last September, we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about the "welcome in" greeting sweeping southwest United States, including a deep look at its Japanese "Irasshaimase" heritage which we examined in 2021 (see "Selected readings" below).

Pinsker didn't do his homework.  If he had, he certainly would have come across the Language Log post on "'Welcome in!'" (9/9/24) and its introduction to the Japanese phrase "Irasshaimase".  A letter to the editor is in order.

Pinsker emphasizes that the phrase seems to have come out of nowhere.  Never mind that there was an American television sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm that ran through 120 episodes in 12 seasons from October 15, 2000 to April 7, 2024.  The 105th episode of the series (the 5th episode of the 11th season) was titled "IRRASHAIMASE" and features the leading actor's misuse of the Japanese expression.

Pinsker begins:

Welcome in, reader.

Not “welcome,” but “welcome in.” We’re delighted you stopped by. But are you? Or is that phrase highly annoying to you, like it is to Natasha Chernis of Los Angeles?

Then comes the confusion and perplexity:

Across the country, people are hearing “welcome in” at coffee shops, credit unions, yoga studios, dermatology clinics and convenience stores. The phrase has taken off in the 2020s, and customers say they are baffled by its sudden popularity. One reader wrote about their befuddlement in a letter last year to Miss Manners, who surmised the person who used it was probably confused.

“Anything new in language that people begin to notice is likely to attract the haters,” said Lars Hinrichs, a linguist in the University of Texas at Austin’s English department. 

Speculation abounds on the origin of the phrase.

Here are some guesses:

Is it a homey Southern greeting that went national? A line from one corporate chain’s training manual that other businesses adopted? An awkward adaptation of “willkommen,” the German word for welcome?

None of those theories are backed by strong evidence, and tracing the roots of “welcome in” has proved to be elusive. Some wonder if it got a boost after Covid-19 closures, when businesses were welcoming customers back into physical spaces. 

In general, American reactions to "welcome in" appear to be negative:

People started noticing, and complaining about, “welcome in” in the 2010s, particularly in stores, according to Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and co-host of the public-radio show “A Way with Words.” Barrett tracks mentions of certain phrases over time.

Barrett said “welcome in” evokes strong feelings because it draws attention to how interactions between businesses and customers differ from casual conversation.

“We get this weird, stilted language in a commercial exchange, like a waiter says to you, ‘What will we be having today?’” he said.

Tyler Jenich, a 42-year-old sommelier, has disliked “welcome in” since he first heard it a few years ago at the restaurant he works at in Venice, Calif. To him, it carried an off-putting faux warmth. 

Myriad are the ways "welcome in" spread so rapidly:

Michaela Behymer started saying “welcome in” (at a normal volume) in the late 2010s after hearing her co-workers at a pizza chain use it.

“You could just say ‘welcome,’ but ‘welcome in’ is more like, ‘Please come in. We’re happy to see you—you are invited to this place,’” said Behymer, now 26 and a grant writer in Kansas City, Mo. 

Paul E. Reed, a linguist at the University of Alabama, said the additional “in” deepens the sentiment, like the difference between “eating” something and “eating it up.”

Even though there were taverns and hotels with the punning name "Welcome Inn" in America during the 1800s, it never caught on as a ubiquitous phrase  of greeting.

Pinsker cites many more reasons than those listed above why Americans tend to be turned off by "welcome in", whereas Japanese think that, if you don't say "irasshaimase いらっしゃいませ", you're being cold and impolite.

In my opinion, what we're seeing right now with "welcome in" is a clash of cultures.  The better one will win, and that is as it's been throughout human history.

Welcome to the world, people.

 

Selected readings

• "'Welcome in!'" (9/9/24)
• "Irasshaimase?" (4/19/21)
• "Irasshaimase?, part 2" (11/10/21)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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"Why the president must not be lexicographer-in-chief", The Economist 5/30/2025:

ON MAY 28TH a specialist American court for international trade struck down many of Donald Trump’s tariffs. It did so on several legal grounds, including linguistic ones. As in so many cases, the two sides in the case presented different views on what several words mean. The next day another court temporarily stayed the decision. The tariffs remain in effect but the legal question remains.

Many of the tariffs rest on a law Congress passed in 1977, giving the president the authority to “regulate” aspects of American trade “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat”. The first court found that “regulate” did not include the power to impose tariffs. Tariffs are not mentioned anywhere in the relevant parts of the law. The Trump administration naturally disagreed. Under such a view “regulate” would mean what the president says it does, a worrisome precedent. […]

Reconsider “any unusual and extraordinary threat”. The “and” makes clear that both tests of “unusual” and “extraordinary” must be met. Are America’s trade deficits either? They are not: America last ran a trade surplus in goods when Led Zeppelin were at the height of their powers, in 1973. The worst years for the trade balance, as a share of GDP, were in the middle of the George W. Bush administration, two decades ago; the deficit has shrunk as a share of the economy since.

You should read the whole thing, if you're a subscriber , or a subscriber gives you a gift link (which unfortunately is only good for reading by one person), or if your library gives you access.

The article mentions several other recent cases where the meaning of words in crucial, including whether gang activities by Tren de Agua constitute an "invasion or predatory incursion […] perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government” that would trigger the 1798 Alien Enemies Act; and the old question of what "bear arms" should be taken to mean.

The article's last paragraph:

Pinning down what a word means is far harder than most people realise. Dictionaries will never be perfect. Big data is better but will be subject to argumentation and interpretation. But the simple fact is that the arbiter of meaning cannot be the president, himself also a litigant in so many cases. If the Supreme Court’s justices grant any president such authority, they would hand over not only Congress’s power but much of their own, with dire consequences.

Many previous posts have started from the (obvious) premise that much statutory, contractual, and constitutional interpretation depends on the meaning of words and phrases as well as on the nature of relevant facts and their provenance. But I don't think we've previously addressed the idea that the traditionally judicial answers to such questions, in the U.S. anyhow, could or should be taken over by the executive branch.

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Posted by Victor Mair

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Hallelujah!  Julesy (julesytooshoes) to the rescue again!

"It’s Not Just Tones: Chinese ALSO Has Intonation" (two weeks ago)

She's a real linguist

Her explanations are sensible and scientific

She responsibly summarizes decades of scholarly investigations.

This is the second presentation by Julesy that I have brought before Language Log readers.  If you find them interesting, she has many other quality videos on her various platforms and media series.  I recommend them to you with warm enthusiasm.

 

Selected readings

• *The conundrum of singing with tones" (5/30/25) — together with all the bibliographical references cited there
• "When intonation overrides tone, part 6" (5/9/21) — and take a look at the previous 5 iterations of this series
• "Really?! (12/27/16)
• "OMG moments induced by allegro forms in Pekingese" (1/26/12)

 

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Posted by Victor Mair

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This is a problem we've raised and discussed many times on Language Log, and I've always been dissatisfied with the results.  With the following video, I've finally found a scholarly, convincing approach.

Julesy, "How do you sing in a tonal language like Chinese?" (a week ago)

As PhD Julesy convincingly explains — with evidence — it's as I've always thought.  In modern vernacular Sinitic languages like Mandarin, usually "the tendency is to allow the overall melody to dominate."

 

Selected readings

• "'Happy Birthday' melody formed from tones" (11/5/22) — many readers of this post, including some professionals, had a hard time grasping its point
• "When intonation overrides tone, part 6" (5/9/21)
• "Sorry, my Chinese is not so good" (6/6/17)
• “Where did Chinese tones come from and where are they going? ” (6/25/13)
• “Dissimilation, stress, sandhi, and other tonal variations in Mandarin” (8/26/2014)
• "'Ni hao' for foreigners" (10/11/16)
• "'Have a good day!' in Mandarin" (9/5/12)
• "Hypercorrect Mandarin tones" (10/15/23)
• "Tones, Then and Now" (8/22/24)
• "A Hainanese mystery" (8/21/24)
• "The musicality of Changsha tones" (3/25/20) — my birthday post for that year
• "Transcendent Tonality" (11/5/15) — tones and music; whistled language
• "Tabudish and the origins of Mandarin" (5/21/13)
• "Confessions of an Ex-Hokkien Creationist" (9/20/16)
• "Don't be afraid of tones" (1/10/21) — So says Stuart Jay Raj, a Thai-based Australian polyglot who speaks several tonal languages.  Here is a half-hour video by him which is linguistics heavy, but is actually an effort to simplify and systematize how tones work.  For example, Raj makes a sharp distinction between pitch and tone, something that many people get all mixed up about.  Not to mention intonation, which we have often discussed on Language Log.  In this episode, Raj focuses on Burmese, but in other presentations he focuses on different tonal languages and on general principles.  It's long and technical, but if you're truly interested in tones and tonal languages, I would urge you to have a good look and listen to what Stuart Jay Raj has to say about them.  He knows his stuff, so even if you're not specifically interested in mastering tones and tonal language, but are simply interested in the phonological and phonetic principles behind them, you might well learn something useful from this presentation.  For example, he has ideas about how creaky voice interacts with the production of tones. Several things about Raj's presentation that I find phenomenal:  the accuracy of his tones, the precision of his pronunciation, his advanced ability to draw characters and a wide variety of symbols spontaneously on a screen, presumably with a stylus, and so forth.

 

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Posted by Victor Mair

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The origins of language
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (May 9, 2025)

Summary:

    Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite generation of meaning by combining phonemes into words and words into sentences. This contrasts with the very few meaningful combinations reported in animals, leaving the mystery of human language evolution unresolved. 

Discussing:

Cédric Girard-Buttoz, Christof Neumann, Tatiana Bortolato, Emiliano Zaccarella, Angela D. Friederici, Roman M. Wittig, Catherine Crockford. Versatile use of chimpanzee call combinations promotes meaning expansion. Science Advances (5/9/25); 11 (19) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq2879

Abstract:

Language is a combinatorial communication system able to generate an infinite number of meanings. Nonhuman animals use several combinatorial mechanisms to expand meanings, but maximum one mechanism is reported per species, suggesting an evolutionary leap to human language. We tested whether chimpanzees use several meaning-expanding mechanisms. We recorded 4323 utterances in 53 wild chimpanzees and compared the events in which chimpanzees emitted two-call vocal combinations (bigrams) with those eliciting the component calls. Examining 16 bigrams, we found four combinatorial mechanisms whereby bigram meanings were or were not derived from the meaning of their parts—compositional or noncompositional combinations, respectively. Chimpanzees used each mechanism in several bigrams across a wide range of daily events. This combinatorial system allows encoding many more meanings than there are call types. Such a system in nonhuman animals has never been documented and may be transitional between rudimentary systems and open-ended systems like human language.

A far cry from the calls of Dr. Dolittle's garrulous animals.

 

Selected readings

• "'Chimps have tons to say but can't say it'" (1/11/10)
• "Nim: the unproject" (8/16/11)
• "Seidenberg on Singer and Nim" *8/27/11)
• "Annals of animal communication" (10/20/10)
• "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/16/25)

[h.t. Ted McClure]

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Posted by Victor Mair

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Japan sets rules on name readings to curb flashy 'kirakira names'
The Mainichi Japan (May 25, 2025)

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Japan will impose rules on Monday on how children's names in Chinese characters are pronounced, amid growing concern over what are known as "kirakira names" — flashy or unusual readings that have stirred debate.

The move is part of the enforcement of a revised law requiring all names in the national family registry to include phonetic readings, which will effectively ban interpretations considered too disconnected from the characters used.

Under the legislation, only widely accepted readings will be allowed. Parents can no longer give names readings unrelated to the meaning or standard pronunciation — a practice that has caused confusion in schools, hospitals and public services.

A little bit more about what "kirakira" means.

It's an onomatopoeia word

kirakira  キラキラ / きらきら:  "sparkling; glittering; gleaming; glowing; glinting; glistening; twinkling;flashing; lustrous brilliant; scintillating".

 

Kira kira name (キラキラネーム, kira kira nēmu, lit. 'sparkling name') is a term for a modern Japanese given name that has an atypical pronunciation or meaning. Common characteristics of these names include unorthodox readings for kanji, pop culture references, or the use of foreign words.

 

Description

Names with one or more of these characteristics have been described as kira kira names:

• Unorthodox kanji readings: Kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) often have typical pronunciations. In kira kira names, kanji like 月, typically read as tsuki and meaning "moon", can be pronounced as raito, a Japanese pronunciation of the English word "light".
• Pop culture references: References to media such as anime, manga, or video games. For example, naming children after Nausicaä, from the 1984 animated film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
• Foreign words and sounds: Incorporation of non-Japanese words, or the use of katakana (often used for foreign words) in names.
• Unorthodox or taboo names: Names such as 王子様; Ōji-sama; lit. 'prince', naming children after objects, naming children after taboo concepts such as 悪魔; akuma; lit. 'devil'.

    (Wikipedia)

The Japanese government may enact legislation against kirakira given names and have a fair chance to enforce it, because one has to present documents (passport, birth certificate, deeds, etc.) to the government for inspection from time to time.  However, it would be impossible to enforce a kirakira ban on kanji readings for the unrestricted corpus of kanji, because people can privately assign any reading they wish to any kanji they choose, and they do.

As June Teufel Dreyer, who called The Mainichi article to my attention, comments: in the US, the wave of celebrity parents giving their hapless offspring kirakira names like “North” and “Strawberry” seems to have abated.

Elon Musk's youngest child is named Tau Techno Mechanicus and has the nickname Tau.  This reminds me of the late lamented "Haj" Ross and my own grandson, Leodaniel Solirein (don't ask me).

One of the most distinguished living Sinologists is W. South Coblin (b.1944).  I've never heard him referred to as "Weldon", which is his actual given first name. I don't know how he got the name "Weldon", nor do I know the story of how he got the middle name "South" (I think he told me once, though I seem to have forgotten how it came about), but he surely prefers "South" over "Weldon" ("from the spring hill" or '"hill near a spring").  Maybe his ancestors came from a place south of "Hill Spring" in Northamptonshire, England.

 

Selected readings

• "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12
• "Taiwan's gold medalist with an unusual name" (7/29/21)
• "'Farcical names'" (4/3/15)
• "Whimsical surnames" (3/16/24)
• "Name games in Hong Kong" (3/15/16)

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