reading

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73003&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=evidence-from-oracle-bone-inscriptions-for-research-on-typhoon-related-disasters-in-the-central-plains-and-chengdu-plain-of-china

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73003

Archeological data with AI- and physics-based modeling explain typhoon-induced disasters in inland China around 3000 yr B.P.
Science Advances, 12.10 (3/4/25)
Ke Ding, Siyang Li, Aijun Ding, Houyuan Lu, Jianping Zhang, Dazhi Xi, Xin Huang, Sijia Lou, Xiaodong Tang, Xin Qiu, Lejun He, Yue Ma, Haoxian Lin, Shiyan Zhang, Derong Zhou, Xiaolu Zhou, Zhe-Min Tan, Congbin Fu, Quansheng Ge

To fully understand the significance of this paper, one must realize that the Central Plains (Zhōngyuán 中原) and Chengdu Plain in Sichuan are crucial, fertile agricultural and economic hubs with deep historical significance. The Central Plains served as the "cradle of Chinese civilization", and was a vital transport corridor in the East Asian Heartland (EAH). The Chengdu Plain has been a perennial "Land of Plenty", supported by the Dūjiāngyàn 都江堰 irrigation system, a miracle of ancient hydraulic engineering still operating today more than two millennia after it was constructed.

Abstract

Climate change–related extreme events during the mid-late Holocene, especially around 3000 years before the present (yr B.P.), severely threatened human survival and cultural development at various locations. However, although marked social change during this period in China have also been reported to coincide with extreme disasters, the causes and impacts of these events remain unclear. Here, we aligned paleoclimate reconstructions with quantitative analyses of archeological evidence, including oracle bone scripts, together with artificial intelligence– and physics-based model simulations to uncover the causes. We found that intensified typhoon activities exerted considerable impacts on climate extremes and social change in inland China around 3000 yr B.P. These findings underscore the urgent need to improve preparedness for today’s typhoon-induced disasters in the context of accelerating climate change.

Introduction

…

In this study, we quantitatively examined the weather-related written records in ~55,000 pieces of oracle bone scripts (3200 to 2996 yr B.P.), the earliest form of systematic Chinese writing (14–15), and developed several indexes representing the climate conditions during ~200 years in the Late Shang Dynasty.

Usage advisory from VHM

For the last few years, I've been noticing that Chinese archeologists and scientists publishing in English consistently refer to 甲骨文 as "oracle bone scripts" (note the plural), when I think they mean "oracle bone inscriptions" or "oracle bone texts".

I'm wondering if I should make an attempt to correct this usage, or whether it is so well entrenched in Sino-English that nothing can be done to change it.

Oracle bone scripts, the earliest form of systematic Chinese writing, were mostly found in AY in the Central Plains and generally considered as divination records of royalty and nobility in the Late Shang Dynasty (14–15, 36). Therefore, besides being recognized as invaluable cultural relics, oracle bone scripts also serve as precious contemporaneous documentation of people and their circumstances during the Chinese Bronze Age (37–38). Consistent with that revealed in the relevant geological and archeological records, oracle bone scripts also suggest a considerable influence of climate extremes, especially floods, during the Late Shang Dynasty (8, 39–41). A typical example can be seen in Fig. 2A; one of the main characters representing “disaster” in oracle bone scripts is a pattern resembling water waves, which indicates floods according to existing studies (42).

This is Fig. 2A of the article:

The authors claim that the three wavy lines near the top resemble water waves, which indicates "floods", hence "disaster".  I wonder about that.

They also post He27219 and say that it means "[upcoming] heavy rain".  It looks like this OB character for rain:

Is there a special character for "heavy rain"?

Judging from the paper as it appears in Science Advances examined here, it does not seem to me that the authors have made productive use of the oracle bone evidence.  It was a good idea for them to attempt to take the large amount of references to rainfall on the OBIs* (Oracle Bone Inscriptions) into account, but they only tell us how often the rains fell, not how much fell.  At least, that's all the information I can obtain from the data proffered.

—–

*For many years, I translated jiǎgǔwén 甲骨文 as "oracle shell and bone inscriptions" (abbreviated as OSBIs), until specialists in the field talked me out of it by telling me that turtle plastrons are also a kind of bone.

Selected readings

• "German English" (3/8/26)
• "Submissive woman or bound slave: interpreting oracle bone forms as a Rorschach test" (2/20/26)
• "Font making for oracle bone inscription studies" (9/18/24)
• "Nomadic affinity with oracle bone divination" (11/25/20)
• Victor H. Mair, "The Case of the Wayward Oracle Bone", Expedition Magazine, 43.2 (2001).

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73003&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=evidence-from-oracle-bone-inscriptions-for-research-on-typhoon-related-disasters-in-the-central-plains-and-chengdu-plain-of-china

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73003

Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73009&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=language-policy-at-the-chinese-national-peoples-congress-npc

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73009

China to Enshrine Xi-Era Ethnic Policy in New Law

by Chenghao Wei, NPC Observer (3/5/26)

The following is the introductory paragraph to the prospectus for the NPC's proceedings this week (starting on the 5th and lasting for eight days):

Next week, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) is expected to adopt a Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Law) [民族团结进步促进法]—designed to codify General Secretary Xi Jinping’s new orthodoxy for governing China’s ethnic minorities. That doctrine, known as the “Important Thinking on Improving and Strengthening Ethnic Work,” reflects the “Second-Generation Ethnic Policies” promoted by several prominent scholars. In a nutshell, this new “assimilationist” approach aims “not just to strengthen citizens’ sense of belonging to a larger, unified Chinese nation under the Party but also to mute expression of other—in the Party’s view, competing—identities.”

Chapter II is where the plan focuses on language policy:

Chapter II (Building a Shared Spiritual Home)lays the ideological foundation for the assimilation project. It affirms the policy of fostering identification with “the great motherland, the Chinese nation, Chinese culture, the Communist Party of China, and socialism with Chinese characteristics” through patriotic education, education in official historical narratives, publicity of “the fine Zhonghua traditional culture,” and promotion of “Chinese cultural symbols and image of the Chinese nation” (arts. 11–14).

This Chapter then affords language and education particular attention. It incorporates the relevant rules of the newly revised Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language [国家通用语言文字法], but often goes beyond them. For instance, it codifies the goal of having preschoolers become proficient in Putonghua and requires that Chinese characters be displayed more prominently than minority scripts if both must be used in public (art. 15, paras. 2, 4). It also tasks the education and ethnic affairs ministries with developing textbooks on “the community of the Chinese nation,” while requiring all schools to integrate that concept into their curricula (art. 16, paras. 1–2; art. 18, para. 1). This Chapter does vow to support the standardization, digitization, and preservation of minority texts (art. 15, para. 5), but the goal of such investment is to “protect languages from being completely forgotten rather than protecting their ongoing, everyday use by living people.”

Finally, this Chapter broadly requires media, internet service providers, families, among others, to promote the Party’s ethnic policy (arts. 19–21). Parents are reminded of their duty to provide lawful family education and are prohibited from “instilling in minors ideas detrimental to ethnic unity and progress” (art. 20, para. 2).

There's not much ambiguity about where they're headed with regard to language.

Selected readings

• "NPC Delegate Proposes To End Foreign Language Translation" (5/31/20) — that was six years ago; it didn't happen
• "Badge of honor: Language Log is blocked in China" (12/26/19) — with an account of  other major banned websites:  Wikipedia (all languages), The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Hackernews, Imgur, Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other invaluable websites were already off-limits to Chinese citizens for years.  The internet in China is severely decimated by the CCP government.
• "The Arithmetic of Party-Speak:  The 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party is just around the corner — and that means the machine of political discourse is humming away at high speed" (8/28/17).
• "The mind-numbing official-speak of the CCP" (8/29/17

[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73009&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=language-policy-at-the-chinese-national-peoples-congress-npc

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73009