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notalwaysright_feedMy mom and I are taking a taxi home. (At a quarter past midnight, from an opera theatre after six hours of Wagner and intermissions, so we’re both getting groggy). We’re heading first to Mom’s place, which is the nearer one, and then to mine. Driver: So, for the first location, it’ll be seven minutes. […]
notalwaysright_feedRead That Comeback Was Infectious
A real jerk on the football team says:
Jerk: "So, [My Name], have you gotten rid of your stupid disease yet?"
matuzo_feedI recently added a rule to my reset style sheet UA+ that I wanted to share with you.
When you add a popover to a page and open it, it looks similar to a dialog in terms of its styling. It's positioned at the center of the viewport.
That's okay, but I would argue that in most cases you want your popovers aligned closely with the button that controls them. As it turns out, that's super easy to achieve in browsers that support CSS anchor positioning, since popovers already have an implicit anchor. All you need to do is overwrite the margin property and position the popover. I'm wrapping the rule in a feature query to ensure the margin isn't reset in browsers that don't support CSS anchor positioning (At the time of writing, most importantly Safari).
@supports(position-area: end) {
[popover] {
margin: 0;
position-area: end span-end;
position-try-fallbacks: flip-block, flip-inline, flip-block flip-inline;
}
}If you're in Chrome or Firefox, you should see the popover aligned and the bottom left (or right for RTL) edge of the button.
You can also add position-try-fallbacks: flip-block, flip-inline, flip-block flip-inline;, as I did here, to tell the popover to try flipping its position along the inline and block axis if it overflows the viewport in its initial position (Thanks, Temani, for the hint).
Nice and easy, and it's a much better default.
My blog doesn't support comments yet, but you can reply via blog@matuzo.at.
languagelog_feedWe'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)
Julesy lays it all out in her usual magisterial manner, so I won't repeat what she already has said so clearly in the video, but will just add three items that are relevant to support her case:
1. Aside from King Sejong and his revered Hangul, one of the other most treasured historical relics in Korea is the Haeinsa 해인사 ("Temple of Reflections on a Smooth Sea"), which houses the 81,258 woodblock printing plates of the Korean Buddhist canon. This is the most complete, best preserved, and most reliable Chinese Buddhist canon. The monks who constructed and maintained the repository were architectural and technical geniuses who built a wooden monument that was designed to ensure the conservation of the woodblocks from mold, mildew, moisture, as well as extreme cold and excessive heat. When I visited the temple, I was astonished by all of the ingenious measures the monks took to adjust the ventilation of air through the storage areas. I simply marveled at the perfection of the edifice. In recent decades, contemporary engineers did tests utilizing modern storage facilities and techniques to temporarily house some of the blocks, and it was clear that they did not conserve them as well as the many centuries old depository at Haeinsa.
If the Korean people idolize Hangul, they adore Haeinsa.
2. The foundational phonological science that enabled the creation of Hangul — whoever is credited with the invention — was Indo-Buddhist. See:
Victor H. Mair and Tsu-lin Mei. “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Chinese Prosody.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51.2 (1991): 375-470 — on the historical development of tonal patterns in traditional Chinese poetry
"Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in Buddhist translations of the 2nd c. AD" (4/20/20)
Hill, Nathan, Nattier, Jan, Granger, Kelsey, & Kollmeier, Florian. (2020). Chinese transcriptions of Indic terms in the translations of Ān Shìgāo 安世高 and Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖 [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3757095
Nathan Hill,“An Indological transcription of Middle Chinese,” Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, 52 (2023), 40-50.
W. South Coblin. A handbook of Eastern Han sound glosses. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983.
Axel Schuessler. “The Qièyùn System ‘Divisions’ as the Result of Vowel Warping.” The Chinese Rime Tables. In David P. Branner, ed. (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006)), pp. 83–96.
Shuheng Zhang and Victor H. Mair, "Between the Eyes and the Ears: Ethnic Perspective on the Development of Philological Traditions, First Millennium AD", Sino-Platonic Papers, 300 (April, 2020), 1-49.
Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages", Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751 — for me personally, the most important linguistic impact of Buddhism was its legitimization of the written vernacular in China
3. The Confucianist Choson (or Joseon) 조선 Dynasty (1392-1897) was so anti-Buddhist that in essence they outlawed tea, which was closely identified with Buddhism. That's why still today, a hundred years after the collapse of the Choson, true tea ("wisdom [prajñā प्रज्ञा] tea") is making a slow comeback against ersatz tea.
"Taiwanese Twosome: tea and Sino-Korean" (6/25/25)
Victor H. Mair and Erling Hoh, The True History of Tea (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), especially Appendix C on the linguistics of "tea".
BTW, the most stinging / important sentence Julesy says in her video presentation is the very last one.
—–
P.S.: You probably can't see the swastika In the top left corner of the title frame of the video because it is covered up by Julesy's little circular portrait, but it has nothing to do with Nazism. Rather it signifies Buddhism. For example, if you wonder around street and alleys of Japanese villages and towns, you will see little Buddhist shrines featuring the swastika. In Chinese it is called 卍字, pronounced wànzì in Mandarin, manji in Cantonese, manji in Japanese, manja (만자) in Korean and vạn tự or chữ vạn in Vietnamese. In Balti/Tibetan language it is called yung drung. (source)
In fact, the swastika long predates Buddhism in what is now called "China". See:
Mair, Victor H. 2012. "The Earliest Identifiable Written Chinese Character.” In Archaeology and Language: Indo-European Studies Presented to James P. Mallory, ed. Martin E. Huld, Karlene Jones-Bley, and Dean Miller. JIES Monograph Series No. 60. Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man. Pp. 265–279.
P.P.S.: I pondered long and hard whether I should title this post as "Buddhism and Hangul" or "Hangul and Buddhism", and whether that made a difference.
Selected readings
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fic_rush_48notalwaysright_feed[I had recently moved to the Washington, DC, area from my small hometown. My hometown rarely got any big-name acts for concerts, and never any celebrity meet-and-greet events. I read that a Star Trek convention would be held at a local hotel, just across the Potomac River from DC. (This was before “Star Trek: The […]
notalwaysright_feedRead Every Data Migration Ever
Me: "How clean is the data? Are you sending all of it and expecting us to clean it, or are you sending just the stuff you want to keep?"
Client's Head of IT: "Oh, we definitely don't want that in the new system, so we will just send over the parts we want."
Me: "Are you sure? Are you absolutely doubly sure? Pinky promise, no take-backsies?"
notalwaysright_feedI believe that this story is going to sound so unbelievable (especially to those under 50) that you won’t believe it. But I swear it is absolutely true. My sister did ballet growing up in Colorado. The summer before she started Junior High she got an invitation to join the San Francisco Ballet to improve […]
marcicatsabotabbynotalwaysright_feedMy dad and I are both fascinated by languages. When my dad was young (he’s in his mid-seventies now), our hometown’s main industry was textile manufacturing. There were multiple textile factories, and most of the people in the city worked in the factories. It made a select few, the so-called “Textile Barons” very rich, untill […]
tamaranth
Kitty narrowed her eyes at him. “A bit pompous, aren’t you? To think you can find a solution to a problem that people have been working on for over a millennium?”
“That’s academia, baby.” Ulysses folded his arms across his chest. “Anything else I can help you with?” [p. 205]
Madison, Wisconsin: 1969. Ulysses Lenkov is a 'human lightning rod', a magician who can attract and talk to spirits, but can't decide a subject for his dissertation). Sam Sterling is a mild-mannered archivist who's moved back to Madison to be near his family, who he doesn't especially like. Warned by a fellow-magic user that something big is coming -- something connected with the god Dionysus -- Ulysses seeks out Sam and discovers that his first name happens to be ( ... )
notalwaysright_feedRead There’s Norway You’re Staying Away
Me: "Sorry, can't check you out here. There's no register here, so you need to go to the check-out up front."
Customer: "But there's a line, I want to pay here."
smokingbootblueswannotalwaysright_feed - (no subject)notalwaysright_feed - That Comeback Was Infectiousmatuzo_feed - Better defaults for popoversprincessofgeeks - Some HR fanvidslanguagelog_feed - Hangul and Buddhismnotalwaysright_feed - O₂ No!lullabymoon in fic_rush_48 - Round 157, hour - 10notalwaysright_feed - (no subject)notalwaysright_feed - Every Data Migration Evernotalwaysright_feed - (no subject)marcicat - fic rec Fridaysabotabby - podcast fridaynotalwaysright_feed - (no subject)daily_otter_feed - The Happiest Little Otter Facetamaranth - 2026/010: Dionysus in Wisconsin — E H Luptonnotalwaysright_feed - There’s Norway You’re Staying Awaynotalwaysright_feed - (no subject)smokingboot - Valerian Teablueswan - (no subject)oursin - (no subject)syntheid
