Un-burning words at the stake: Discovering the true lost origins of "warlock" and "hemlock"

While I'm busy putting together my presentation of the oldest recording of a (Para-)Mongolic language in world history by far, I thought I'd indulge in a little Halloween-time word-wandering. Previously leading up to Halloween, I discovered the Uralic (Mordvinic) origin of "vampire" ("soul-biter") and "vurkalaks" ("wolf-man thing"). I will probably write those up into posts of their own closer to Halloween, with a new Turkic variation on the "vurkolak" theme.

But for now, I'm taking a very rare tour down the history of my own language -- an etymological stay-cation. ^_^

In the process, I will overturn centuries of lazy ham-fisted "just so" stories about where these crucial words come from, what they mean, and how they're still here. As usual with my insights, no one has ever thought of them before. Only half of it is due to being smarter than them -- the other half is not taking any orthodoxy for granted, and looking at the topic with fresh eyes, from first principles. Academics are some of the most wacko people who ever made a living, and if just one Somebody pushes his idee-fixe, it becomes entrenched as the received obsession, or received clever-sillyness. You can't call it wisdom, when a wise person would rule it out as lazy or loony.

Especially in linguistics, from etymologies of particular words, to relationships between languages, there is just so much institutionalized ridiculousness. But that does mean I'll always have plenty to do, heeding my vocation as a truth-teller and secret-passageway-wanderer...

I'll get to "witch" later, for now we're starting with "warlock" since it shares its final morpheme with "hemlock", another macabre word just in time for Halloween.

The standard story is that "warlock" comes from Old English "wǣrloga", meaning "pledge-liar" (usually glossed as "oath-breaker", i.e. pagan religious officials were breaking their oath to Christianize). Here, "wǣr" comes from "pledge, covenant, agreement", and "loga" means "liar", sharing a root with Modern English "lie".

And that's precisely where we can tell this is a bullshit etymology. Old English "g" especially between vowels becomes semi-vowels "w" or "y" or dissolves entirely into its surrounding vowels. It does not remain a stop consonant, like the "k" sound at the end of "warlock". For example, "boga" becomes "bow", and that very root "loga" becomes "lie" and "liar". Conclusion: the OE ancestor of "warlock" must have had a "k" sound, which did not soften into a glide or disappear during Middle and Modern English, as opposed to "g". In OE, the "k" sound was written "c".

For brevity, I'll call Middle English "ME" and Modern English "Eng".

I do think that the first syllable of "warlock" traces back to OE "wǣr", in either of its two distinct senses -- "to watch out for" (leading to "wary", "aware", "beware"), and "true; truth". It probably combined them in a double-entendre -- a warlock was someone who watched out for his community, using his practice in a guardian or protector role, and he was someone who could perceive and speak the truth, that is as a sooth-sayer (which also comes from OE roots meaning "truth-sayer"), or a prophesy-giver. Other lesser people cannot see what events will truly unfold, as opposed to not unfolding or remaining hypothetical -- a sooth-sayer or warlock can tell you what will truly occur.

The next morpheme is OE "lāc", a once highly productive suffix used to derive nouns meaning an activity, process, or state associated with the root it attaches to. The most famous surviving word with this suffix is "wedlock", which is what I first thought of when I tried to figure out what "warlock" meant. Well, it's got some bizarre usage of "lock" in it -- and it's not the "hair" kind of lock, or the "fastening mechanism" kind of lock. What other words have a bizarre opaque suffix "lock"? I know -- "wedlock"!

In "wedlāc", the "wed" root refers to a pledge, and "lāc" is the "activity / process" suffix -- the activity that involves making a pledge. The suffix broadens the scope from the instant of pledging "I do", to the entire indefinite ceremony in which this one finite instance of pledging takes place.

Well then, "wǣrlāc" means the process or activity involving speaking the truth or watching out for things as a guardian. Not a brief finite instance of mouthing the prophesy, or the discrete instant of seeing a vision of evil-doers who are the source of problems. Rather, the broader indefinite habitual occupational activity and process of engaging in those actions. To gloss it with a noun and suffix, it means "truth-ery" and "guardian-ship".

Now all that's missing is the final vowel, since the ME reflexes end in "e", a reduced schwa-like vowel, which eventually disappeared altogether in Eng "warlock". This was the OE masculine agent noun suffix "a". This used to attach to OE "hunt" (meaning the same as in Eng), "hunta" = "hunter". This final "a" from OE regularly weakened to "e" in ME and disappeared in Eng.

So putting it all together, "wǣrlāca" = "wǣr + lāc + a" = "a man whose occupation involves sooth-saying / guardian-ship". That is precisely what a warlock was back in the OE days, before the British were Christianized. He was a religious official, interacting with the supernatural, on behalf of a congregation or audience who he was responsible for helping out.

That word regularly evolved into Eng "warlock" phonetically, unlike "wǣrloga", although the semantics were given a major shaking-up during the Christianization of Britain and the growth of the institution of the Christian church. Namely, it was demoted from a legitimate source of religious authority and practice, to an illegitimate marginalized dabbler in the dark arts, a male "witch". Even after the de-Christianization of Britain and America, "warlock" still retains its heavily Christian connotation of "boo-hiss, pagan religious official".

Rather than merely slander it semantically, the Christian officials also altered it phonetically and orthographically, to "wǣrloga" or "pledge-liar". This is a taboo deformation to rob the word of its power and legitimacy, when the practitioners and their audiences were still thriving, only partially converted to Christianity. But it's also a kind of satirical deformation, where rather than alter the sounds in any ol' deforming way, they chose a replacement that was pejorative -- "pledge-liar". Similar to referring to Ronald Reagan as "Ronnie Ray-Gun", to satirize the "Star Wars" military policy. His critics could have altered his surname in any number of ways, but they did so in a way that was semantically meaningful, just in a pejorative way.

The word "wǣrloga" is rare in the OE corpus, and restricted to Christian religious texts, such as "The Whale" (980 AD), a morality tale in favor of Christianizing rather than being seduced by all manner of demons and such, including the "wǣrloga" -- which every reader of "The Whale" understood to mean "wǣrlāca", with pejorative taboo deformation.

We can tell that "wǣrloga" was not a spoken vernacular word in OE cuz it left 0 descendants in ME or Eng, where it should have been retained as "warlow", but that word has never existed in Eng.

A scribe or two may have copied the word into ME, but it was not spoken then either, and in Eng they didn't even bother copying it in the monasteries anymore. Its rhetorical value had vanished, since pagan religious institutions themselves had vanished. Why keep heaping taboo-deforming abuse upon an official who no longer exists, and why sternly admonish his audience who also no longer exists? It was retired just like "Ronnie Ray-Gun" was, when its relevance had run out.

However, the spoken language of the common people *did* retain a reflex of "wǣrlāca" into the ME and Eng eras, even if scribes -- who were still mostly in Christian institutions -- preferred to quietly delete it and its taboo-deformed variant from their scriptoriums. It is plainly in use today as "warlock", but it erupted during the Early Modern witch trials in Scotland, where the Christian church could no longer keep the word under wraps. They needed a good, pointed word meaning "male witch", so all of a sudden the ancient word "warlock" was written -- in disgust -- once again by the scribal profession. But it had never gone away among the speech of everyday English speakers.

Although my reconstruction of "wǣrlāca" as the ancestor to "warlock" is rock-solid both phonetically and semantically, where every other proposal fails glaringly, I will buttress it further with a parallel coinage from OE. There was in fact a more dark-arts-dabbler kind of word in OE, akin to "sorcerer" -- "scīnlæcca". This is derived in exactly the same morphological way as I derived "wǣrlāca". It has a root "scīn", meaning "phantom, ghost", the activity / process suffix "lāc", and the more archaic agentive suffix "ja" (instead of "a").

The choice of "ja" caused two sound changes to the whole compound, namely "i"-umlaut, where the palatal "j" brought the back "a" to front "æ" in original "lāc", and the "c" before "j" caused it to geminate into "cc". These are both regular sound changes in OE. Because "wǣrlāca" uses "a" rather than "ja" as the agent suffix, it avoids both of those further sound changes.

The key point is that OE was already coining words for "sorcerer" using the morphological template I laid out for "wǣrlāca", including the main fixed morpheme "lāc", and only a subtly different fixed suffix "ja" vs. "a", leaving open only the 1st morpheme to denote what kind of activity the practitioner was engaged in. For "scīnlæcca", he was engaged in "phantom-ery", while the then more respectable "wǣrlāca" was engaged in "truth-ery" and "guardian-ship".

* * *

That made me think -- what other English words survive with this "lock" suffix? The received cluelessness says that "wedlock" is the only one, but I have conclusively proven that "warlock" belongs here as well. It's not counter-intuitive at all -- the "lock" in "warlock" doesn't refer to the "hair" kind of "lock" or the "fastening device" kind of "lock". How many possible usages of the suffix "lock" can there be? Parsimony requires us to assume that every example not relating to hair or fasteners is a survivor of OE activity / process suffix "lāc", and it is up to our insightfulness to discover how it is being used, what the main root is, and so on.

Well, "hemlock" is just such another example of a word ending in "lock" that has nothing to do with hair of fastening. And it's also timely as a macabre word for Halloween season. ^_^

The received cluelessness derives Eng "hemlock" from OE "hymlic", which in fact has 3 distinct plant referents -- hemlock, bryony, and convolvulus. The latter two are climbing vines, which are not deadly and not infamous for their use in ritual suicide or execution, only hemlock is.

Every reflex in ME has "o", not "i", in the 2nd syllable, so "hymlic" cannot be the right reconstruction, regardless of what species it refers to. But tellingly, some ME reflexes have the 1st syllable with "e" and some with "o/u". Clearly "hemlock" comes from the "e" form, and one or both of the others come from the "o/u" form.

Even more damningly, there's a ME reflex "hemloke", with a final "e", which cannot pop up out of nowhere for no reason at the end of OE "hymlic". There absolutely must have been a final vowel in the OE form, and it must have specifically been "a", in order to weaken into "e" during ME, and then fall out altogether by Eng "hemlock".

Therefore, the OE ancestor of "hemlock" was "hemlāca", which is the only source that regularly evolves into ME "hemloke" and Eng "hemlock". Breaking it down, "hem + lāc + a", where "a" is the weak masculine agent suffix, "lāc" is the process / activity suffix, and "hem" denotes the specific activity. What ever could "hem" refer to? Why, it's the OE root "hem" meaning "definite border", as in "to hem someone in" by drawing a border close around them, or more to the point, the hem of a garment.

Before a hem is put onto a garment, its ends are raw, unfinished, indefinite, and atelic -- extending out for who-knows-however-long. Not forever, but without a clearly defined end-point. By putting a hem on it, this vague indefinite atelic expanse is given a clean, crisp definite final end-point. It is now finished, completed, done-zo. Even more apropos, hemming a garment shortens its length, by folding over a certain amount of the end.

And so, much like the ancient Greek view of the last Fate cutting the thread of a person's life, so the ancient British viewed hemlock as the plant that, if you ingest it, shortens and finishes off the garment of your life. Good ol' gallows-humor in the Germanic languages, even back in ancient times.

What's the point of the suffix "lāc"? To broaden the scope from the instant of hemming, i.e. termination of life, into the entire ceremony or ritual in which this instantaneous act of hemming takes place, just as with "wedlock". Hemlock is "the agent involved in the activity of hemming", namely putting a hem on the ingester's life.

Much like the taboo deformation of "wǣrlāca", "hemlaca" was deformed in the scribal culture, to dilute its poisonous potency. If you say the pure name, you might as well drink the stuff straight. But deform its pronunciation a little bit, and it goes down just as harmlessly as those non-fatal (if annoying) vine species, "hymlic".

But among everyday speakers of English, "hemlaca" never went away. It evolved naturally into "hemloke" and then "hemlock", un-deformed. This makes me suspect that the taboo deformation was not just due to the poisonous nature of the plant, in which case you might think commoners also would avoid speaking its sounds purely. Probably this was related to the same Christianization effort that deformed "warlock", if hemlock's ritualistic use was tied to the region's pagan past. That would only motivate the religious transformers to taboo-deform it, while laypeople had no reason to single this word out, and kept pronouncing it according to the natural sound laws of their language as a whole.

Its most famous ingester was Socrates -- not a pagan Brit, but a pagan nonetheless. Probably the British scribes wanted to stamp out any and all associations with paganism, whether foreign or domestic, that hemlock used to carry.

By un-torturing the data, the words "warlock" and "hemlock" no longer confess to meaning "pledge-liar" or some homophone with harmless vine species. I have restored them to their fully transparent Old English glory, tripling the number of "lāc" survivors.

Why did only "wedlock" escape the scribes' alterations, and become noticed by standard etymologists for what its origins were? Well, what hatred against "wedlock" could the Christian church have had? Nah, let that one slide. But "warlock" and "hemlock"? Time to whip out the taboo-deforminator 3000... And today's clever-sillies, however atheist they may be, are just propping up the purge launched by the lexical crusaders of Dark Age Christendom.

But here amid the Gothic ruins of the blogosphere, this humble cyber-warlock in search of a congregation will continue to see and speak the truth, and guard the heritage of the language of my ancestors.

Eskaleut origins of Manchurian / Tungusic language family

Time to start a new standalone post, though as always most of what I publish will be in the comments section. I'll be continuing work on the Eskaleut origins of Tungusic words, and the sound laws that link them.

To briefly recap the latest mega-discoveries, I began with a new model for the birth of the Altaic languages as creoles that are mostly Samoyedic (in the Uralic family), with a crucial Yeniseian influence / phonotactic filter. This was partly about historical sound changes, but largely lexical, showing how Proto-Turkic in particular is "Sayan Samoyedic with a Yeniseian accent". But it created an Altaic foundation which the other two families used as well, Monogolic / Para-Mongolic, and Tungusic.

Then in the middle of that, I happened upon the mother of all secret passageways in Altaic studies -- Tungusic used to be a member of the Eskaleut family, which up until now has thought to be entirely confined to the New World, namely the Arctic New World, mostly the Eskimo branch, but also Aleut in the Aleutian Islands. The more I unearth the etymologies, the more it looks like Tungusic is mostly Eskaleut, and owes only a minor part of its nature to the Altaic foundation. It can still be considered a creole, neither pure this or pure that, but the influence and inheritance from its Eskaleut side is pervasive.

This represents a new contribution to the discoveries about linguistic connections between Siberia and the northern New World, such as Vajda's discovery of the sibling status between Yeniseian in Siberia and the Na-Dene family mainly in Northwest America (with a major recent spread into the American Southwest). I already added to that specific family in the past year or so, by showing that Japonic belongs to it as well. But this latest discovery of mine, about Tungusic being Eskaleut, provides a whole new link between Siberia and Northwest America.

Without rehearsing every single point made in the previous comment section, here are they key principles and sound laws:

The main problem that faced the speakers of Proto-Tungusic, was that the Altaic foundation came from Uralic, which is a half-sibling to their own native tongue, Eskaleut. If they let the two intermix willy-nilly, the outcome would be inbred and confusing. So, they made a concerted effort to distinguish these two sources of lexical items, when forming the lexicon of their new creole, Tungusic.

The Altaic base resulted from the Eastern Steppe nomad confederations of the 1st millennium BC (such as the Deer Stones culture), who were victorious in driving out the Indo-Iranian apocalyptic charioteer cult that had laid siege to the Sayan Mountain gate during the Andronovo era. As victors and protectors of the region, their new Samoyedic-Yeniseian creole enjoyed prestige among other residents of the Eastern Steppe, all the way east into Manchuria and the Amur region.

As such, Tungusic deferred to the Altaic foundation when separating its lexicon into two source. Words of Uralic origin would keep their Altaic form, while words of native local Eskaleut origin would be systematically altered, though still recognizable. Both Uralic and Eskaleut have a redundancy in their consonant series, where stops are voiceless and fricatives are voiced. Uralic-origin words preserved this redundancy. Eskaleut-origin words inverted this redundancy, but still kept a redundancy, to please their Eskaleut ears -- now the stops would be voiced, and fricatives would be voiceless. This creates a complimentary distribution between the two sources of words, allowing them to keep them separate.

The only major change to the phoneme inventory involved the uvular consonants from Eskaleut, since Uralic does not have consonants in this place. Briefly, "q" -> "g" and "ʀ" -> "r" in Tungusic. For the vowels, "ə" -> "e", although subject to moving due to vowel harmony.

At the earliest stage, vowel harmony seems to have been the imported Uralic pattern, since Eskaleut has no vowel harmony of its own, based on front vs. back. This may have changed over time, toward the typical Tungusic pattern based on high-front vs. low-back. This is a minor quibble to me at this point, so I'm just using front-back as a guideline.

Phonotactically, the major change was adopting a Uralic word-shape of CVCCV, perhaps involving deletion of a V between the medial C's in an Eskaleut root, or metathesizing the final two segments of an Eskaleut root of shape CVCVC. Also, new Uralic phonotactic rules for the nature of that medial consonant sequence, e.g. if there's a liquid, it must be the 1st of the sequence in Uralic, but not necessarily in Eskaleut, requiring metathesis or feature-alteration.

One other important sound change is deletion of voiced velar consonants between vowels, including Eskaleut "ɣ" and "ŋ", as well as voiced "w"-like "v" between vowels. Intervocalic velar deltion occurred in New World Eskaleut, and in the other Altaic languages, especially Turkic. Intervocalic deletion of "v" occurred in New World Eskaleut.

At the end of this initial process of adopting the Altaic foundation, and separating the two sources of words, these sound changes stopped. The job was done. However, words don't stop entering the lexicon just cuz the major initial stage has been completed. Late-coming words do not appear to show these sound changes as much, whether they're from Uralic or Eskaleut origin. This allows us to date when words entered the lexicon. It's similar to Ancient Greek, where earlier "s" -> "h", so if you see "s", that word is probably a late-comer to Greek, after that law ceased operating.

Specifically, the descendants of Proto-Samoyedic had already weakened "p" toward "x" / "h", possibly further deleting the weak consonant and yielding null. This was inherited into Turkic the strongest, where earlier "p" is null, while Mongolic and Tungusic held onto the "x" / "h" forms. Also, Tungusic changed "p" -> "b" in its Eskaleut layer, as part of the effort to distinguish Uralic from Eskaleut origin. Both of those laws erase "p".

And yet, there's still a decent amount of "p"-initial words in Proto-Tungusic -- these must be late-comers, regardless of their source. And indeed they are from less important word classes and semantic fields, unlike the crucial classes and semantic fields that show the sound changes of "p" -> "x" (Uralic) and "p" -> "b" (Eskaleut). They were lexical afterthoughts, late-minute filler, flourishes, secondary / learned / extended meanings, and so on.

There are also a handful of "t"-initial words of Eskaleut origin, entering the lexicon after the "t" -> "d" change in the Eskaleut layer. They join the words of Uralic origin, which never altered "t" in the first place.

One major common problem / shibboleth of Eskaleut and Tungusic, is palatalization of both alveolar "t" -> "c" and velar "k" -> "c", before "i" or even "ə" ("e" in Tungusic). Uralic / Samoyedic did not take part in this, let alone to such an obsessive extent. In Proto-Eskimo, no words begin with "ti", so they must have been palatalized to "ci" by the P-E stage. There are even gaps in the "tə" space, so some of those must have been sent to "cə". However, there are basically no words with "cə", so those also must have been raised to "ci", an overflowing container in P-E.

Thankfully, this palatalization of "t" and raising of "ə" was far less extensive in Old World Eskaleut, i.e. the non-Altaic parent in the Tungusic creole. So some cognates between Old World and New World Eskaleut clearly have "t" in Tungusic, vs. "c" in Eskimo, revealing that they used to begin with "t" rather than "c" in Eskimo, before the Proto stage.

Tungusic does not have "c", and it treated Eskaleut sources differently, seemingly based on chronology, although maybe there's some phonological conditioning that I can't see just yet. At the early stage, or certainly preceding non-palatal vowels, "c" -> "s", much like in several New World descendants of Eskimo. As mentioned, Tungusic did not palatalize "t" to "c" in some cases, so that source of "c" was avoided.

However, another source of "c" was earlier "ki" or "ke" (from "kə" in Eskaleut), which had been palatalized as well. Even among late-entering words, where initial "k" is preserved, there are no Tungusic words with "ke" or "ki" -- they must have been sent somewhere else, and there are a bunch of words beginning with "ʒ" (voiced palatal affricate), so they must have gone there. Eskimo did not palatalize "k", and there are many words beginning with "ki" and "kə". This palatalization of "k" is strictly Tungusic, and reflects the compresses phoneme inventory that happened when the uvular consonants of Eskaleut had to be squeezed into the Uralic-esque phoneme space, where the furthest-back place is velar.

Since "k" already has unaltered Uralic-origin words, and since that is an incredibly common consonant in Uralic, this container was going to be overflowing. So in some cases, "k" -> "x" in the Eskaleut layer, part of the inversion of the consonant feature redundancy, which produced voiceless fricatives and voiced stops. This seems to be the early stage.

Late-entering words, though, still tried to avoid overflowing "k", and palatalized them to "c" before "e" or "i" -- but since "c" doesn't exist in Tungusic, these were then voiced to "ʒ", in the same place. That keeps the change within the overarching inversion of feature redundancy, since an earlier "k" maps to a voiced stop / affricate.

Also worth noting that in late-coming words with initial "t", where "t" was preserved rather than voiced to "d", palatalization was still an active threat, and could have resulted in "t" -> "c", unlike "d", since voiced consonants do not palatalize as easily as voiceless ones. But even "d" palatalized would result in "ʒ", which would merge earlier "d" and "k", creating homophones and confusion. Since "c" is an empty container, earlier "t" words palatalized to "c" would therefore be mapped further into "ʒ". But that would have merged earlier "t" and "k" before palatal vowels, creating homophones and confusion. So, to prevent this homophone problem, the triggering palatal vowels "e" and "i" were rounded to "ö" and "ü", since round vowels tend to impede palatalization (too difficult to articulate both rounded lips and flexing the tongue tip toward the palate).

What I have not yet fully determined, is the origin of Tungusic words beginning with unusual nasals, "ń" and "ŋ". My brief look says they are either shifted from an earlier "n", or are nasalization of an oral consonant in the same place, like "k" -> "ŋ", since "k" was overflowing and had to be mapped elsewhere. They are not merely conditioned by the following vowel, as though "ń" only appeared before front vowels -- both of these nasals appear before all the vowels of Tungusic. If anything, "ń" is *less* likely to appear before a front vowel, so it could be a nasalized "c", for all I know.

To summarize the major sound changes in the Eskaleut layer of Tungusic. Remember, this is from Proto-Eskaleut, that is the shared ancestor between the Old World and New World branches. Since the New World branch palatalized "t" to "c" before "ə" or "i" already in its proto-stage, sometimes there's a correspondence between NW "c" and OW "t", due to NW palatalization of "t", and other times where NW "c" corresponds to OW "s", due to OW feature redundancy inversion (producing voiceless fricatives and voiced stops / affricates). Voiced fricatives from Eskaleut were mostly hardened to stops, as part of the inversion of feature redundancy.

Vowels:

"ə" -> "e" (subject to vowel harmony)

Consonants, voiceless stops:

"p" -> "b"

"t" -> "d"

"c" -> "s"

"k" -> "x" (early?, unconditional?)

"k" -> "ʒ" (late?, before "ə" or "i")

"q" -> "g"

Consonants, voiced fricatives:

"v" -> "b"

"ð" -> "d"

"ɣ" -> "g"

"ʀ" -> "r"

With all that said, today will see more etymologies, covering some of the "ʒ" words, including another numeral, the 4 seasons... and another massive hunting trophy, the Altaic sky-god's name Tengri. Stay tuned! ^_^

"Oh la Moot" by E-rasure, parody song for social media crushes and un-crushes

And now for a brief musical interlude while I cook up some new posts on the ongoing project of the Crescentine family of languages and cultures...

I haven't written one of these in awhile, but something just bit me, and I need to. ^_^

To the tune of "Oh l'Amour" by Erasure from 1986 (original lyrics). If you search for it, make sure you find this version, where the chorus has heavier percussion and background vocal harmonies. The first album version is bit slower and not as intense -- which a song about pining-away for lost or unrequited love must be!

* * *

Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?

Like-baiting you
You were like-baiting me
Always fan-arting you
You wrote it off as just memes
Oh S of my chart,
Don't make me feel own'd
Just scrap me for parts
Like your last-model phone

Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?

Why close without save?
Why unfollow me?
I just F5 and pray
For at least a subtweet
On ye olde timeline
In my DM's you'd slide:
"Get yours, I'll get mine
But won't be one-guy'd"

Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?

No recov'rable files
You never bookmarked my page
I'm leaving this site
What's left to engage?
Oh S of my chart
You've chased enough clout
Come click on restart
My system's crashed out

Oh la moot,
Blocked my account, left my screen oh so blue
Mon ah moot,
How's a boy get a girl to unmute?

Eastern Steppe culture in Northwest America: Breaking precious copper decorated sheets for potlatches and funerals

Although I've established that the Japonic language family belongs to the broader Dene-Yeniseian family, which presently spans Siberia to the American Southwest, I had no idea what the time-frame for this relationship was, when first exploring the matter.

But upon further investigation of linguistic, mythological, and ritual relationships, I've not only uncovered further shared shibboleths, but determined that their common-ness lasted up through fairly recent times. Their common ancestor was not from 10, 20, or 100-thousand years ago. Not every element of their cultures dates back to the exact same time-period. Still, the earliest shared cultural ancestor they have goes back no earlier than 2000 BC. And in some cases the shared ancestor only goes back to between 500 BC and 300 or so AD. They could have been in lingering contact with each other through the 1st millennium AD.

This totally blows up the notion that the culture of the New World was either brought with long-distance migration from the Old World on the order of 10s of thousands of years ago, or that it evolved only in the New World after that initial wave of migration. For some New World cultures, that's true. But for others, who speak Na-Dene languages, their bodies and haplogroups may have come over 10,000 years ago, but their present-day culture did not, nor did it evolve solely in situ after settling into the Americas. There was a transmission of Siberian culture from the Old World starting as early as 2000 BC and perhaps lasting through 500 AD.

This is a great illustration of the non-correlation between genes and culture, or between migration of bodies and migration of culture. Cultural forms can spread by contagion, from one adjacent group to the next, and so on in a chain. Group A transmits it to group B, B transmits it to C, and then C to D. The fact that it is present in A, B, C, and D does NOT show that it began with A and then A migrated through all the intervening regions, leaving it behind them at each stop. In fact, it doesn't imply that A has migrated at all -- maybe they had contact with B (without, however, migrating to replace B, just interacting with neighbors), but not C, D, or any further link in the chain. And contagion is a far faster transmission process than migration of one spreader group to all regions affected -- as the phenomenon of epidemic diseases shows.

That's not to say that cultural forms spread just like epidemic diseases -- the key difference is how "susceptible" one group is to the cultural influence of another. Pathogens don't care about cultural groups or which other groups they choose as role models vs. groups they shun / avoid. Cultural transmission is not necessarily transitive either, unlike diseases -- in some cases, A influences B, and B influences C, but C rejects the influence of A (directly). In such a case, B acts as a gatekeeper between A and C, a role that does not show up in epidemic disease transmission. This is where all of the real art-and-science of cultural transmission happens -- just saying it can spread from one adjacent group to the next is not very surprising, it's what relationships must be in place for the transmission to take place, and when it will stop.

With that big-picture in mind, let's now look at some shared cultural shibboleths in Northwest America and cultures of the Eastern Steppe, including the off-shoot that wound up in Glorious Nippon. Some of these examples are from the comments in the previous post, some are ones I discovered just in the past few days.

I'm going to try breaking these up into smaller, more digestible separate posts, instead of having a long string of 250 comments on a single post.

* * *

First, we'll start with ritual. An earlier post demonstrated that ancient Japan (starting sometime before 300 AD) shared a cultural shibboleth with the Xiongnu and the Pazyryk cultures of the Eastern Steppe (and Silla, in Korea) -- breaking precious bronze mirrors as a funeral rite, and burying them as grave goods. See that post for all the details, which begin in the 3rd section.

For the time-frame, this ritual began in the mid-1st millennium BC (Pazyryk) and lasted through the mid-1st millennium AD (Kofun-era Japan). After then, the practice seems to have faded away...

But not in Northwest America, where a strikingly similar ritual lasted up through the conquest of the frontier by the Americans. Perhaps in the Old World, gradual sedentarization and civilizing influences from China led to the abandonment of this Eastern Steppe barbarian ritual, while in Northwest America there never was a sedentary mega-state civilizing influence until the white man showed up. They certainly were not in the cultural orbit of the Aztec, Maya, or Inca empires. So perhaps the Mongolians and Japanese would still be practicing this funeral rite, if there had been no China for them to interact with...

Metallurgy was never widespread in North America before European colonization. But there was a limited amount of iron and copper production in the Northwest, where the raw material was sourced from Alaska. We'll get to the mythical or not-so-mythical legend behind that, when we look at myths!

But after they began working with copper, various groups in Northwest America, not only those speaking Na-Dene languages, began to practice a ritual of breaking precious copper ceremonial shields, sometimes as part of a funeral, although sometimes as part of a potlatch. In both occasions, though, the broken fragments were buried somehow -- either under the ground or tossed into the sea, where they sank to a watery grave.

In both occasions, the "coppers" or copper shields were not very utilitarian, they were symbols of status and wealth and perhaps a connection to the supernatural and to ancestral lineages. They were decorated as art-works. They were owned and traded as decorative status symbols, with some degree of otherworldly power -- just like those bronze mirrors in the Eastern Steppe.

The main difference in the New World ritual is the shape -- they are beaten smooth and are between half a foot to several feet in length, like the Old World round mirrors, but they take the form of a T-shaped shield (again, not used as an actual shield in battle). And the adornments are also local patterns. So there was some degree of syncreticization between the Old World ritual and existing Northwest American arts-and-crafts traditions.

They don't seem to be treated as magical for their ability to collect and reflect light, as though they were mini-suns, like they were in the Old World, where they played into the solar cult of the Eastern Steppe.

We can't tell if their use at potlatches is different from their Old World context, which was funerals -- perhaps the only difference is when potlatches were held in the Old World, like mainly during a funeral, whereas in Northwest America, potlatches were held outside of funeral contexts as well. But in both cases, their breaking and burial can be viewed as a form of conspicuous wealth destruction, as an honest signal of the large amount of wealth held by the leader. In this way, it's no different from human and animal sacrifice, on the same occasions (potlatch and/or funeral) -- it's the sacrifice of precious objects, which only a wealthy household owns.

However, it's not just a vague conceptual similarity like "sacrificing precious objects" -- they are made of copper, beaten smooth into a sheet, adorned as decorative objects, used in a ceremonial context rather than a valuable object that sees real-world use, and their method of sacrifice is the same -- breaking into fragments.

Most inclusion of precious objects in a funeral or other ceremony does NOT involve breaking them or rendering them worthless as utilitarian objects, or even as decorative objects. Indeed, if they were just decorative objects made from copper, they would not seem so similar to the Eastern Steppe versions -- it's the fact that they're ceremonially sacrificed by fragmentation that jumped out at me when reading about them.

All these unnecessary / arbitrary points of similarity show that it is a shared shibboleth, not just independent variations on a universal theme.

This New World ritual goes back no further than the mid-1st millennium BC, when it is observed among the Pazyryk culture in the Eastern Steppe. It was still practiced in Japan during the early Medieval era. When was it transmitted into the Pacific Northwest? Sometime after the prerequisite adoption of copper metallurgy, which was more limited regionally and occurred later in the New World.

I'm guessing sometime at the twilight of its use in Japan, or just afterwards -- when the Siberian transmitters would have still been familiar with the ritual, but since it was no longer de rigueur in Siberia, it was not emphasized as strictly to the New World adopters. It was likely transmitted by the same Siberians who taught the New Worlders about copper in general -- "Y'know, this isn't just utilitarian stuff. Where we come from, we beat it into sheets, decorate it, and break it into fragments during major ceremonies like a funeral. You guys should do that, too!"

Maybe they specifically said to make it into a round mirror, and the New Worlders said that wasn't as relevant to their local culture, and made them into shield-like shapes instead. Or maybe since the ritual was fading away in Siberia, the Siberian transmitters didn't insist on every element being preserved -- what the hell, the ritual was dying out anyway, just give them the basic understanding, which is that copper is valuable, it can be beaten into a smooth canvas for artwork, and this valuable object can be broken into fragments for a major ceremony like a funeral.

I doubt it was too much later after it died in the Old World, since hardly anyone would still remember it in order to pass it on. Probably not 1000 AD. But also not too early, since it only began in 500 BC, and it required use of copper or bronze. So perhaps more like 300 to 700 AD, though after being transmitted, lasting right up through the "present" (closing of the American frontier circa 1900). Pacific Northwest natives never had to worry what a civilization like China might think about them sacrificing people, animals, and precious mirrors, well after the Dark Ages...

UPDATE: Staying here until no longer able, WordPress and Substack will be back-up / alt sites

It looks like the work-around may be good for awhile. I'd really prefer not to leave my home of over 20 years, not to mention setting up 2 new sites.

Google *has* already abandoned Blogger and Blogspot -- no help center, impossible to reach anyone, they make changes whenever for no reason, and if they break it, you have to find a work-around or it's over. Even if you find one, they have turned from apathetic to vindictive against their own users. That's why I couldn't even leave comments after awhile -- some seething spiteful flunkie actually coded the "browser not supported" screen into the comment box itself. But I'll get to the gory details about that in a little bit.

Suffice it to say, I sense them ultimately giving Blogspot the same treatment that Yahoo gave GeoCities -- total demolition. Slightly better-case scenario, they leave up the domain but stop the writers from putting up any new posts or comments. Either way, there's zero chance they will migrate the blogs at Blogspot to some future site, as they have nothing to move them to, unlike when they killed Google Play Music and forced users into YouTube Music. They didn't even keep their attempt at social media, Google+, so why would they keep a format that is even less utilized, like blogs?

Just cuz I have a work-around doesn't mean it'll work forever, especially given how vindictive the Google-hive has become. Even if it works, they could shut down the entire domain. So, I'm setting up 2 separate sites just in case.

The WordPress one -- The Library of Akinokure -- will be mainly for collecting entire series that I've done here, especially those that have mainly been in the comments section, so search engines can find them. That gives me several years' worth to re-publish in more coherent form. I may even go back through the archives here for series that were already in standalone post form, and back them up there as well.

Right now, I'm working on the work I've done about Japanese / Japonic belonging to the Dene-Yeniseian family of languages. Full posts will go up over there, and I'll just leave a brief remark about it in the comments section here -- in case people don't want to read an entire 500-word discovery every time, but just get the gist.

I've more or less set up the layout, though I'll be tweaking it and maybe making a new header image, etc., but you can start perusing the Japonic-Dene-Yeniseian linguistic series there right now and going forward.

The Substack one -- just "akinokure", like here -- will take longer for me to figure out what to do with, since that allows both long-form posting and a micro-blogging comment feed, like I have here. But I don't want to cannibalize this main site by putting too much on Substack. I'm thinking of using it for pictures in the micro-blog feed. Brutalist mall du jour, vintage book du jour, thrift store find du jour, that kind of thing. I don't have the layout set up yet, other than making the landing page look like this blog, so there's not much to do there yet.

The point is, I'll keep to posting here as much as I can, for as long as I can, and if anything should interfere with that, or end that, you'll be able to tell. But now, you'll have 2 alt sites to check on, to see if in fact I'm moving over there for good. For the moment, and unless I specifically say so at the alt sites, they'll remain alt and Blogspot will stay main.

I don't like posting these content-free programming notes, but I really did just receive an intense signal from Google that Blogspot will receive even less support than merely being abandoned by them. So I've had to waste a bunch of time scrambling to find a work-around, and set up alt sites just in case.

I know the American military is about to commit suicide-by-cop with another failed war in the Middle East, but I've already said pretty much everything there is to say about that, specifically about Iran, so my next post here will go into greater detail about the cyber-bureaucracy that controls so much of our online existence, how surreal it is, how to minimize our exposure to its risks, and so on. Might as well get something productive and insightful out of this whole ordeal...

URGENT: Moving blog to Substack! Still using "akinokure"

 I can't explain in detail now, but Google's tech incompetence / malice had temporarily locked me out of the Blogger dashboard and comments section. That's why I've been MIA here for a week. Fortunately I found a work-around, but I don't know how long that will last. It was nothing ideological or anything like that, purely technical, but it was insanely malicious, and I no longer have trust in Google to be a reliable guardian and steward of the Blogger / Blogspot platform.

So I am moving all blogging activities over to Substack -- same name as here, "akinokure":

https://akinokure.substack.com

I will do long-form blogging there, and they have a built-in micro-blogging feed called "Notes", which will replace my blogging in the comments section here.

I will also try to do long-term back-up of this blog at WordPress, "The Library of Akinokure":

https://libraryofakinokure.wordpress.com

That will not involve micro-blogging, or backing up random comments and observations -- the stuff that's really worth preserving. Possibly migrating the whole thing from here, over there, or maybe just a "greatest hits" compilation. We'll see.

These are all still somewhat up-in-the-air, but I have to leave this final message while I can still use this work-around. The pace will be the same over there as it has been here, depending on how inspired I am du jour.

But, it will be the same cliff-dwelling sage, the same location atop the Cliffs of Wisdom -- you'll just be taking an alternate route up the mountain. The Substack route, rather than the Blogspot route. It will still be me, and my charmingly eclectic ever-shifting range of topics! I will await you at the end of the Substack route up the mountain! ^_^

Uncovering the prehistory of Japanese: The structure and origins of Japonic verbs

In a series of lectures published in the comments section to the previous 2 posts, I discovered and detailed the Yeniseian origins of the Japonic language family. That's not to say that Japanese is a Yeniseian language, but that the Wa people used to speak a Yeniseian language, and they carried over many of their lexical items into the Altaic language that they shifted to after Yeniseian -- probably a Para-Mongolic language -- and have retained them even into the Japonic stage of their history, after incorporating Emishi / Ainu speakers along the way.

But the numerous examples I gave are mostly nouns and adjectives, and some highly important closed-class items like pronouns, kin terms, and particles / affixes. There are very few verbs in the examples -- until now!

The reason I couldn't draw Yeniseian origins for Japanese verbs is that I was trying to capture too many segments from the Japonic form, but it turns out that the final 2 segments in Japonic verbs -- Cu (some consonant, and "u") -- are just verb markers, not part of the semantic core of the word. I knew that already about the final "u" for Japanese verbs, but I did not appreciate the fact that the final consonant is not semantically crucial, it's only there for phonotactic reasons.

And that reason I didn't know that, is that nobody else knows that! So I couldn't just read about it in a Wikipedia article, Wiktionary entry, or even scholarly article, unless it's an obscure / forgotten one, entirely in Japanese, from the 15th C...

So in the interest of not only revealing the nature of Japanese verbs, but also to help connect them back to earlier Yeniseian forms that have been carried over after language shift, I'm going to start a new post on this topic.

The source of Proto-Japonic verbs is Wiktionary's list. See also some helpful intros from Wikipedia on the topic of Japanese conjugation and Japanese five-way vs. one-way verbs ("godan" vs. "ichidan").

First, to briefly summarize what *is* already known about Japanese verbs. They characteristically end in "u", not some other vowel, and not a consonant (coda consonants are banned in P-J). Other parts of speech are not this regularized in their ending, Japonic really wanted to clearly mark its verbs.

Before this final "u" is a consonant. Verbs fall into 2 classes. By far the most common are those where this consonant is considered the final segment of the stem of the verb. Less common are those where this consonant is "r", but the verb stem is considered to end in the vowel just before that, always followed by "ru". These classes are called consonant-stem verbs vs. vowel-stem verbs.

Example of a consonant-stem verb -- "kaku" ("to write"), has the stem "kak-".

Example of a vowel-stem verb -- "miru" ("to see"), has the stem "mi-".

The consonant-stem verbs are also known as "godan" or 5-way verbs, since the vowel that follows the stem comes in all 5 different Modern Japanese vowels, depending on the tense, aspect, etc. that the verb is being used it. So "kak-" is followed by "a", "i", "u", "e", and "o", before other suffixes and particles are added on, to indicate whether it's a negative, a command, the infinitive, the past, and so on.

The vowel-stem verbs are also known as "ichidan" or 1-way verbs, since their stems end in a vowel, and this is the one and only vowel in their conjugation pattern (before the negative, command, infinitive, etc. suffixes are added onto them).

Since the vowel-stem verbs have stems that end in a vowel, and the unconjugated verb must end in a vowel as well, and Japonic phonotactics prefer syllables that are "CV", a consonant must come between the end of the stem and the final "u". In every single case, this consonant is "r" -- showing that it is a dummy consonant, not semantically crucial to the particular verb it occurs in. For example, "miru" and "tomeru", whose stems are "mi-" and "tome-".

Now, for the part that is not understood, or if it was once understood, has not been transmitted to the present. This preference for verbs ending in "ru" is not unique to the vowel-stem verbs, where it is obligatory -- the most common final consonant for the consonant-stem verbs is "r", which means they also end in "ru"!

Can any ol' consonant be the final segment of a stem for the consonant-stem verbs? I skimmed through the list of P-J verbs and could immediately see that "r" was the most common, followed by "k", with others rare, and some non-existent. How is this not widely known??? There's a massive preference for and against certain segments as the final consonant of consonant-stem verbs.

I present these in the following list of 61 consonant-stem verbs and 16 vowel-stem verbs, which are the entire list of P-J verbs at Wiktionary. First they're split into the consonant (godan) vs. vowel (ichidan) stem verbs. And within them, they're ordered by the frequency of the final segment, from common to absent. Wiktionary lists "woi-" as "wo-", but it has an "i" in some forms, so it's like the others ending in a vowel sequence of "Vi". The vowel "ə" is AKA "o2".

Godan

R, 21

ar-
asar-
kir-
kukOr-
kur-
mapar-
nar-
nenpur-
ninkir-
panpakar-
pikar-
sir-
sur-
ter-
tukur-
tur-
ur-
watar-
wəntər-
yar-
ər-

K, 18

arik-
ik-
isonk-
k-
kak-
kik-
mak-
muk-
nonk-
sik-
suk-
tonk-
tontok-
uk-
unkok-
yak-
ək-
əyənk-

P, 9

ap-
asump-
ip-
kup-
op- ~ əp-
sinənp-
turunp-
tənp-
yukəp-

T, 5

kat-
mat-
mət-
ut-
ət-

S, 4

kərəs-
s-
əs-
ətəs-

M, 2

nəm-
yOnkam-

N, 2

in-
sin-

Y, 0

W, 0

Ichidan

A, 12

pukor-a-
wasur-a-
ank-a-
mak-a-
int-a-
nant-a-
nis-a-
wosam-a-
koy-a-
moy-a-
kuw-a-
uw-a-

I, 4

ai-
mi-
poi-
woi-

E, 0

O, 0

U, 0

Again, all of the vowel-stem verbs end in "ru" in the uninflected form. But the most common final segment for consonant-stem verbs is "r", yielding the ending of "ru" in their uninflected forms as well! This preference for "r" dwarfs nearly all other possible choices for consonants. In a close 2nd place is "k". In a distant 3rd place is "p", and even further behind are "t" and "s", with "m" and "n" rounding out the list of those that are actually present but rare, while "y" and "w" do not appear at all.

So, far from the final consonant of consonant-stem verbs being open to any ol' choice, there is clearly a strong preference for "r" and "k" and against most of the others. Next we investigate why this is, and draw conclusions for the study of etymologies -- very important to know if the final consonant in consonant-stem verbs is semantically crucial or vacuous! Turns out, it's vacuous, and that was what prevented me from discovering Yeniseian origins to Japonic verbs. Thankfully, that can now be corrected!

* * *

So why is "r" the default consonant for the final syllable -- "ru" -- of the uninflected form of Japonic verbs? When the Wa people were shifting from Yeniseian to Altaic / Japonic languages, their morphology changed from polysynthetic to agglutinative, i.e. where you stick or "glue" basic building blocks together in a long chain.

There are only so many building blocks, which introduces the homophone problem -- how can you tell that some suffix is a verb ending vs. a particle connecting two words vs. a noun ending vs. a prefix vs. anything else that a building block could be?

Polysynthetic languages are fusional, where all these changes to a stem are not building blocks concatenated together, but "bound" morphemes that can only appear in certain contexts and not on their own. English has very little of this left, although it is still fusional. A better example are the Romance languages that we studied in school.

In Spanish, the verb "to sing" is "cantar", and the stem is "cant-". Unlike Japanese, though, this stem does not merely receive a series of building blocks stuck on the end, one block for each bit of information added. Rather, the entire rest of the meaning comes from just one ending, which therefore come in dozens of forms.

One of these "bound" endings is "-o", yielding "canto", "I sing". This is the present tense, first person, singular number, indicative mood, simple aspect -- all of those bits of additional information, "fused" into a single morpheme that cannot appear on its own, but only on a verb stem. If you want "We sing", the ending is "-amos", yielding "cantamos". There is no clear relation between "-o" and "-amos" -- opacity is a feature of fusional morphology, whereas agglutinative morphology is transparent, since each bit of meaning has its own building block. That's not even to mention the dozens of other endings that "cant-" can receive, to fill out all those differences in tense, person, number, mood, and aspect!

Well, although agglutinative morphology is far more transparent than the opacity of fusional morphology, that comes at a trade-off with the homophone problem. In Spanish, there are almost no homophone problems across the dozens of endings that "cant-" can take, and none of them are homophones with other words throughout the language -- "amos", "aste", "arian", etc., are not free-standing words that could be confused with these fusional verb endings.

This makes the detection of word boundaries crystal-clear for fusional languages -- "Oh, I just heard '-aste', which can only be a verb ending, so that's the end of a word. And it followed 'cant-', which is a verb stem, so that must be the beginning of the word."

Agglutinative languages like Japanese have a huge potential homophone problem, since building blocks can hypothetically be combined in any which way, so how do you know which meaning is intended? Is "mi" the stem of a vowel-stem verb, is "mi" a noun", is "mi" a particle, is "mi" a suffix, or prefix, or pronoun? It could be any of those things, and in fact in Japanese it *is* several of those things.

Agglutinative languages also have the problem of detecting word boundaries, since the building blocks can appear in initial, medial, and final position, hypothetically. They aren't like "aron" in Spanish, which is a fusional verb ending that cannot appear as a prefix or as a stem of a noun or verb. Unlike hearing "aron" in Spanish and immediately knowing it's the end of a word, hearing "mi" in Japanese gives you zero information about whether it's the beginning, middle, or end of a word, since that building block can appear in all places!

Therefore, agglutinative languages have to try to impose a set of rules about which building blocks can appear at the beginning, middle, or end, and for verbs vs. nouns vs. adjectives. It mitigates some of the confusion about homophones and word boundaries, but doesn't entirely solve it.

How can they do this, if their whole morphology is about gluing together any ol' string of building blocks? Well, that's just the semantic side, where "mi" could refer to various things.

* * *

Enter, phonotactics! That is, the rules or constraints on what sounds, sound sequences, sound structures, etc., words can take in the language.

Getting right to the point, Japonic phonotactics prohibit "r" in initial position. It only occurs initially in words borrowed from Chinese, English, or other non-Japonic language. So it works perfectly to indicate medial or final position, eliminating initial position. When you hear "ru", you know it's the middle or end of a word. Again, doesn't totally solve the problem, but it helps.

That also means that "rV" cannot be a particle, since that would mean "r" in word-initial position. Japanese has tons of connecting particles, but none of them begin with "r". So when you hear "ru", you know it's not a particle, not a prefix or beginning of a stem, so it's either a suffix or a later part of a stem.

Why did the vowel have to be "u"? To avoid homophone problems, it seems: "ra" was already taken as a pluralizing noun suffix, "re" was already taken as a nominalizing suffix, and "ri" for and adverbial suffix. "Ro" seems to have been dispreferred on phonotactic grounds, it's by far the least common "r" syllable in OJ. So that leaves "ru" (3rd-most common "r" syllable in OJ) as the best choice for default verb ending.

From "ru", the default vowel ending for verbs became "u", even for verbs whose final syllable has some other consonant, like "kak-". In OJ, the most common syllable for a consonant does not always end in "u", e.g. "p" and "t". So it's not consonant-by-consonant phonotactics that determines the final vowel of the verb -- it's a default vowel that was originally established for "r", and it was copied for all other verbs in order to standardize the final segment of verbs -- "u".

Why didn't nouns and adjectives receive such rigidly standardized endings? Cuz they don't add on as many building blocks as verbs do in Japanese. Nouns are not inflected for number (mostly) or gender. They only take case suffixes. Adjectives do not have to agree with the nouns they modify, for number, gender, or case. Since verbs are going to take on all sorts of suffixes, it's more necessary to know where the end of the stem is, that all these blocks are being stacked on top of.

Which consonants other than "r" are allowed for consonant-stem verbs? This is both phonotactics and avoiding homophones, especially with suffixes and particles. And this is the only place where the 5-way conjugation of verbs is relevant -- since many vowels are going to follow the final consonant of the stem, this presents phonotactic and homophone problems for that consonant plus any of the vowels. That's a lot of problems to avoid, and only a few consonants can do so.

Starting with the consonants that are absent from consonant-stem verbs -- the approximants "y" and "w". From the P-J stage, the syllables "wu" and "yi" were banned in order to dissimilate approximants from their vocalic counterparts. Since both "i" and "u" would appear after "y" and "w" in the 5-way conjugation pattern, this would result in the syllables "yi" and "wu" appearing, and that's illegal. So, no consonant-stem verbs can end in "y" or "w". In fact, if they were intended to be the final consonant of a consonant-stem verb, they were given an invariant "a" afterward, and put into the 1-way / vowel-stem class instead. We'll get to those later.

The nasals "m" and "n" would not result in illegal syllables when conjugated, but they would involve too big of a homophone problem. "N" plus any vowel is already a highly common suffix or particle, especially the possessive particles "no" / "na" and the locative particle "ni", as well as the diminuitive noun suffix "ne". "M" would yield a bunch of homophones for common concepts like "seeing", "body", and "three", as well as the non-unique topic marker particle "mo", and "mu" was already a verb suffix (volitional, etc.).

Originally, "o" was not one of the vowels following the last consonant of the stem, so these homophones aren't so crucial, but they indicate the homophone problem nonetheless, which "r" does not have.

The problem with "s" is that "su" is already a verb unto itself, one of the very few that is monosyllabic, and a very ancient and common verb -- "to become" and "to do". Hearing this at the end of some other verb whose consonant stem ended in "s" would make it sound like the final "su" was this standalone verb being used as the 2nd element of a compound verb, or as an auxilliary verb for the part of the stem preceding "s". WAY too confusing. Evidently so confusing that over time, Japanese standardized "su" into "suru" with the most preferred verb ending, "ru", just to prevent any confusion.

I'll get to the handful of exceptions to these rare consonant verbs, in a bit, but briefly they seem to be compounds where the rare consonant was not originally the end of a stem, but the start of the 2nd element of a compound. So they're not such exceptions anyway.

"T" would yield "tu", which was already a common particle (genitive), as well as a verb suffix (completion), and a counter suffix for nouns. "To" was already taken by connecting word "and".

"P" would yield "pu", which was already a verb suffix (ongoing, repeating). Worst of all, "pa" was the topic marking particle.

That leaves only "k" as able to compete with "r". The only particle it would yield a homophone of is "ka", but that's a sentence-final particle, not one that connects words, so it's no problem for the end of a verb. However, "ka" was an adjective suffix in OJ. "Ki" as a certainty suffix for verbs came later during Classical Japanese, not in P-J or OJ. And "ku" was a not-so-common nominal suffix in OJ, but was also a standalone common verb in P-J, "to come", later standardized into "kuru". Same problem with "ku" as with "su".

"K" is not as flawless as "r", but a quantum leap above the other consonants, so "k" is more for the overflow, after a stem ending in "r" has already been taken -- the rest of the stem is fine, just alter "r" to "k", and presto, a new verb with no homophone problems.

E.g., since "sir-" and "sur-" already exist, "sik-" and "suk-" can be used instead. The "su" in "sur-" has to do with "rubbing", while the "su" in "suk-" has to do with "liking, loving". The "si" in "sir-" has to do with "knowing", while the "si" in "sik-" has to do with "spreading out". Rather than conflate the unrelated "su"s and "si"s into homophonous "suru"s and "siru"s, use the default "r" for one and the over-flow "k" for the other. Bingo.

* * *

Before exploring this matter of the less common consonants being an over-flow when the more common consonants were already taken, let's address the matter of how many of these verbs are morphologically atomic vs. complex.

Well, any time there's a nasal + obstruent, it just means there's a morpheme boundary, and this will later get rendaku-fied in OJ. Rarely is there any evidence for the nasal.

Also, Japanese morphemes in general and verbs especially want to be bisyllabic / bimoraic, or perhaps monosyllabic / monomoraic, not more than 2 syllables / moras. Atomic verbs could be hiding inside verbs of 3+ syllables, though, while not being attested on their own. So I'm inclined to only count 4 verbs under stem ending in "p" -- those whose infinitive is 1 or 2 moras ("apu", "ipu", "əpu", "kupu"). The others are complex, and the "p" is really an initial or medial consonant to a later element of a compound, not the final consonant of an atomic stem.

Then restricting the analysis to atomic verb stems, the idea that less common consonants are an over-flow for already taken more-common consonants, predicts that the less common verbs should have more common counterparts -- the ones they are trying to avoid homophony with, by using a less common over-flow consonant. This excludes monosyllabic verbs, since their sole consonant is not a dummy consonant, and you can't tell whether or not there's a competing form -- what precedes this consonant is nothing, not a sequence of vowels and consonants.

Let's see...

Of 10 "k" verbs, 6 have higher-ranking counterparts ("kik-", "sik-", "suk-", "uk-", "yak-", "ək-"). Also, "kak-" may have a counterpart hiding inside of either "panpakar-" or "pikar-".

Of 4 "p" verbs, all have higher-ranking counterparts, and 1 has both of them! ("əp-")

Of 5 "t" verbs, 4 have higher-ranking counterparts, some with more than one.

Of 1 "s" verb, it indeed has every higher-ranking counterpart ("əs-").

Of 1 "m" verb, it does not have any higher-ranking counterparts. This is "nəm-" meaning "to drink", and perhaps it was allowed its very rare final nasal in the stem, as part of onomatopoeia, where eating and drinking tend to have nasal consonants -- both consonants are nasal here, in fact, just like "nom-nom" in English.

Of 2 "n" verbs, both have multiple higher-ranking counterparts.

So yes, the less common consonants are over-flow choices, for when the better choices are already taken, and homophony must be avoided.

And in all cases, to reiterate the main point, these final consonants in the stem are NOT semantically crucial, they are vacuous and only chosen on the basis of phonotactics and avoiding homophony. Important to bear in mind when trying to find earlier ancestors of these verbs...

* * *

What about the 1-way / vowel-stem verbs? Here again we see them acting as either over-flow for already taken forms, or to avoid phonotactic prohibitions.

By far the most common vowel-stem verbs end in "a", and they are transcribed as "-a-", to hint that the "a" is just a dummy consonant. If it weren't, then the other consonants could show up as well -- but they don't. Only "i" shows up as well, and it's rare, and most of those involve vowel sequences, not consonant + "i".

This "a" seems to have been "hard-coded" to prevent the 5-way (or earlier, 4-way) vowel pattern from spawning. Every conjugated form will have "a".

Well, that avoids the ban on approximants "y" and "w" -- both of those are fine followed by "a". Indeed, unlike the consonant-stem class, where "y" and "w" are totally absent, they make up 4 of the 12 entries for vowel-stem ending in "a", just before the dummy "a". Since they couldn't end in "y" or "w" when illegal vowels could result under the 5-way / 4-way pattern, just hard-code the following vowel to be "a", and problem solved!

I'm inclined to think that means these approximants *are* semantically meaningful, since they went through the extreme measure of hard-coding a dummy vowel afterward, to allow the approximant to be preserved. If it were just an over-flow choice of consonant, there are better choices -- the nasals, the sibilant, or "t" or "p", which were generally not chosen. They really wanted the "y" and "w" to stay in these cases.

That goes for the other 2nd-to-last consonants in the vowel-stem class -- which means there's a sick inversion going on! The final consonants in the consonant-stem class are vacuous, while the latest-occurring consonants in the vowel-stem class are meaningful! The 5-way class is really "consonant stem for phonetics, but the preceding vowel for semantics", and the 1-way class is really "vowel stem for phonetics, but the preceding consonant for semantics". Neat.

Another 4 of the 12 vowel-stem verbs are from consonants that are rare in the consonant-stem class (2 "t"s, 1 "s", 1 "m").

Only 2 of 12 vowel-stem verbs are from the super-common "r" in the consonant-stem class, and another mere 2 of 12 from the super-common "k" in the consonant-stem class. In the vowel-stem class, "r" and "k" are not so dominant at all -- combined, they are as common as "y" and "w", which are totally absent in the consonant-stem class!

The over-flow pattern shows up here again. The atomic "kor" in "pukor-a-" could be hiding in "kukOr-" from the consonant-stem class. The atomic "sur" in "wasur-a-" already appears in "sur-". The atomic "mak" in "mak-a-" already appears in "mak-".

As for the vowel-stem verbs ending in "i", 3 of them involve vowel sequences, which are generally a feature of P-J nouns, not verbs. E.g., "tai" = "hand", whose forms have an "a" sometimes and an "e" other times. And the 1 vowel-stem verb that does not have a vowel sequence, "mi-", is cognate with a P-J noun that does have a vowel sequence, "mai" = "eye". Perhaps "miru" began as "mairu", which would make it fit better with the other "i" vowel-stem verbs, and for whatever reason the "a" was deleted.

None of these 4 would have a homophone in the consonant-stem class if they had an "r" hard-coded after their vowel stem, e.g. "ai-" could be altered to "air-" and not compete with an existing consonant-stem verb of that form. Ditto for the others.

Here it seems more like phonotactics play a role -- atomic stems / infinitive verbs cannot be more than 2 moras. "Airu", "poiru", and "woiru" all have 3 moras, so they can't be hard-coded into "r"-ending consonant-stem verbs. In fact, their descendant or variant forms will not have 3 moras either -- "eru", "hiru", and "oru / iru".

Again that suggests that "mi-" used to be "mai". Otherwise it's unusual, since its infinitive, "miru", has only 2 moras as is desired -- that should result in it being treated as a consonant-stem verb ending in "r", "mir-". But if it was originally "mai-", then "mairu" would have 3 moras, break the rule, and get lumped into the "i"-ending vowel-stem verbs, along with "ai-", "poi-", and "woi-".

* * *

I'll get to etymologies in a separate post, or perhaps in the comment section to this post. The most important thing before that is laying out this foundation, about what segments are semantically meaningful vs. vacuous. It turns out, a lot of those consonants are meaningless, so they don't need to be captured in an etymology, only the first "CV" syllable.

Sadly, that makes the etymologies less convincing, since a 3-segment etymology is more convincing than a 2-segment one. But that's just the way the cookie crumbles with Japonic historical linguistics...

Aside from showing a number of Yeniseian origins for Japonic verbs, I'll also draw a parallel between the phonotactic structure of their verbs, and how it parallels Japonic.

Briefly, none of the Proto-Yeniseian verbs -- hardly any words at all -- begin with a nasal. Yeniseian is polysynthetic and prefixing, while Japonic is agglutinative and suffixing -- so it's the same process. Yeniseian verbs avoid initial nasals, Japonic verbs avoid final nasals (in the stem). Japonic is rife with suffixes and particles beginning with nasals, while Yeniseian has several prefixes for verbs that begin with a nasal.

So they share this avoidance of nasals in the part of the verb that gets the most modification during conjugation. And since those particles are carry-overs from Yeniseian to Japonic, as I showed earlier, this is not a coincidence across language families. Yeniseian verbs avoid initial nasals in their stem, and Japonic as the end of their stem, for cognate reasons.

I've also discovered another sound correspondence between Proto-Yeniseian and Proto-Japonic, but I'll get to that one later as well. But briefly, P-Y "tɬ" corresponds to P-J "p", at least in initial position. Not very phonetically expected or motivated -- why not alter "tɬ" to simply "t" or "s" or even "r"? -- but it is what it is.

Well, let me end with at least one etymology! P-Y "cej" means "to rip". P-J lacks "c", but can shift its location to velar "k", as I showed in previous examples. The coda consonant is not allowed, and turns into its vocalic counterpart "i". Since vowel sequences are not preferred, and the 2nd usually takes over the 1st, that gives "ki" as the stem.

Whaddaya know? "Kir-" in P-J means "to cut"! Infinitive: "kiru". And that final "r" in the stem is semantically vacuous, it's only there to make verbs adhere to the standard of "ru" being the final syllable. That means only "ki-" is meaningful in Japonic -- and perfectly matches the expected form that would derive from P-Y "cej". QED!

The collapse of the imperial-scale welfare system, due to over-production of recipients (a special case of general imperial over-extension)

I haven't waded into political dIsCouRsE for awhile, since there has been nothing new to add from what I've already said. But with the looming possibility of food stamp (SNAP) benefits not going out for November, amid the federal government shutdown, it's worth examining the collapse of the charity / safety net sector of society, during the broader collapse of an empire -- as well as its stratospheric growth during imperial expansion.

A large majority of English-language internet content comes from outside America, as English has become the global lingua franca -- but that doesn't mean foreigners understand America, just cuz they speak English and have watched American movies or played American serial killer simulators. So when they hear about cuts to the American food stamp program, they project their own nation's status quo onto ours, and imagine cuts to their own system. But America is the last bloated empire left standing, currently entering its collapse stage, so all comparisons from foreigners will fail.

The clearest way to see this is in the scale of food aid across countries. With SNAP in the news, many Americans are suddenly shocked to discover how much of the population receives it -- about 13%, or 1 out of every 8 residents, an astonishing figure.

And that's just SNAP, not counting the various other arms of the food assistance system, such as food banks, where the estimate is about 17%, or 1 out of every 6 residents, receiving that form of food aid. Depending on the overlap between the two -- and presumably some people are getting both -- that's at least 20% of people living here relying on food aid.

Food banks don't supply every meal for every day in every month -- but neither do the benefits paid out by SNAP, which may be merely $25 a month.

Food banks de facto do not put any barriers to eligibility, unlike SNAP which is means-tested -- you have to be making below a certain income, you generally have to work if you're able-bodied and working-age, and so on, and all of this info is documented and verified by case workers. SNAP is targeted more toward rural residents, while food banks seem to be aimed more at urban or metro-area residents. So I don't think there's tons of overlap between the two, meaning the percent relying on food aid could be higher, like 25%. But it's at least 13%, based on SNAP alone.

What percent of other 1st-world countries rely on food aid? It's hard to say, cuz some bundle all social welfare pay-outs into a single allotment, and it goes toward food, housing, and other basic expenses. That is a maximum figure, then, for food stamps. Some countries don't include food payments, but do give out food packages in kind.

Regardless of these differences from the American system, no other 1st-world country is even remotely close to America's level of food assistance -- about 1-2% of the population in Sweden and Glorious Nippon, 4-5% in France and Italy, even in Poland only 3% rely on food aid. I looked for English-language stats on Russia, but sadly they're all slopaganda -- if any legit Russian-language source can be found, let me know.

So outside America, the most vulnerable 1-5% would be affected by cuts to food aid. And because those on food aid are so much lower in the social pyramid, cutting their benefits would strike their citizens as obscenely cruel.

But in America, cutting food aid "only" affects the bottom 13-25%, which of course includes the same bottom 1-5% as would be affected in other countries, but at least an extra 10% of the population higher up on the pyramid, which is between double the share who get aid outside America (in places where 5% get it), up to 8 times the share (in places where 1-2% get it).

Aside from cross-national comparisons at the same time, we can compare America today to America in years past, back to the 1970s when the system was regularized and institutionalized. There has been a jump in both the share of the American population relying on food aid, and the amount spent on food aid (inflation-adjusted, as a share of GDP, however you measure it). This traces back only to the aftermath of the 2008 Depression, from which America has never recovered (the elites only printed up $10 trillion and handed it out to moronic strivers to play around with). It spiked even further during the Covid hysteria, and 5 years later is still not down to pre-Covid levels, despite Covid being over.

There was a gradual increase during the '80s and '90s, although there was also a decrease during the second half of the '90s. So some of this can be blamed on neoliberalism and de-industrialization, but the jump since 2008 and 2020 seems more like the NGO-industrial complex seizing the opportunity to expand their operations, with the crisis du jour as a rationalization. Other 1st-world countries were destroyed by 2008 and 2020, but they didn't expand their food aid system to cover 13-25% of their population like we did.

For comparison, in 1974 as the system went nationwide, food stamp enrollment was 15 million, out of a total population of 214 million, or 7%. Since 1980, it has maxed out at 10% during a recession and/or a phase of greater funding, and dipped into the high single digits during economic recoveries and/or a phase of lesser funding. But tearing above 10% and that becoming the new normal is very recent. And by the looks of things, that percentage may only grow in the short-term.

And again, that's only SNAP, the means-tested form of food aid -- not covering the exponential increase in food bank aid, which used to be nearly non-existent and limited to soup kitchens, canned food drives, and the like, but has now expanded to rival the SNAP program itself. The estimate of 17% using them is over the course of a year, but even at the time-frame of a month, about 5% of respondents use them (see here for discussion of the 2 different national statistical surveys that ask about food security).

Food banks appear to have grown to fill a separate niche than the SNAP niche -- namely, people who don't qualify for SNAP, due to income, work status, citizenship status, difficulty / unwillingness in filling out forms, or whatever else.

There's surely some double-dippers, but most inquiries I found online about visiting food banks said they don't qualify for SNAP and are curious if the food banks will impose similar means-testing on people who show up to food banks (short answer: they will not, de facto, although they may ask you for an ID to show you reside in the area, or to sign a legally unbinding form that you pinky-swear represents your income). Food banks appear more likely to serve downwardly-mobile middle class residents of metro areas, compared to SNAP.

Then there's the growth in the amount spent on the program, aside from the rise in the percent using it. Some of the long-term growth in the SNAP budget is due to overall inflation, but the program's budget was fairly stable at about $20 billion during the '90s and early 2000s. It made a quantum leap to a new normal of about $60 billion in the wake of 2008, and made another quantum leap to a pandemic peak of $120 billion in 2022, although that has declined to a new normal that is still a quantum leap above the 2008 jump, at around $100 billion for 2024.

It doesn't matter that this is "a drop in the bucket" of the national budget, at 1-2% of federal spending -- when every single program uses up 2-3-4 times as much as it used to in just the 2000s, it collectively explodes the federal budget. And this is even more unsustainable these days, since more and more federal spending is paid for by debt -- with ever-soaring interest rates -- and by currency debasement (printing up trillions in a single year of 2020, which never gets withdrawn from circulation).

The good ol' days when "taxpayer dollars" paid for government spending are long gone -- now everybody pays a highly regressive tax, namely hyperinflation once our unsustainably skyrocketing debt gets defaulted on and no one will loan us even a small amount that is necessary, as well as currency debasement which has already shaved off a double-digit percentage of the dollar's purchasing power in the past few years alone -- and that trend is only escalating, as the dollar sinks and gold soars.

So, rather than the deluded para-political game of "musical chairs" that is a constant source of slopaganda in social media fanfic -- or picking which programs to keep and which to slash, and by how much for each program -- the reality is that every single one of those programs is going to collapse, as our empire collapses. All are bloated beyond their original purpose, beyond sustainable levels, and no one will yield, so they will all totally collapse, and be replaced by state-level replacements in the post-imperial era, much like rump states will replace the current federal state as polities.

In 5-10 years, we won't be bailing out Trump's cronies in Argentina to the tune of $40 billion on a whim, since we won't have any worthwhile currency to bail them out with anymore. We might as well hand them 40 gazillion Zimbabwe bucks.

We already have run out of actually valuable military equipment to flush down the toilet in Ukraine, and in 5-10 years, our military manufacturing industry will be even more hollowed out. So we won't be bogged down in that wasteful dead-end either.

But the point is, every one of these bloated, over-extended, ever-expanding cancerous growths on the empire is going to collapse the entire system on which they feed. They will be replaced by state-level replacements, which will not be so imperially over-extended and over-produced, since we will be in the post-imperial stage of our history.

Maybe one or two wealthy rump states, like the Grand Duchy of California, will attempt a relatively more generous welfare system than the kleinstaats that will make up New New England. But the days when well over 10% of the population is receiving food aid, will be over.

That will not be due to the poorest 1-2% getting wiped out -- they'll still be covered by the rump state welfare systems. But the over-produced group of food aid recipients will not be receiving it any longer. As in post-imperial Rome, foreigners will go back to their homelands, as wealth dries up in post-imperial America, the downwardly mobile will not have as many kids, and with no imperial-scale parasites at the top of the wealth pyramid, resources will be more evenly distributed in the rump states, so there won't be so many desperate working and middle class people either. The bloated war-losing military will be gone, the Baby Boomers will be dead, and Wall Street banks will be holding worthless currency, not real wealth with which to bully the rest of the economy.

Through these various channels, population size will collapse in post-imperial America, just as it did in the Roman Empire. The imperial capital, Rome, had over 1 million residents during the empire's peak in the 2nd century, but during the 5th C, it collapsed by an order of magnitude, or 90%, down to 100,000. It never regained the 1 million mark even after it emerged from the Dark Ages, like the Renaissance or Early Modern eras -- only after national unification brought loads of Italians from other regions of Italy to the new national capital, during the 20th C. (NB: not loads of foreigners, as during the Roman Empire.)

I don't know how long it'll take the population of New York -- and other major cities of post-imperial America -- to collapse by 90%, but they all will. It won't be hard to support the bottom 1-5% on welfare, like most non-imperial or post-imperial 1st-world countries manage today, since the total population is going to shrink down to 25-50 million. We may not collapse as hard as Rome did, since we have lots of open land to still colonize and exploit the resources of, but it will be a radical reduction.

The main thing to remember is -- everything of imperial scale is going to collapse when an empire collapses. If there is no state-level replacement, like a foreign-adventuring military, there will be no such replacement at all. There will be "no more foreign wars", just state-level militias for defense of their own territory. If there is a state-level replacement, like welfare, it will be scaled down obviously, but there will be a replacement.

Also crucial to remember -- none of this is up for debate, by anybody. Certainly not by the para-political fanfickers from social media, who treat the dIsCouRsE as though it's a "model UN" activity that will somehow magically alter the course of IRL events. That goes for both the objective / technocrat niche, as well as the subjective / moralistic niche. All fake and gay.

But it's not even up for debate by actual holders of national offices, their appointees, and their mega-donors. The American Empire is collapsing, irrevocably, and so will every institution of imperial scale along with it, to be replaced -- if at all -- by scaled-down state-level replacements, like rump states and welfare systems typical of the rest of the 1st world, not the over-extended and unsustainable system that we have erected up to this point.

Only the cold iron laws of historical dynamics have a say in the course of events, and we can see from every empire how this no-different empire will turn out, at a bird's-eye level.

Japanese Steppe origins: Breaking precious mirrors as a burial ritual

Before getting into the main topic, I'll just link to some observations I made in the comments to the previous post -- about a Korean royal clan claiming descent from the Xiongnu. This establishes that my parallel investigation of the Steppe, and specifically Xiongnu, origins of their Japanese neighbors is already on solid ground in Southeastern Korea.

The clan that united the kingdom of Silla, which then went on to unify all of Korea, was the Kim clan from Gyeongju. Their legend of their origins is that they descend from a Xiongnu prince, who the Chinese call Jin Midi, but who they themselves call Kim Al-chi. I immediately noticed that "alchi" is one of the variant names of the Alat tribe -- the one whose name means "piebald horse" in Turkic, and who were the ruling clan of the Xiongnu confederation.

Did the unifying clan of Korea really descend from Xiongnu rulers? Well, they made this claim themselves, it's not somebody like me 2000 years later attributing it to them. And Korean scholars note how similar the grave goods are for Silla and the eastern Xiongnu.

I think the Japanese chose to make their Xiongnu origins cryptic due to the rivalry between Wa / Yamato and Silla. Yamato was on the losing side of the Tang-Goguryeo War of the 7th C, whereas Silla was on the winning side (allying with Tang China). They wouldn't try to invade Korea for many centuries after that, and wanted to distance themselves from their geopolitical rivals. Since the Xiongnu origins of the Kim clan were well known back then, the Yamato decided not to make the same claim, lest they be seen as copying Silla, or engaging in sibling rivalry.

But all the signs are there if you look.

* * *

Which brings us to the main topic of this post -- the burial rituals of the Xiongnu and other Steppe cultures of that time, as well as the early Wa culture in Japan. (And Silla, too, of course, but I'm not focusing on that.)

To reiterate an ongoing theme, we have to try to avoid using examples of convergent evolution when linking two groups together. What causes two groups to converge on the same outcome is some kind of utilitarian, economic, materially motivated force -- like getting more calories in your diet.

Group A drinks milk, and group B drinks milk -- are they descended from a common ancestor? Maybe, but maybe not -- maybe they each independently took up pastoralism, and began consuming the dairy products of their livestock. Both of them drinking milk doesn't mean they share an ancestor, it may mean that pastoralists will end up consuming dairy products, whether they share an ancestor or not.

Likewise, quite a few pastoralist groups from the Steppe practice horse sacrifice and horse burials, including Indo-European cultures from the West and Altaic cultures from the East. But that doesn't mean they share a cultural ancestor -- it may just reflect that fact that both have adopted horses, which makes horses very important, and so, what greater sacrifice could they make than sacrificing a horse?

We want to look for examples that are not steered by a cold, clinical Darwinian, economic, utilitarian incentive -- things that are more like a shibboleth. I say "po-TAY-to", you say "po-TAH-to" -- and that proves we belong to two separate cultures, whatever else we might share. Pronouncing the word either way does not help you communicate the meaning more efficiently, it is simply a random inconsequential arbitrary coin-flip that we have constructed in order to distinguish the members of group A vs. group B.

When I get to clothing and jewelry styles, we'll really see this idea take off -- what does it matter if you close your robe left-over-right or right-over-left? The robe closes just the same. But in ancient East Asia, this seemingly meaningless distinction made all the difference between who was civilized (left-over-right) and who was barbarian (right-over-left).

And yes, people in Japan at that time, and up until the Nara period (around 700 AD), were firmly committed to wearing their robes in the Northern barbarian style, just like the Xiongnu. So were the Tocharians, an Eastern Steppe group who adopted an Indo-Euro language (the only known Eastern culture to do so), but remained true to their origins in dress.

Similarly, superstitions may have a utilitarian logic to them -- in which case, it means nothing if two groups share a superstition. I was looking up Japanese superstitions, and one of them is to not whistle indoors -- it turns out, almost every culture in the world shares this superstition. Probably because everyone perceives it as rude, as though you're trying to be a band-leader in an impromptu concert that nobody asked for. So it's frowned on all over the world, and it cannot be used to prove that Russians and Japanese descend from a common ancestral culture where this superstition was born. It was born in multiple places and at various times, independently of each other. It's convergent evolution.

So when we turn to burials -- the main material trace that is left in the archaeological record for us to study in the present about cultures from the past -- we have to look for examples that look like shibboleths, not practices that many cultures could come up with on their own.

E.g., "monumental size of the grave to reflect the elite status of those buried there" -- yeah, no shit, what else are they going to do, make tiny graves for the elite and mega-tombs for the commoners?

We also have to take into account the notion of "degrees of freedom" from statistics, or how much room for variation there is. You might think, Well, mega-size doesn't show that two cultures share an ancestor, but maybe the particular shape of their mega-tombs could play the role of a shibboleth.

Only problem is -- how many 3D shapes are there to choose from for a tomb? You've got your box-like shape, your rounded mound shape, a pyramid shape, and that's about it, for a single structure. There are far, far fewer possible shapes to build a tomb in, than there are possible sound sequences to convey the meaning of "father". If two languages share a word for "father", that's highly suggestive of shared ancestry. If they both build mounded tombs, that's only slightly suggestive.

So although mounded tombs were popular throughout the Steppe in ancient times, from the West to the East, and although the most famous tombs in all of Japanese history are indeed gigantic mounds (Kofun, giving their name to the period in which they were built, roughly 300-600 AD), that is only slightly suggestive of Japan's Steppe origins.

It certainly doesn't *contradict* the claim that Japanese culture has a Steppe component -- it's in line with the claim, but it's a weaker piece of confirming evidence than some example where there's lots more room for variation and more of a shibboleth nature to it.

* * *

Enter one of the most bizarre and distinctive burial rituals in world history -- the deliberate breaking of finely crafted, highly valuable, aesthetically adorned, built-to-last mirrors. Not just putting a crack in them with a little whack from a hammer, but breaking them into at least 4 separate fragments on average. That's no accident -- especially when mirrors in the old days were made of (polished) bronze, which is much harder to fragment than glass. And these were fairly large mirrors, around 8 inches in diameter, not a little hand mirror -- something that impressive, you'd figure they would want to preserve in order to show off as a status symbol.

This is a great example because we can rule out utilitarian, Darwinian, etc. incentives for two cultures sharing this ritual. It's breaking something useful, functional, and valuable -- it's going against the utilitarian motive. Even in the figurative sense, where the grave goods are not meant to be used by the living, but by the dead in the Otherworld, breaking the mirror deprives the deceased of its use or exchange value in the afterlife.

Imagine waking up on The Other Side, surrounded by mirror fragments -- "Gee, thanks a lot for making them worth a lot less, in case I wanted to trade them for something that's only available in the Otherworld, which you couldn't provide me with during the burial. Or in case I wanted to see what I look like dead, or if I wanted to reflect light for some reason. Whose idea was it to break them into pieces?!"

A superstition about not breaking a mirror, could arise independently through convergent evolution. Mirrors are functional, utilitarian, valuable things -- don't break them, or else bad things will follow. Breaking them on purpose is the opposite -- that must be due to some unclearly motivated shared tradition.

BTW, as for the modern American superstition about "break a mirror, and you'll get 7 years of bad luck", this is claimed with absolutely no evidence to stem from "ancient Greece and Rome" -- always a telltale sign of bullshitting. We don't come from Greco or Roman cultures, even distantly. No one can point to an author of the ancient world saying it's bad luck to break a mirror, cuz you'll get 7 years of bad luck. Or some other number of years of bad luck. Or even explicitly saying that breaking a mirror is unlucky.

So the "breaking a mirror is unlucky" superstition is likely much more modern than that, from the era when mirrors became commonplace and the targets of superstitions. At that point, multiple cultures could independently come up with a superstition against breaking mirrors, in America or wherever else.

Back to the ancient Steppe -- other cultures did in fact bury their dead with the same Chinese bronze mirrors (or imitations), but without the widespread practice of breaking them. That does *not* suggest a common origin for them -- functional, valuable, finely crafted things will be sought after as grave goods no matter who they are.

As it turns out, both the Western Steppe and Han China included bronze mirrors in their grave goods, but nobody thinks they share an ancestor. They both independently figured out that these things were valuable and impressive feats of craftsmanship, so why not include them with all the other goodies in the grave?

It was only the Eastern Steppe groups that fragmented the Chinese bronze mirrors as part of their burial rituals. See this review article of the broken bronze mirror phenomenon, which surveys the Western Steppe as well as the East.

It began with the Pazyryk culture from the Altai Mountain region during the mid-1st millennium BC. They are misleadingly called "Scythian" as though they were Indo-Euro-phone, culturally Iranian, or primarily Western Steppe, none of which is true -- they seem to be proto-Turkic if anything, the western frontier of the Eastern Steppe.

This practice continued, most famously, among the Xiongnu, around the turn of the millennium...

And as fate would have it, among the Kofun burials in Glorious Nippon, in the early 1st millennium AD (and in Silla). As with the Pazyryk and Xiongnu, not all of the Chinese bronze mirrors are broken in Kofun burials, but a large number of them are -- perhaps dozens of mirrors each broken into 3 or 4 fragments on average, within a single site. And this practice was not just one fluke site, but dozens of locations all around Japan.

Nor was it done only in peripheral or culturally deviant regions of the nascent Japanese nation -- if anything, it was done in abundance at the very heart of the soon-to-be Yamato state, around Nara. See this discovery of over 100 mirrors broken into nearly 400 fragments, from the Sakurai Chausuyama Kofun near Nara, dating from the 3rd C and belonging to a very elite individual, possibly the legendary Queen Pimiko herself.

This early date is also helpful to establish that these Steppe influences of Japanese culture did not only arrive during the course of the Kofun era -- they were there before 300 AD. And it is helpful to show that these influences are not "Korean," as though they were confined only to Korea and Japan. Rather, both of them are extensions of a broader Eastern Steppe tradition, brought by Steppe people who crossed the mountains into the Korean peninsula, the first wave going further into Japan, and a second wave remaining in Korea (the Koreanic speakers).

* * *

These bronze mirrors, and mirrors in general, are so important in Japanese culture that one of the three imperial regalia -- the special material items that legitimize each emperor, which are passed on to each new holder of that office -- is an ancient bronze mirror, the Yata no Kagami. (We'll get to the Steppe origins of another of the three, the magatama or curved jade jewel-bead, in the next post.)

Mirrors have always been important in the rituals of Shinto, as symbols of the sun. It seems like the Eastern Steppe cultures view mirrors as solar symbols -- miniature suns that you can wield with your own two hands, throwing bright beams of light wherever you please, like a demi-solar-god all by yourself. The Western Steppe cultures view them more in terms of reflecting the physical likeness of a person, not as pre-industrial spotlights.

And wouldn't you know it? While browsing the Wikipedia article on "mirrors in Shinto," I nearly fell out of my chair looking at how the mirror is displayed in a typical Shinto ritual. See the center top of this image, where the mirror lies between the 4 animal statues. The mirror itself is a disc, and it's resting on a stand that is curved very much like a crescent moon

There's that distinctly Xiongnu visual shibboleth again! A solar disc, with a crescent moon underneath, opening up to the sun, which remains in use on the national flag of Mongolia. We'll see that in Kofun-era earrings, in the post on clothing styles.

Do an image search for "Shinto mirror," and you'll see all sorts of variations on this theme, but they all involve a stand that is crescent and opening up to the solar disc. I can't determine when this combination of items began, but it has endured right up through the present.

Somewhere along the way, the Steppe fixation on the "sun and moon" duo was downplayed, and the crescent shape was carved in the shape of clouds or sea waves or some abstract thing. But who ever depicts clouds as forming a shape whose border is an upward-opening crescent? Or sea-waves depicted with that same border shape? It's obviously a crescent moon, and that border shape has been preserved -- even though its interior has been (re-)decorated to distract from its moon-focused origins.

I wonder if this Shinto mirror-and-stand configuration goes back to the Xiongnu, and the smaller golden "disc with crescent" items that are found among the Xiongnu, or the identical Kofun-era earrings, are just jewelry representations of their sun-and-moon religious rituals, which would have involved one of those large bronze mirrors as the solar disc, supported by a stand in the shape of an upward-opening crescent moon. IDK, something to think about / look into.

* * *

Like many ancient facets of Japanese culture, they have been preserved or served as inspiration for even the most hi-tech and futuristic domains of contemporary Japanese culture -- like video games. In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, there's a crucial item called the mirror of twilight, and it is in the shape and color of an ancient Chinese bronze mirror -- and it also lies in 4 fragments, which must be re-assembled in order to use it as a massive light-reflector.

In an earlier game in the series, Ocarina of Time, the player uses a mirror shield to reflect beams of light in order to trigger doors opening and such. However, it doesn't resemble the ancient bronze Chinese mirrors, and does not lie in fragments. Even earlier, in A Link to the Past, the mirror shield doesn't bounce rays of light, but absorbs them. And even earlier, in The Adventure of Link, the protagonist helps a townswoman find her lost mirror and is rewarded for it -- it's not shown at all, though, let alone in an ancient Chinese form, or lying in fragments, or reflecting light rays. But these are all still part of the enduring Japanese fascination with mirrors.

* * *

Finally, what the hell *was* the reason for breaking the mirrors back then? It doesn't matter for the purposes of linking various cultures together that share the practice. But just to try to get inside their heads...

I actually came up with a similar concept as the Twilight Princess video game, before even reading about it. None of the other grave goods, whether highly valuable or not-so-valuable, are deliberately broken. They're intact, in good working order, and meant to aid the deceased in some way.

Mirrors left intact would be the same -- an aid to the deceased.

But the ones that were broken -- could have been a reflection of the corpse itself. Something that used to be a finely crafted, highly valuable, built-to-last creation -- but that now finds itself at the end of its use, decaying into pieces, losing its order and structure, never to be used again...

Until some fateful event in the future, where the dead are brought back to life, and where these mirror fragments would be supernaturally placed back together, without the awkward glue or whatever means that a person would use, but actually restored to their original state and in their original working order -- with no cracks, glue, or anything else like that to be seen.

Until that day comes, both the corpse and the mirrors will lie in their fragmented, decaying state, unable to function as they were originally created.

Maybe they didn't have the apocalyptic revival of the dead and restoration of the mirrors, as though Humpty Dumpty had been miraculously put back together again. At the very least, they could have intended the broken mirrors to stand for the broken body, broken family, broken social hierarchy, now that this elite individual has been retired from their role.

Since they viewed mirrors mainly as sun symbols, i.e. projectors of light, then a broken mirror is tantamount to a snuffed-out candle for some other culture where candles represent light projection and mini-suns.

Such an important person dying is like the sun and moon themselves going dark in the sky.

We know that ancient Altaic people used to view the sun and moon as mirrors-in-the-sky -- see the earlier post on their creation myth, which is mainly about churning the primordial sea with a divine staff in order to make land-masses out of the resulting sea-foam on the surface. One of them also mentions that during the age of creation, two mirrors were placed in the sky, which brought light to the universe -- the sun and the moon.

So, far from being a sign of disrespect toward the dead, the broken mirror was the ultimate material expression of grief from the mourners.