The Kotte Rajamaha Vihara was founded in the 15th century under royal patronage to house a sacred tooth relic of the Buddha. At the time, some considered this the holiest site in Sri Lanka, greater than Aśoka’s Bodhi tree in Anuradhapura and the Buddha’s footprint on Adam’s Peak. 🧵 🗃️ 📜 #SriLanka

The first foreign bank to enter China was Oriental Bank, a British imperial bank first founded in India as Bank of Western India (1842) which opened branches in Hong Kong (1845), Canton (1845) & Shanghai (1847), etc, and later used the Chinese names 東藩滙理銀行 (HK) & 麗如銀行 (China) HK banknote (c. 1866)

Interestingly, in the 1849 publication 英漢歷 (Anglo-Chinese Calendar), the Oriental Bank (in Canton) was translated as 銀房 under the list of foreigners living in Canton (Guangzhou), China. The person in charge of the bank branch was Archibald Dunlop

The Sinospheric word for 'bank' - 銀行 (ngan4 hong4; yinhang; ginkō) - has its modern roots in Hong Kong, where it's attested since the 1850s. Before that, there had been a 'money business guild' in Guangzhou, apparently attested as 銀行會館 since 1714. 1/

Weekly Georgian Etymology: მკვლელი mḳvleli 'murderer, assassin', from Old Georgian ႫႩႪႥႤႪႨ mḳlveli killer, participle of კვლა ḳvla kill, from Proto-Kartvelian *ḳal-. Possibly an ancient Eurasian Wanderwort: Indo-European *gʷelH- kill, Uralic *kola die, Dravidian *kol- kill.

A tell-tale sign when someone socialized with simplified Chinese writes traditional characters*: 面 ('[sur]face') is not distinguished from miàn 麵 ('noodle'; 麺 in its Japanese form), so we get 'Lazhou beef surfaces' 蘭州牛肉面 🍜😋 *Or Japanese, as in this example.

New Kanji spotted by a friend in Kyoto: ⿴囗京, as a name for a Rāmen place. It‘s glossed as miyako みやこ (‘capital’, ‘Kyoto’); so it’s effectively the same as 京 itself, and the 囗 just a way to make it more atas… 😆

Language of the day: Tày, Vietnam‘s most-spoken Tai language. Similar to Zhuang further North, it traditionally uses an adapted Sinitic writing system. 😍 Like the vernacular Vietnamese writing, it‘s called chữ Nôm (Tày) in Vietnam.

‘Nepalese’ can refer to two unrelated languages: Traditionally, it refered to the Transhimalayan native language of Kathmandu valley, now known as Newar; nowadays, ‘Nepali’ refers to the Gorkha Kingdom‘s Indo-Aryan language, ere known as Khas.

may all sentient beings be at peace om mani padme hum om mani padme hum om mani padme hum om mani padme hum 🐀 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐂 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐅 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐇 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐉 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐍 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐎 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🐑 唵嘛呢叭咪吽 🐒 🐈 唵嘛呢叭咪吽👻唵嘛呢叭咪吽 😈唵嘛呢叭咪吽 🌍 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🌎 唵嘛呢叭咪吽🌏 唵嘛呢叭咪吽 唵嘛呢叭咪吽ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ་| ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ་| ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ་| ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ་| ཨོཾ་མ་ཎི་པདྨེ་ཧཱུྃ་|

"Assimilation ou intégration ? La représentation de la #Mongolie, du #Tibet et du #Xinjiang dans les parlements de l'Empire Qing et de la République de Chine" 🖥️ Les vidéos des conférences de Egas Bender de Moniz Bandeira (@fau.de‬) sont disponibles.  👉 https://f.mtr.cool/yheoqqtceq

From the Newari name "Yambu" यम्बु for Kathmandu derives its Tibetan name Yambu ཡམ་བུ་, whence derives the older Chinese name Yangbu 陽布 (or similar). Nowadays, it is Yambu or Ka tha man du ཀ་ཐ་མན་ཌུ in Tibetan, and Jiademandu 加德滿都 in Chinese.

Old Armenian word of the day կշռեմ "weigh, measure, calculate" Arm. tr. of Evagrius's letters (ed. Young & Karapetyan) 16.5 թէ խաւսի՝ կշրէ զխաւսսն "if the monk talks, the demon weighs his words" կշռեմ derives from կշիռ, կշռոց "balance, scale(s)" (distantly, cf. Akk /gišrinnu/ and Sum /ŋešrin/)

Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky is 604 pages filled with 4,000 freshly invented Chinese characters 🤩 (he accidentally reinvented a handful of them lol)

A Celestial Master Talisman 天師符. From an article by H. Kopsch called "The Master of Heaven" in The China Review, 1874. books.google.com/books?id=2C0...

One of the magazines published by regional associations of late Qing students studying in Japan was the Zhejiang Wave (浙江潮, 1903). The name was a reference to a Su Shi poem (廬山煙雨浙江潮未到千般恨不消), while the cover page reminded of a Japanese woodblock print.

夏天很熱，來冷靜一下: 𤔡什麼薰衣草不高興的時候就不開花? 因爲他不開薰 🤣🤣

The term "Quốc ngữ" now usually refers to the Romanized writing system of Vietnamese (=chữ Quốc ngữ 𡨸國語). But it originally means the "national language" (VN'ese), including when written in chữ Nôm, like in this 1899 dictionary Đại Nam quốc ngữ 大南國語

What's the origin of 'soul'? No living soul knows. The Germanic ancestor of 'soul' can be reconstructed, but attempts to reconstruct its further origin or find cognates have only been speculative. My new graphic sums up these theories and shows the cognates of 'soul' in the sister languages:

kè-oē 計劃 means ‘plan’ in Hokkien 😁

There are not only inscriptions from Southern Vietnam in Sanskrit, but also in Cham language. The Đông Yên Châu inscription is the oldest in any Austronesian language, and the fun part is - if you studied basic Malay, you can recognise a lot of it! 🤩 Urāng, dengan, di, etc.

So the first time I learned the word "musk-rat" was in reference to a certain billionaire; now the second time it is from a 19th-ct. Malay textbook. Though Malay "cencurut" is apparently a different species from the North American musk-rat; it's also known as "Asian house shrew".

1/6 For our latest highlight for our upcoming 10th anniversary, we return to the work of @antoniofdo.bsky.social (‪@rug.nl), author of "Kropotkin's commune and the politics of history", published @global-ih.bsky.social in 2018. We asked him about this research today. Here is what he had to say:

The earliest Sanskrit-language inscription from Southeast Asia is this stele found in Võ Cạnh village in what is now Southern Vietnam. Written in Gupta script, it dates to sometime between the 2nd-5th centuries.

The earliest attestation of Finnic is a 13th-century birch bark from what is now Russia, a variety that would be closest to modern Karelian or Veps. It‘s some sort of a charm against lightning, but hard to to interpret in detail: юмолануолиїнимижи ноулисѣханолиомобоу юмоласоудьнииохови

1905년경 청나라 말 금석학자 단방(端方)이 고대 이집트 비석을 사와서 탁본을 뜬 이야기

A fascinating exploration of Chinese reception of Egyptian antiquity by our visiting fellow Tian Tian!

Digitized version available at catalog.princeton.edu/catalog/9985.... It is included in the upcoming exhibition library.princeton.edu/formsandfunc...

Duanfang 端方 (1861-1911) was one of China's 'constitutional commissioners' in 1905-06. He used his world tour to not only study constitutions, but also to purchase elephants 🐘(backbone of Peking Zoo, first in Asia) - and Egyptiaca. Fascinating article by Tian Tian: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Khitan small script also had a variant "seal script" font. There are two magnificent examples of it: the eulogies on the tombs of Emperor Daozong 道宗 (1032-1101), and of his wife, Empress Xuanyi 宣懿 (1040-1075)

There's one day left of the Waterstones 25% discount on upcoming books, which I've made use of to get the books of great authors and scholars like @cathamclarke.bsky.social and @saracharles.bsky.social. My own love letter to written English is included too! www.waterstones.com/book/why-q-n...

I recognize this name 黃遵憲 (in part because my father's name is the same as his but with a different middle character). Huang Zunxian is probably best known for having written 我手寫我口，古豈能拘牽！「我手寫我口」was later quoted by 胡適 Hu Shih (1891-1962) and became a slogan for 白話文運動 "vernacular language movement"

Note "Tokei" (Tōkei 東京) at the bottom instead of the now current "Tōkyō" (not unusual at all for 1872 though).

There's also a funny expression in Japanese and Chinese for horizontal writing (like Latin): "Crab-walking script" Yokomoji/Xiexingwenzi 蟹行文字 🦀🦀 Huang Zunxian 黃遵憲 (1848-1905) used it in his poems, also in conjunction with the corresponding shrike-tongued sounds: 教兒兼習蟹行字，呼婢閒調鴂舌音😅

The earliest known use of the term 津波 (tsunami) is said to be 駿府政事錄 by 後藤小三郎光次 which documented the 1611 Keicho Oshu (or Sanriku) earthquake and tsunami During Edo period, other terms like 海立、震汐、海嘯 were also used. Nowadays 津波 is most commonly used @egasmb.bsky.social

they still make similar dharani wheels in china, below is what's called 往生錢- rebirth money, and it is burned as a kind of offering to ensure a better rebirth for a deceased person. kektianhuat.com/joss_paper?p... most of the wheels are written in chinese but some have bits of 'pseudo sanskrit'

the one above is a type that I have burnt for my ancestors. but it exists in other forms as well like this one from taiwan www.xunyiza.com/products/inf...

Big #Egyptian news!! Book on Hieratic. Free to download for 2 weeks. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Also I think it's noteworthy that the context is one of the King who received Heaven's blessing, the great mandate. Thus Heaven watched over (King's) sons 王若曰：盂！不(丕)顯玟(文)王，受天有大令(命)，....古(故)天異(翼)臨子，灋(法)保先王，匍(敷)*有亖(四)方。 *this graph is partially missing, but a similar (or same) phrase appears earlier

In some early bronzes, 灋 does not mean “discard”, but is used adverbially, like 灋保先王: "灋-ly protect the preceding kings". How does it relate to the "law, model" or the "discard" meanings? Does it mean "Consistently"? "Greatly"? "Exemplarily"? This is still disputed.

Zeb Raft, The Threshold. The Rhetoric of #Historiography in Early #Medieval #China. #Harvard University Press. #AAS2025 #chinesestudies #books

Here we have an early (Western Zhou) example where 灋 (法) does not yet mean "law" or "to model oneself on", but "disregard, abandon" (later written as 廢): 勿灋朕命 "you shall not disregard my mandate". In the received literature (Book of Songs), this is written as 無廢朕命.

Fa 法 ("law") is an abbreviation of the character 灋. The story told in the Shuowen Jiezi 説文解字 is that it is composed of a mythical unicorn 廌 that "levels like water" 氵 and "removes" 去 those who are not in the right. However, that might just be a Han-era folk etymography 1/6

Interestingly, the original meaning of the character 吃 (⿰口乞 or ⿰口气) means “to stutter” in which the phonetic component 乞 (气) could also add part of the meaning since it has the phonetically borrowed meaning of "begging" (i.e., trying to talk but with difficulties)

The charachters 气 (qì < *kʰɯds, 'air') and 乞 (qǐ < *kʰɯd, 'beg') look similar and are pronounced similarly - that's not a coincidence! 乞 was adapted from 气 bc the pronunciation was already similar in Old Chinese, and 气 was long treated as a variant of 乞 1/

My friend Chen Fei 陳飛 has just published a fascinating article about theories of imperialism in late 19th/early 20th Japan and China, focussing on Samuel Reinsch, Ukita Kazutami 浮田和民, and Liang Qichao 梁啓超. It's open access at the Historical Journal! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Elvin Meng 2025 "Three Manchu Manuscripts in the East Asian Collection of the University of Chicago Library" @ doi.org/10.1163/2210... (Inter alia on glossing practices in bilingual Manchu-Chinese texts. 🤓)

Japanese prints from 1873 depicting famous Western inventors and scholars in times of trouble. Pictured: Audubon (work eaten by mice), Carlyle (papers burnt), and Arkwright (spinning machine smashed by wife). More here: publicdomainreview.org/collection/j...