she was cuffed to the truth

Posted by Victor Mair

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As announced in the title of the first post on this subject, my aim is to understand where the Galatians originated and how / why they migrated to where they were when Apostle Paul wrote his epistle to them.  Since I was apparently insufficiently clear about both of those purposes in part 1, in this follow-up post I will provide additional scholarly material.  Inasmuch as the identification of the Gauls / Celts and the languages they spoke will be important for several posts about them that I will write in the coming weeks, today's post will necessarily be long and detailed. 

Here I will quote from Ben Witherington III, Grace in Galatia: A Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (Grand Rapids, MI:  Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998), pp. 1-7.

N.B.:  Illustration for art historians below.

The term Γαλάται was used interchangeably with Κέλται or Κέλτοι by Greek writers, as were the terms Galatae, Galli, and Celtae by Latin writers. These terms were used to refer to a group of people originating in central Europe in the Danube river basin but who migrated into Switzerland, southern Germany, northern Italy, France (hence the Roman name Gaul for this region), Britain (the Celts) and then finally into the Balkans, and Asia Minor. The region which these peoples inhabited and took control of in Asia Minor came to be called Galatia or even Gallogrecia (the land of Greek-speaking Gauls).

It was in about 278 b.c. that this migratory people made their way into Asia Minor, originally on the invitation of Nicomedes the king of Bithynia who sought to use them as mercenaries. Basically these people settled around Ancyra, and after a series of battles with their neighbors were confined to an area in north central Asia Minor bordered by Phrygia to the west, Cappadocia and Lycaonia to the south, Pontus to the east, and Bithynia and Paphlagonia to the north. By 189 b.c. Galatia had suffered the same fate as the rest of Asia Minor by coming under the control of Rome.

It is fair to say that the Galatian people, who had originally migrated to Asia Minor, and their descendants, retained a great deal of their original culture well beyond the NT era. They spoke a Celtic dialect which continued to survive into the fourth century a.d., at least in rural areas of ethnic Galatia. They had a distinctive form of Celtic religious and political organization and were widely revered and feared as great warriors and mercenaries. They were considered barbarians due to their strange dialect, considerable physical stature, and wild appearance, though by Paul’s time most of them seem to have been capable of speaking Greek.

…

The province of Galatia continued to have territory added to it by the Roman authorities up to and beyond the time when Paul visited and wrote to people in this region. For example, in 5 b.c. portions of Paphlagonia in the north was  [recte were] added to Galatia, and then perhaps about a.d. 4 a part of Pontus was added to the region (this portion being called Pontus Galaticus). Sometime just before or during the reign of the Emperor Claudius (a.d. 41–54) a part of the northern Taurus region was added to the province of Galatia as well.

In short, in Paul’s day the province of Galatia was an enormous province, usually governed by a legate rather than a consul from the Senate, until at least the time of Nero. This is what made it a praetorian province. It bordered on the Black Sea in the north and the Mediterranean Sea in the south, and in theory when Paul addressed persons as Galatians, if he used Roman provincial designations, he could be addressing people anywhere in this region. Strabo in his discussion of Galatia confirms that the province included old Galatia, Pisidia, Lycaonia, parts of Pamphylia, and Cilicia Trachea (12.5.1). At least thirteen Roman colonies were established in the province of Galatia, mainly in its southern portion, either by founding cities or reconstituting cities. Among these were Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra.

Despite the enormous size of this province there does not seem to have been any regular presence of legions in Galatia during Paul’s time there, though there were of course retired soldiers in various of the colony cities. One reaches this conclusion because after years of quiet the Parthian tribes did arise in rebellion in about a.d. 55 in Armenia and Nero put the Galatian legate Cn. Domitius Corbulo in command of the eastern forces to check the advance of the Parthians. However, as Corbulo hastened east he had to requisition two legions from the governor of Syria in order to have troops for the task. Furthermore, it took him two years of training to get them ready to fight the Parthians and he had to conduct levies throughout Galatia and Cappadocia as well. Sherk goes so far as to say that during the period from Augustus until Nero there were no legions stationed in the Galatian province. This reminds us that it is a mistake to over-estimate the Roman military presence in most of the regions Paul evangelized.

In part, what made the province, especially its southern portion, governable was the building of a great Roman road, the Via Sebaste, sometime around or just before 6 b.c. This road linked most of the major colonies of the southern part of the province including Pisidian Antioch, Iconium and Lystra.  It is important to bear in mind that Roman roads in the northern part of the province were only constructed for the first time in the 70s and 80s a.d. which led to great growth in Roman military presence in that part of the region thereafter. The existence of Roman roads in the south but not in the northern part of the province in Paul’s day must be factored into the discussion of the audience Paul is addressing in Galatians.

What must also be borne in mind is that since the Roman province of Galatia included many different tribes and peoples and not just the descendents of the Celts or Gauls, the only term which could be predicated of all of them in Paul’s day would be Galatians. He could not for instance call them Phrygians or Lycaonians if he had evangelized a cross section of the residents of this Roman province. In fact, there is clear evidence from the inscriptions of the period that the entire region was regularly called Galatia in the NT era (cf. ILS 9499; IG Rom. 3.263, Eutropius 7.10), and not just the Celtic or Gallic part.

…

The further history of this province is of some relevance to our discussion because the earliest Christian discussions of Paul’s Galatians were undertaken with a knowledge only of subsequent developments in the province. By this I mean that we need to be aware that Vespasian detached almost all of Pisidia from Galatia in a.d. 74 and about a.d. 137 Lycaonia Galatica was removed and added to an enlarged province of Cilicia. In a.d. 297 southern Galatia was united with surrounding regions to form a new province of Pisidia with Antioch as its capital, and this in turn meant that the province of Galatia at this point reverted back to its original ethnological dimensions. It was this later truncated form of Galatia that was known as the province of Galatia to Christian commentators who discussed Paul’s Galatians between the fourth and nineteenth centuries of this era. It is not surprising under these circumstances that these commentators assumed that by ‘Galatians’ Paul was referring to the residence of ethnic or old kingdom of Galatia which coincided with the Roman province of Galatia after a.d. 297. The older commentators were all or almost all north Galatianists in regard to where they located Paul’s audience. It was only with the rise of the age of archaeology that this assumption about the locale of Paul’s Galatian converts began to be challenged by W. M. Ramsay and others, starting at the end of the nineteenth century.

…

Recently, J. M. Scott has made the interesting suggestion that Paul’s image of the world, which he learned while a Jew, be taken into consideration. Specifically he suggests that Paul shared the same view as Josephus and other Jews that the table of nations in Gen. 10 determined how a Jew would view the pagan nations. Josephus identifies Gomer, the first son of Japheth with the Galatians “who are understood as occupying the whole Roman province of Galatia, including south Galatia (Ant. 1.123, 126)”. Paul may have thought in similar fashion as Josephus, but Paul’s use of provincial terminology elsewhere in his epistles, and the fact that he is addressing mainly Gentiles who are unlikely to have been familiar with the traditions Josephus cites, makes it more probable that Paul is simply using provincial terminology in Galatians.

In closing this part of the discussion it is important to note that everything in Galatians suggests that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of Paul’s Galatian converts are Gentiles not Jews, otherwise all these arguments about not submitting to circumcision would not be on target. Then too, these arguments also suggest that these Galatian Christians were attracted indeed even bewitched by the Judaizing suggestions or demands of the agitators and this makes it natural to suppose that the Galatian Christians had already had some exposure to Judaism before becoming Christians. Perhaps they had even had a positive and close exposure by spending time with Jews in the synagogue in at least some cases. One must also make sense of the fact that Paul feels he can use an elaborate Jewish allegory in Gal. 4 and arguments about covenants and Abraham and the development of salvation history to convince them not to listen to or follow the teaching of the agitators. In short, Paul is using Jewish arguments to convince Gentiles not to become more Jewish! This too suggests an audience conversant with Judaism and perhaps the basic lineaments of the Hebrew Scriptures as well. All of this is understandable if Acts 13–14 is right that Paul’s standard operating procedure when he was in the province of Galatia was to preach in the synagogue first until he was thrust out, and that his converts, both Jewish and Gentile came out of that Jewish matrix (cf. Acts 13:43, 48; 14:1). In other words, Galatians would be a word on target if his audience already knew a good deal about Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures, it would be a word on target if he is in the main addressing God-fearers. It would be less apt if the Gentiles he is worried about had had no association with or knowledge of Judaism prior to Paul’s arrival in Galatia.

Migration was a key factor in the movements of the Gauls into Asia Minor, as were inducements from the Hellenistic Bythnians, under their king Nicomedes.  Bythnia later became a Roman province.

One of the most moving sculptures from the classical period is that of "The Dying Gaul".  Although the warrior has been vanquished, he is dignified in death:

The Dying Gaul, also called The Dying Galatian (Italian: Galata Morente) or The Dying Gladiator, is an ancient Roman marble semi-recumbent statue now in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. It is a copy of a now lost Greek sculpture from the Hellenistic period (323–31 BC) thought to have been made in bronze. The original may have been commissioned at some time between 230 and 220 BC by Attalus I of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over the Galatians, the Celtic or Gaulish people of parts of Anatolia. The original sculptor is believed to have been Epigonus, a court sculptor of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon.

(Wikipedia)

The reputation of the Gauls / Galatians / Celts as mercenaries was not unwarranted.

gladiator (n.)

mid-15c., "Roman swordsman," from Latin gladiator (fem. gladiatrix) "fighter in the public games; swordsman," from gladius "sword" (there is no verb *gladiare), which probably is from Gaulish (compare Welsh cleddyf, Cornish clethe, Breton kleze "sword;" see claymore). Old Irish claideb is from Welsh.

The close connection with Celtic words for 'sword', together with the imperfect match of initial consonants, and the semantic field of weaponry, suggests that Latin borrowed a form *gladio- or *kladio- (a hypothetical variant of attested British Celtic *kladimo- 'sword') from [Proto-Celtic] or from a third language. [de Vaan]

(etymonline)

Phonological-etymological notes from Doug Adams:

It is indeed an imperfect match of initial consonants but throughout its history Latin has shown a tendency to voice initial k's.  Thus Romance (Spanish) has gato < cattus and golpe 'blow' < colophos.  No explanation has ever been offered up for the phenomenon.

The Celtic connection is quite probable.  And certainly these kinds of words are liable to borrowing.  Look at epee or claymore in English.

There is still much to mull over about Celts and Celtic.

Selected readings

• "Who were the Galatians? How did they get where they were?" (7/2/25)
• "A revolutionary, new translation of the gospels" (5/4/21)
• "An eccentric translation of the bible" (5/1/24)

[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]

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Posted by Mark Liberman

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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69913

In "Rococo" (7/6/2025), I quoted from Charles Carr's 1965 paper "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY II. ROCOCO" his evidence that the word rococo began as way of denigrating certain kinds of out-of-fashion ugliness. Jonathan Smith noted in the comments that "baroque itself was first a(n) (disparaging) epithet", and I quoted the OED's endorsement of that idea, though without going into the whole "an irregular pearl is like a wart" background.

But in a parallel 1965 article, "TWO WORDS IN ART HISTORY I. BAROQUE", Charles Carr lays out three etymological theories about baroque, after sparing us "fantastic etymologies to be found in certain eighteenth-century dictionaries".

Carr's second theory is the "elaborate art is like an irregular pearl is like a wart" one. And he quickly rejects a third theory, promoted by the 13th and subsequent editions of Kluge's Etymologisches Wôrterbuch der deutechen Sprache, that baroque is an eponym for the Urbino painter Federigo Barocci. But Carr's first etymological theory is the most fun, at least in my opinion:

Leaving aside fantastic etymologies to be found in certain eighteenth-century dictionaries, there are three main theories on the origin of the word expounded in recent writings on the subject.

According to the first, baroque is derived from the Med. Latin baroco, one of the mnemonic code-words apparently invented by the thirteenth-century schoolman William of Shyreswood to denote the several moods of the syllogistic figures. Baroco represents the fourth mood of the second figure, consisting of a major premise that is universal and affirmative and a minor premise that is particular and negative, yielding a conclusion that is particular and negative. By an extraordinary coincidenoe, extraordinary because of the more customary derivation of baroque from a Portuguese word barroco meaning a pearl, but undoubtedly a coincidence because he uses the example of the pearl for the other moods of the second figure, William of Shyreswood's example of the baroco syllogism is: every pearl (margarita) is a stone; some men are not stones ; therefore, some men are not pearls. The derivation of the French baroque from the syllogistic term seems first to have been suggested by J. J. Rousseau in an article on baroque music in his Dictionnaire de Musique (1767) : "Il y a bien de l'apparence que ce terme vient du Baroco des logiciens." This etymology is found sporadically in some nineteenth-century dictionaries, was revived in recent times, especially by Croce (op. cit.), but has not been generally accepted by philologists other than Italians. The evidence for and against it will be considered later.

Here's Rousseau's entry, courtesy of Gallica, clearly expressing a negative vibe:

BAROQUE. Une Musique Baroque est celle dont l'Harmonie est confuse, chargée de Modulations & de Dissonances, le Chant dur & peu natural, l'Intonation difficile, & le mouvement contraint.

Il ya bien de l'apparence que ce terme vient du Baroco des Logiciens.

Baroque music is music whose harmony is confused, full of modulations and dissonances, whose singing is harsh and unnatural, whose intonation is difficult, and whose movement is constrained.

There is every reason to believe that this term comes from the Baroco of the Logicians.

1767 is earlier than I would have expected for such a stylistic change — that was the year that Telemann died, and Mozart was 11 years old. But it's not clear to me whose music Rousseau was criticizing — maybe he was manifesting a genre difference rather than a change in time periods, or just being his often-nasty self? Readers may provide some evidence, beyond the clues in the book's preface and the (other strange) stuff in this page from Grove's Dictionary., e.g.

His 'Lettre sur la musique Française' (1753) raised a storm of indignation, and not unnaturally, since it pronounces French music to have neither rhythm nor melody, the language not being susceptible of either; French singing to be but a prolonged barking, absolutely insupportable to an unprejudiced ear; French harmony to be crude, devoid of expression, and full of mere padding; French airs not airs, and French recitative not recitative. 'From which I conclude,' he continues, 'that the French have no music, and never will have any; or that if they ever should, it will be so much the worse for them.' 

Adding to the stylistic mystery, this is the endpaper of Gallica's edition, which (the pasted bookplate aside) seems more appropriate for the psychedelic 1960s than for Louis XIV's France:

Some background reading:

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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69913

Posted by Mark Liberman

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https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69890

In the Fox News recording of Donald Trump's 7/8/2025 cabinet meeting, at around 17:33, there's a Walt Whitman-esque description of various historical U.S. raids on Iran, culminating in an interesting example of how to define a word by repeating it with emphatic voice quality.

Here's a bit of the context:

I mean if you compare that to
the same country
the hostages from
years ago
Jimmy Carter it was unfortunate for Jimmy Carter he was a nice man but
with the helicopters going down
the sandstorms the
prisoners they got captured
then the election
and the prisoners
and Reagan and all the prob-
it was nothing but problems and uh
and that was a failure and ours was
not only the pilots I mean
those machines flew for thirty seven straight hours they didn't stop.
They went skedaddle
you know the word skedaddle?
It means skedaddle.
They dropped the bombs
and they c-
and somebody said skedaddle
let's get the hell out of here
and every bomb hit its mark
uh and hit it beaut-
hit it incredibly

The OED glosses skedaddle as

Of soldiers, troops, etc.: To retreat or retire hastily or precipitately; to flee.
Originally U.S. military slang, introduced during the Civil War of 1861–5.

with a first citation from the New York Tribune in August of 1861:

No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they ‘skiddaddled’, (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good use the seceshers make of their legs in time of danger).

The etymology is given as "probably a fanciful formation", where I guess "fanciful" means "onomatopoetic"? But Wikipedia sez that it's

Possibly an alteration of British dialect scaddle (“to run off in a fright”), from the adjective scaddle (“wild, timid, skittish”), from Middle English scathel, skadylle (“harmful, fierce, wild”), perhaps of North Germanic/Scandinavian origin, from Old Norse *sköþull; or from Old English *scaþol, *sceaþol (see scathel); akin to Old Norse skaði (“harm”). Possibly related to the Ancient Greek σκέδασις (skédasis, “scattering”), σκεδασμός (skedasmós, “dispersion”). Possibly related to scud or scat. It is possibly a corruption of "Let's get outa here".

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Posted by Victor Mair

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[This is a guest post by Gábor Parti]

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Posted by Victor Mair

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This morning at the Greek stand of the farmers market, I bought spanakopita ("spinach pie") and one other item with the "spanako-" root, which also had spinach as a main ingredient.  The resemblance to English "spinach", plus the fact that it was obviously not one of those ubiquitous wrinkled leafy green vegetables related to cabbage, kale, collard, etc., got me interested in what its etymology was.

Just quickly checking a few easily accessible sources, some seemingly contradictory aspects of the common understanding of the etymology of "spinach" started to bother me:

From Middle English spinach, from Anglo-Norman spinache, from Old French espinoche, from Old Occitan espinarc, from Arabic إِسْفَانَاخ (ʔisfānāḵ), from Classical Persian اسپناخ (ispanāx, ispināx).

Wiktionary

Greek σπανάκι • (spanáki)

From Byzantine Greek σπινάκιον (spinákion), σπανάκιν (spanákin), σπινάκι (spináki), ultimately from Persian اسپناخ

Wiktionary

The English word "spinach" dates to the late 14th century from the Old French word espinache.^[2] The name entered European languages from medieval Latin spinagium, which borrowed it from Andalusian Arabic, isbinakh. That in turn derives from Persian aspānāḵ.

Wikipedia

garden vegetable with thick, succulent leaves, late 14c., spinache, spinage, etc. (late 13c. as a surname), from Anglo-French spinache, Old French espinache (14c., Modern French épinard, from a form with a different suffix), from Old Provençal espinarc, which perhaps is via Catalan espinac, from Andalusian Arabic isbinakh, from Arabic isbanakh, from Persian aspanakh "spinach."

But OED is not convinced the Middle Eastern words are native, and based on the plethora of Romanic forms pronounces the Romanic words "of doubtful origin." Compare Medieval Latin spinagium. Old folk etymology connected the word with Latin spina (see spine), supposedly for the prickly fruit, or with Medieval Latin Hispanicum olus.

etymonline

Then I remembered that four years ago I had written a very long, detailed post on the subject of the origins of English "spinach":  "Spinach: the Persian vegetable" (1/19/21).  After I finished writing that post, I thought I'd never have to investigate the origins of the English word "spinach" again.  Now, however, I began to be troubled by problems about the derivation of "spinach" that I hadn't considered before.  So I asked Don Ringe about them:

According to my research here, when English borrowed the word for "spinach", ostensibly it came from Old French espinache (14c.), which apparently got it from Arabic isbanakh, which got it from Persian aspanakh "spinach."  As you can see, however, Old French, Arabic, and Middle Persian had it in a form with prosthesis, whereas Old Persian did not have prosthesis, just beginning with initial "sp-).  

This is very confusing to me.  How could English borrow the word from a language that already had prosthesis and then get rid of the initial vowel that had already been added and go back to an earlier form of the Persian word?

Reassuringly, Don replied:

This one is easy:  English routinely drops French prothetic vowels, because in OF they were maximally unstressed.  Adding or subtracting a fully unstressed vowel at the margin of a word is an easy change, in both directions.  Take a look at the history of Italian:  Latin sp- and st- acquired a prothetic vowel i- in Old Italian, and then more recently it was dropped again.  So the fact that the English word apparently resembles the Persian word more closely is literally a historical accident. 

But you should also take a look at the etymology recorded in the OED online, which is the gold standard for English etymologies:  it's not certain that the Persian and Arabic words are the source of the Romance words rather than the other way around.

Following Don's advice, I turned to the OED:

OED seems more concerned about finals whereas I'm more concerned about initials.

To quote an American icon:  "I'm strong to the finich 'cause I eats me spinach."

It looks like I'm not done with "spinach" yet, so I'd best keep up my spinachy quest to determine where the word (and the plant) actually came from.

Though the Chinese were already eating spinach by the middle of the 7th c. and definitively calling it the "Persian vegetable" (bōcài 菠菜), the name they gave it just refers to the country it came from, not what the people of that country called it:

From earlier 波斯菜 (bōsīcài), from 波斯 (Bōsī, “Persia”) + 菜 (cài, “greens, vegetable”).

where bōsī 波斯 is obviously a transcription of "Persia":

Borrowed from Old Persian (Pārsa).

Middle Sinitic: /puɑ  siᴇ/

(source)

The botanical homeland of spinach does indeed seem to be the Persian realm, so it is not surprising that many of the words for this vegetable in the world's languages ultimately come from Persian or allude to Persia.  So I thought that maybe, by tracing the origin of the Persian word for "spinach", I could get closer to the IE root.  None of my usual go-to sources for PIE roots (e.g., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots) were hazarding a guess for what the ultimate IE root for "spinach" might be.

There was, however, an old folk etymology that connected "spinach" with Latin spina ("spine; backbone", originally "thorn, prickle").  Usually I'm wary of folk etymologies, but this one was convincing.  It made sound and sense!  Moreover, it fit well with the early Iranian words for spinach.

(…forms with پ (p) are directly from Middle Iranian). The Old Iranian form would be *spināka-, *spinaka- (compare Northern Kurdish sping), from the root *spin- (Northwestern Iranian), *sin- (Southwestern Iranian), ultimately from the Proto-Iranian *spai- (*spi-), from Proto-Indo-European *spey- (“thorn-like”) (*spi-), which are also reflected in Latin spina, Persian سنجد (senjed), Ossetian сындз (synʒ), синдзӕ (sinʒæ, “thorn”), Baluchi [script needed] (šinž), Central Iranian šeng, Kermani šank (“thorn”). Also akin to Semnani esbenāγa.

(Wiktionary)

There you have it:  "spinach", the plant with spiny, spiky, prickly seeds.

Selected readings

• "Spinach: the Persian vegetable" (1/19/21)
• "Keeping Things Green With Spinach Varieties", by Lawrence Davis-Hollander, Grit (November 29, 2011)   

[Thanks to Nick Tursi]

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Posted by Victor Mair

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69818&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pinyin-the-proof-is-in-the-pudding

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69818

Mok Ling sent me an article from China Times with the following percipient observations:

Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.)
Solar's secret (other than apparently practising 4 hours every day) is, of course, bypassing characters altogether. On this Weibo post (3rd image [click to open and enlarge]) she reveals that she's been learning Mandarin purely using Pinyin all this time, and even strictly observing the spelling rules!

It's certainly a feat, and another mark on the scoreboard for the "ZT" method.

I wouldn't say that Solar's Mandarin is perfect, but after learning it for just seven months, I would have to declare that her command of the language is amazing.  Her delivery is fluent, natural, and confident.  Solar's Mandarin doesn't sound "foreign" at all.  She is able to express herself freely and with wit.

This is how Mandarin could become a rival to English as the world language, but I doubt that it will ever come close to challenging English in the coming decades.  The Chinese people — including those who teach Mandarin as a foreign / second language — are too viscerally wedded to the cumbersome, hard-to-learn sinographs as the only proper way to write Sinitic languages.  Never mind that Dungan and POJ Taigi have proven that you don't need the Chinese characters to command a spoken Sinitic language at native level, and you can use alphabetic scripts for writing too.

John Rohsenow, who is a regular reader and commenter on Language Log, is the authority on the ZT experiment, and Mark Swofford, long-time webmaster of Pinyin.info and the site's blog, Pinyin News, is also a contributor to Language Log.

Selected readings

• "How to learn to read Chinese" (5/25/08) — includes an explanation of ZT
• "Pinyin resurgent" (3/7/24)
• "Pinyin vs. English" (10/20/23)
• "Dissension over the role of the alphabet in literacy acquisition in the PRC" (4/11/21) — with extensive bibliography of relevant works
• "'They're not learning how to write characters!'" (11/5/21)
• John DeFrancis, "The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform", Sino-Platonic Papers, 171 (June, 2006), 1-26, with 3 exhibits, including the famous shopping list with pinyin used for common forgotten characters ("egg; shrimp; chives"); reprinted as an HTML version in Pinyin.info here.  This outstanding article by the doyen of Chinese language teachers during the second half of the 20th century lays out clearly and systematically the past, present, and future of scipt reform as they stood at the beginning of the 21st century.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69818&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=pinyin-the-proof-is-in-the-pudding

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69818