Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Paul Goble’s Russian political blog Window on Eurasia recently featured a post whose linguistic ramifications are intriguing:
Olzhas Suleymenov, the Kazakh author of a book that some have helped lead to the rise of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, says that he welcomes its translation into Ukrainian because Ukrainians will understand that book’s [...]

In Indo-European linguistics I so often heard that the proto-language had four clearly defined seasons that I never thought that there could be other prevalent systems of natural cycles. In the collection Проблемы исторической лексикологии чувашского языка (Cheboksary, 1980) N. I. Yegorov contributes a paper titled ‘О названиях времен года в тюркских языках’ (The names [...]

Yesterday I bought in a Cluj used bookstore a Crestomație de literatură română veche (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1983), a selection of early Romanian-language documents edited with commentary, and printed on surprisingly good paper for the Ceaușescu era. As one might expect, the chrestomathy begins with the letter of Neacșu of Câmpulung, the first attestation of [...]

A couple of years ago I read a fascinating paper by the Slavicist B.O. Unbegaun entitled ‘Les noms de la neige en roumain’, collected in Selected Papers on Russian and Slavonic Philology ed. R. Auty & A. E. Pennington (Oxford, 1969). While this theme is especially interesting to me because Cluj lies almost exactly on the isogloss between the words nea and omăt, I thought this paper would appeal to a fairly wide audience, and I felt it didn’t deserve to lie forgotten in an old Festschrift. So, I have translated it here into English. There’s probably a great deal of Franglish, but I’m tired and will further edit later.

I find it rather odd that Romanian has /f/ in some borrowings from Common Slavonic and Hungarian when the CS original had /x/. I don’t think I’ve come across this kind of shift in any other languages. To give examples:

CS praxŭ ‘dust’ ∼ Ro. praf ‘dust, powder’.
CS vrŭxŭ ‘top, summit’ ∼ Ro. vârf ‘top, summit’.
Hu. [...]

When I was in Kyrgyzstan in June, I lost my Russian-English-Russian dictionary, Random House’s pocket dictionary that had served me well for over six years. I looked around for a new one in Bishkek, but options were few and in the end I got a cheap dictionary that evidentally had been made by a local [...]

While I have learnt some languages fairly quickly and feel that I have mastered grammar if not idiom, Russian continues to present challenges. No matter how much I speak the language (it’s sometimes my daily working language in Helsinki), how much time I spend in Russia among native speakers, and how many textbooks I work [...]

As discussed here before, Unicode so far supports the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic script only partially, with notable gaps such as the ligature /ja/. In October, an international conference ‘The Standardization of the Old Church Slavonic Cyrillic Script and its Registration in Unicode’ was held in Belgrade. Its conclusions are now available on the web.

Nearly two years ago I wrote that Robert Orr’s monograph Comparative Slavic Nominal Morphology (Slavica 2003) was surely written decades before publication because of the passage:
When typological evidence is used in conjuction with other types of evidence it can provided a strong support for the hypotheses under discussion … One area of IE linguistics which [...]

I’ve just finished Heine & Kuteva’s highly entertaining monograph The Changing Languages of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2006), which shows how certain European languages have become remarkably alike over the last 2000 years in a series of language contacts spreading outwards from one centre or another. One of the languages that the authors frequently use [...]