Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Back when I first learned about Old Church Slavonic, the sexiest language around, I was intrigued by Czech composer Leoš Janáček’s masterpiece of twentieth-century choral repetoire, the Glagolitic Mass. Instead of setting the mass in Latin, as is the fashion and which he himself considered in 1908, Janáček instead decided to look far back into [...]

I would like to take this opportunity to plug my Introduction to LaTeX for Classical Philologists. What was planned as a simple introduction to Greek and Latin typesetting is slowly but surely becoming a compendium of all things about typesetting Indo-European languages and reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European. Try it out and let me know what you [...]

A few months ago, I noticed that at the listings of many books about comparative Indo-European linguistics on Amazon.com was the same copied-and-pasted review encouraging browsers to read John V. Day’s The Indo-Europeans: The Anthropological Evidence”. The fellow who posted these reviews, which never said anything about the book at whose listing they were posted, had also posted a number of positive reviews to books on white supremacism. What kind of book was Day’s, I wondered, that it would attract such an audience?

A year ago I managed a weblog called Nephelokokkygia, charting my interest in comparative Indo-European linguistics. I later took it down, feeling that I would be speaking too authoritatively for an undergraduate student, and frequently finding I had little to write about. Immediately afterward, however, my studies began to give me much more to think [...]