This is the linguistics weblog of Christopher Culver, who graduated with a B.A. Classics from Loyola University Chicago and is currently doing an M.A. in Finno-Ugrian linguistics at the University of Helsinki.
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You are currently browsing the Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog weblog archives for April, 2005.
Since one must have more than one language to do any comparison, I think students and scholars of comparative linguistics appreciate language diversity more than most other people. To warn you of an opposing force of such diversity, however, I present you with my new essay, Why Esperanto Suppresses Language Diversity: Thoughts On Leaving the [...]
Mari (марий йылме) is a Finno-Ugric language spoken by over half a million people living in the mid-Volga region as well as in Bashkortostan in the eastern part of European Russia near the Urals. It has two literary languages (Meadow-Eastern Mari and Hill Mari), which, along with Russian, are both official languages in the Republic [...]
The Tenth International Congressus for Fenno-Ugristics will be held in the Republic of Mari El, Russian Federation from the 15th to the 21st of August this year. The list of excursions to little-known sites within Russia is highly attractive. What is most interesting for me, however, is a course in the Mari language presented a [...]
In my study of the Romanian language I have been amazed at how much of the original Romance lexicon for matters of love and affection have been replaced by loans from Common Slavonic. Off the top of my head I can name: Rom. a iubi, OCS любити ‘to love’ Rom. prieten, Bg. приятел ‘friend’ Rom. [...]
Jim over at the always-entertaining Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey responds to my recent post on the unpleasant conclusions of John V. Day with his own observations about the connection between the hunt for the Urheimat and white supremacism in contemporary studies: It’s depressing to have to think about the intersection of Indo-European philology and racism, but [...]
The Финно-угорская электронная библиотека (Finno-Ugric Electronic Library. Don’t worry, it’s in English too) offers books in the Komi, Mari, Udmurt, Erza and Moksha languages. It is unfortunate that few learning materials exist for these fascinating (and still very much alive) languages, but this collection of texts should offer learners something to complement their studies. The [...]
Illness has prevented me from making updates for the past week, but I did get some reading done. I recently acquired through inter-library loan Angela Marcantonio’s The Uralic Language Family: Facts, Myths and Statistics, published by Blackwell in 2002. I got it only because it was a title about Uralic from a respectable publisher (i.e. [...]