Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Helmut Richter has written a lightweight short history of the German language, starting from the second Germanic sound shift. It may prove interesting to speakers of English who will begin study of this relative more distant than one might usually imagine. He has also written a companion article, ‘Questions and Answers about German Dialects’.

Christian Coseru at Australia National University has written a guide on Sanskrit Unicode Text Processing using Emacs (‘the One True Text-Editor’) and LaTeX. Of course, it is just romanisation, because full Devanagari support isn’t ready yet in Emacs, but it should prove useful to comparative linguists. Coseru links to a page by J Hanneder on [...]

A post at LiveJournal alerted me of the existence of the Anglo-Saxon word neorxnawange, meaning ‘paradise’. The word occurs in Genesis, in the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve: Þæt wīf andwyrde: “Of ðǣra trēowa wæstme ðe synd on Paradīsum wē etað: and of ðæs trēowes wæstme þe is onmiddan neorxnawange, God bebēad [...]

In the event that there are readers of my weblog who do not also read LanguageHat (which is rather unlikely), I thought I would mention EuroLang, ‘a specialist niche news agency covering topics related to lesser-used languages, linguistic diversity and national minorities within the European Union.’ It was launched by the European Bureau for Lesser [...]

I am in the midst of expanding my LaTeX for Classical Philologists to a complete resource for the Indo-Europeanist. What that means is that general Classics themes such as typesetting metre will not be added until I return this Fall to university and the dull limitation of just Greek and Latin studies, but more IE [...]

Some years ago, when I first began a course in Mandarin Chinese at Defense Language Institute, I was highly sceptical that a language with such a great number of homophones could possibly work effectively. In the Chinese-English dictionary I received, meant for students and with a rather meagre word stock, the Pinyin-romanized syllable ‘shì’ (IPA [...]

I have updated my article Typesetting Old Church Slavonic with LaTeX. Additions include a section on how to typeset OCS in the common Latin transliteration schemes.

A call for papers has been sent out for the Fourth International Symposium on Finno-Ugric Languages in Groningen (The Netherlands) with the topic ‘Language and Identity in the Finno-Ugric World’. The organizers present these questions, which I thought readers here might find quite thought-provoking: Which place does the native language have in defining one’s identity? [...]

Johanna Laakso, a professor of Finno-Ugrian studies at the University of Vienna, maintains several pages which try to present the state of Uralic studies to the public and combat the usual misconceptions. Her bit ‘Finno-Ugric and Turkic?’ is a good response to the information disseminated by those who put too much credence in Altaic notions. [...]

Peter Wilson, legendary in the LaTeX world for his ‘memoir’ and ‘epigraphs’ packages, has recently provided a series of font sets which should be quite popular among those interested in dead languages: Aramaic Linear B Nabatean Old Persian Ugarite It’s worth looking at the other packages in the ‘fonts/archaic’ directory at CTAN for some further [...]