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 August, 2005.
There is a fantastic new Russian news site about life in Mordovia that carries all news in both the Erźa (a.k.a. Erzya) and Moksha Mordvin languages. Translations in English and Russian are also provided, meaning that the site provides a small remedy for the lack of learning materials for those languages in English. The first [...]
Through a web search, I stumbled across a monograph by Brian D. Josephs entitled ‘Balkan Insights into the Syntax of *mē in Indo-European’ (PDF) It’s always nice to find freely available monographs about IE linguistics, and this one is very informative for any Classics student wondering why Greek has such an unusual looking negator (in [...]
So I got bored last night, and with a copy of Sihler’s New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin lying around, I decided to do a flashcard set with all the sound laws mentioned in it, as well as a couple of OCS cards I had already drawn up. The result is ‘IE Sound Laws: [...]
Nancy Thuleen, a teacher of German language to undergraduates at University of Wisconsin – Madison, is also a fan of Gothic. As part of her studies in a graduate Gothic course, she wrote three texts which should prove interesting to neophytes: Gothic Nominal Declension: Variation in Proper Nouns (written with Mike Lind), ‘Gothic Miscellany: Vowels, [...]
The longest extant text in the Etruscan language is the Liber Linteus, the linen wrapping of a mummy now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Zagreb. I saw this mummy several years ago during a trip to Croatia, and I regret that at the time I had no idea of the import of what [...]
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the online Wright grammar of the Gothic language, I should also mention that the Gothic Bible is online as well. The Wulfila project, ‘a small digital library dedicated to the study of the Gothic language and Old Germanic languages in general’, provides the Gothic text with English translation [...]
The Germanic Lexicon Project at University of Pennsylvania is in the processing of providing Wright’s Grammar of the Gothic Language (Oxford University Press, 1910) online. The entire book is available in image format, and an uncorrected text is available in HTML. I’ve often consulted Wright in my university library, and considering its age it is [...]
Verbix, the online verb conjugator, is known for supporting little-known languages like Irish. Now I see that they even include support for Proto-Indo-European verbs. It’s a nice toy, though Verbix is known for its less than 100%-reliable conjugations. However, when dealing with the reconstruction of the proto-language, one has to choose between several competing paradigms. [...]
Cyril Babaev (founder of the aforementioned Cybalist list) has written a historical grammar of Lithuanian with some interesting comments on Lithuanian’s evolution from Proto-Indo-European. Babaev’s Indo-European Database contains links to other grammars. It is probably the most useful site ever hosted at a Bizland.com address. (Thanks to Rodrigo Portela Sánchez for bring this to my [...]