Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

I get the feeling that there is a lot of useful material for Irish on the Internet, even Old Irish, but it is poorly indexed. I have found some resources which fascinate me. The 1890 Kuno Meyer edition of The Voyage of Bran, my favourite of all Irish mythological stories, is available with the Old [...]

Have you ever seen an example of linguistic ignorance so appalling that it actually causes you physical pain? Well, I just have, and I feel that the only way to find relief is to share this with my colleagues and transfer my hurting on to them. The matter at hand is the sole review for [...]

For several weeks I had been trying to grasp the basics of Lithuanian intonation, oh-so-poorly described in my introductory grammar. While Beginner’s Lithuanian by Dambriunas, Klimas, and Schmalstieg (New York: Hippocrene, 1998) does a lot of things well, its discussion of pronunciation isn’t so hot. But then a simple Usenet post by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal [...]

Two Classical Greek matters have drawn my attention recently. The first is Brooks Haxton’s dreadful translation of Heraclitus (Fragments, Penguin Books, 2003), where he follows “translators” like Stephen Mitchell (who butchered the Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, and many other world classics) in rendering ancient wise men into hip beatnik English without wasting time on actual [...]

Curious about the minority Slavonic language spoken along the Carpathian mountains in Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine I obtained a copy of Paul R. Magocsi’s Let’s Speak Rusyn (Prešov edition). How amusing what one can learn about the language just by considering its Rusyn title Бісідуйме по-руськы. For the verb ‘to speak’ Rusyn continues to [...]

In the preface of Routledge’s The Indo-European Languages (the first, Italian edition of which was published in 1993, an English translation in 1998), the editors mention that in 1968 a project was undertaken by Kuryłowicz called the Indogermanische Grammatik which would be a modern version of Brugmann and Delbrück’s Vergleichende Grammatik. The project was subsequently [...]

Tapani Salminen at the University of Helsinki maintains a very useful Tundra Nenets homepage. It contains a copy of the chapter he provided to Routledge’s The Uralic Languages, the UNESCO Red Book report, and many interesting links. One Ferenc Válóczy provides a Forest Nenets to English glossary (hosted at Geocities, make of it what you [...]

That is what Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is calling the political situation in the Republic of Mari El, Russia. Here’s a rundown of the latest trouble there. First, Prof Yuri Anduganov, who was president of the Tenth International Finno-Ugric Congress, was killed in a car accident on July 7 under suspicious circumstances. Anduganov was forced [...]

Usually I’m not too enthusiastic about Neo-Latin, but I thought this was simply too cool. I picked up a copy of the Duckworth/Bristol Classical Press 2005 Academic Catalog, and they announce Andrew Laird’s new work The Epic of America: An Introduction to Rafael Landívar and the Rusticatio Mexicana. The Rusticatio Mexicano is a 1782 description [...]

When mentioning the Mari resources of Kimberli Mäkäräinen several months ago, I didn’t notice that she has a page of ‘Meadow Mari Grammar Bits’, pretty much the only English-language introduction to Mari grammar available online. It’s a good thing for one to keep bookmarked while he is saving up his pennies to buy Routledge’s The [...]