Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Like Zhao Yuanren, whose poem “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” I presented here several months ago, the linguist Y.R. Chao also composed several Chinese works written only with characters that are (excepting tones) homophones in Mandarin and therefore would ultimately make no sense if read aloud. Here’s an example: 西溪犀、喜嬉戲。嵇熙夕々携犀戲。嵇熙細々習洗犀。犀吸溪、戲襲熙。嵇熙嘻々希息戲。惜熙嘶々喜襲熙。 Using Pinyin transliteration, [...]

I’ve been doing more with Indo-European within my university studies now, enough that it is starting to seem like “work”, so in my free time I’ve been reading more about other language families. I’ve stumbled upon an fascinating connection between Athabaskan, an American Indian language family, Chinese, and Vietnamese, concerning the development of tones. In [...]

For readers of German, there is a course in Sorbian, that most neglected of all the Slavonic languages.

I first read Harold Pinter’s 1988 play Mountain Language a few years ago and was reminded of it yesterday by a quotation from it in David Crystal’s Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Inspired by the treatment of the Kurds in Turkey, Pinter’s work compresses the terror of political oppression, and specifically language oppression, into [...]

Every so often one reads a paper exposing some limitation of the comparative method that makes one rather depressed about one’s studies. I am very happy in this field and hope to make a career out of it, but I know that modern scholarship doesn’t allow the great optimism that we’ll ever reconstruct everything possible [...]

The various Old Church Slavonic primers that have been written over the past hundred years are of varying quality. Among the worst for this student of historical linguistics are Lunt’s Old Church Slavonic Grammar, which is purely synchronic and written from the viewpoint of structual linguistics, and Gardiner’s Old Church Slavonic : An Elementary Grammar, [...]