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 November, 2005.
That the feminine gender and frequency of the ā-stems in Indo-European developed after Anatolian left is one of those things that “everyone knows.” Yet, Robert Beekes finds incredulous the idea that this entire system developed only after the departure of Anatolian. I am currently reading his The Origins of the Indo-European Nominal Inflection (Innsbruck, 1985) [...]
An announcement from the Ura-list about a new book by the scholar Helimski: Mari und Mordwinen im heutigen Russland: Sprache, Kultur, Identität / Hrsg. von Eugen Helimski, Ulrike Kahrs und Monika Schötschel (Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, 66). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005 ISBN: 3-447-05166-3 http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/ Im immer noch polyethnischen und mehrsprachigen Rußland stellen die Siedlungsgebiete der [...]
Continuing from the last post on the sigmatic aorist in Latin, I turn to Bridget Drinka’s examination of this matter in Old Church Slavonic. This will be brief, due to being occupied by other matters at university. While Drinka shows that the sigmatic aorist in Latin is in general a very late innovation, her goal [...]
I’m currently reading Bridget Drinka’s The Sigmatic Aorist in Indo-European: Evidence for the Space-Time hypothesis (Institute for the Study of Man, 1995). In this book, the thirteenth Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph, Drinka argues that the sigmatic aorist commonly reconstructed based on evidence in Greek, Old Church Slavonic, Sanskrit, and Latin among others, did not [...]
I plan on selling some of my heavier books in order to facilitate my move back to Europe next year and give me a bit of badly needed spending money, and I will simply depend on my university library’s copy for the time being. One of the weightiest tomes in my collection is Andrew L. [...]
In Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistics and Archaeological Considerations (Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 2001) Eugene Helimski contributes the paper “Early Indo-Uralic Linguistic Relationships” where he expresses doubt about many of the supposed IE loanwords in the Uralic languages. He feels that the concept of semantic shift is too often invoked. Jorma Koivulehto, for example, [...]
Following the launch of the Info-RM site with news in the Erza and Moksha varieties of Mordvin, announced here a couple of months ago, Эрзянь правда (Erźa Truth) now provides more news in that apparently most lexically Russified of Uralic languages.
In Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (University of Hawaii Press, 1997), a work in the DeFrancis tradition of condemning Chinese characters, Wm. C. Hannas asks why the success of modern Vietnamese orthography hasn’t shown other East Asian countries that romanization can be introduced with no problems. The answer, apparently, has to do with a common principle of [...]