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 December, 2005.
Having been asked by a reader how Meadow (Eastern) Mari and Hill (Western) Mari differ, over a series of posts I shall try to give as detailed an explanation as I can with the limited materials I have collected so far. As Meadow Mari has the simpler phonology, it is the variety usually described in [...]
I arrived in Finland on Saturday and this morning came to Helsinki where I will be for one week. With daylight being too limited for much sightseeing and my linguistic curiosity insatiable, I probably will spend most of this time in the library. Today’s tour of the university department of Finno-Ugrian linguistics was exciting. I [...]
Currently sitting in Chicago’s dreadful O’Hare airport waiting for my flight to Finland, I present you with some Finno-Ugric news Johanna Laakso sent out on the Ura-list: In general FU news: WEB-FU, the electronic journal of the Vienna Finno-Ugrists cordially welcomes old and new readers and awaits your contributions from all areas of Finno-Ugric studies [...]
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov’s magnum opus Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans is now available online—in the original Russian, that is. If you aren’t willing to pay the US$148 that the English translation published by Mouton de Gruyter is going for on Amazon.com, and can’t get ahold of a physical copy of the considerably cheaper Russian original, then [...]
Using Unicode to digitise an Old Church Slavonic document requires some truly unpleasant compromises, as anyone who has attempted to do so has sorely found out. For example, I’m perpetually irked by the fact that the Unicode Consortium refuses to assign a position for iotified Cyrillic A, telling people to use U+044F CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER [...]
I often marvel at how close the Slavonic languages remain to each other in spite of 1500 years of individual development. The slow pace of phonetic change means that their lexicons are all very similar indeed. Yet, one shouldn’t assume too much that a word in one language necessarily still has the same meaning as [...]
The Information Centre for the Finno-Ugric Peoples has a page with links to MP3 files of ten traditional Mari songs. One unfortunately has to put some effort into making out the words due to the low quality of the recordings, but it is nice to see so much made available. In 2004 a CD of [...]
You’ll need some knowledge of Russian to make your way through it—most links on the sketchy English version of the site lead to Russian pages—but the “Minority Languages of Russia on the Net” is a great list of resources, such as an English-Moksha (Mordvin) dictionary, an ethnographic study of the Eastern Mari, and a Russian-language [...]
If you are curious to know what the Mari language sounds like, visit Марий Эл OnLine and select “Интервью” from the menu on the left. (Some Russian may be necessary to find your way around.) You’ll find several videos of Mari-language interviews in WMV format. Very, very cool.
The Digital Classicist is a “collaborative and permanently ongoing project that aims to provide answers to or offer discussion around some of the key questions that concern scholars of classics and ancient history [and Indo-European linguistics! —CRC] who need to use computers as part of their research activity.” I discovered the site because they were [...]