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.
As this weblog contains content in numerous languages, written in various scripts, readers are encouraged to download and regularly update the fonts developed by the DejaVu font project.
You are currently browsing the Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog weblog archives for February, 2006.
A quick remark about two books I’ve discovered recently. Alexander M. Schenker’s The Dawn of Slavic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) is concerned with the historical and cultural events of Slavic ethnogenesis, but it also has such an extensive presentation of Old Church Slavonic that it may be fairly counted among OCS primers, comparing [...]
A while back I was searching for the text to one of the Mari songs downloadable online, and through Google I found a whole collection of Mari song lyrics, with material in both the Hill Mari and Meadow Mari languages. Unfortunately, the link was dead. I managed to get three out of the four pages [...]
As another language blog, LanguageHat occasionally does, I’m going to write something about a poet. This is not as off-topic as it might seem. My graduate studies in Finno-Ugrian linguistics beginning later this year will be on “marin kielikontaktit” (Mari language contacts), namely Mari’s relations with neighbouring Uralic languages Mordvin and Permian, but also its [...]
As I journey through academia, I’m constantly amazed how a minute object of study can be expanded to a 300-page monograph. Example: Alan J. Nussbaum, Head and Horn in Indo-European (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986) ISBN 3-11-010449-0.
a hettita a hettitakülönös nép a hettitaazt hiszi minden hettitamindenkiről hogy hettita Sándor Weöres, “Le Journal”(from Csontváry-Vásznak, 1953). Recently I’ve read two papers about an IE branch I rarely do much with, Anatolian. The first item is Jaan Puhvel’s paper “Whence the Hittite, Whither the Jonesian Vision?” in Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into [...]
Coming from a little-known European academic publisher, LINCOM EUROPA, and unavailable for sale in the U.S., Boris Gasparov’s 2001 primer Old Church Slavonic (ISBN 3895868892) was a pleasant surprise. The book is generally a synchronic treatment of the artificial language that we find in the manuscripts, with few references to Proto-Indo-European. Still, Prof Gasparov does [...]
Since I’m currently studying in a Classical Studies department where literary criticism, history, and philosophy are the only acceptable topics for a paper, and historical linguistics is often seen as a foreign and irrelevant voodoo science, I thought I would engage in an entirely masturbatory fantasy about how I would approach the teaching of Latin [...]
We all know how annoying it is to be enjoying a work only to run across a sentence or two that makes us suddenly doubt the whole enterprise’s trustworthiness. I thought I’d share some that I’ve run across recently. Here’s one where the reader gets the feeling that the manuscript was prepared long before the [...]