Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

There’s a new story out about how Chinese speakers and English speakers think differently in, where else, the popular press. From Chinese, English Speakers Vary at Math at CBS News: Things add up differently for native English speakers compared with people who learned Chinese as a first language. Simple arithmetic was easily done by both [...]

Yves Codet has come up with LaTeX Unicode hyphenation patterns for Sanskrit and Prakrit in the Devanagari, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu scripts. These work only for the Xetex form of TeX (formerly for Mac OSX only, coming soon to Linux and Windows). Nice to see that progress continues to be made in typesetting non-European [...]

Continuing in the vein of an earlier post showing odd passages from papers that make one doubt the validity of the whole, I offer this: The special status of [Khanty and Mansy] as a separate branch of Finno-Ugric is clear, as the rest of the family does not show certain features found only in Ugric [...]

Please, someone buy this through my Amazon referral link so that I can retire already. (The Uralic and Altaic Series, published by Routledge, sold for twenty-four thousand dollars).

Daniel Bunči’s site “False Friends of the Slavist”, which I mentioned here late last year, was abandoned in 2003. Now, however, it has been placed on Wikibooks and is regularly expanded by a team of volunteers. As with all Wiki material, take whatever you read critically, but it’s still a useful resource for tracking the [...]

There’s a relatively new Udmurt news and information portal up at www.udmportal.com. There’s already a similar portal for Komi, and these serve as important signs-of-life for students in the West. I encourage all to regularly patronize these so their proprietors know there’s interested people out there. Meanwhile, things continue to go badly for the Mari [...]

The first volume of the “UCLA Indo-European Studies” series was a general collection of papers edited by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Brent Vine. It went out of print almost immediately, but UCLA was kind enough to make the collection available online with each paper readable as a separate PDF file. There’s some good material here. [...]

I’ve been keeping away from blogging for a while now, as while waiting for the results of the graduate school admissions process, I figured I should start exploring other hobbies I might take up should I disastrously find no future in linguistics. However, I have been accepted to University of Helsinki where this Fall I [...]