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 August, 2006.
Having survived the London airport madness that began late last week just as I left, and having made it to Helsinki, with significant expense and delay due to canceled flights, I’ll get back in business here. Since it wasn’t so long ago that all celebrated the appearance of Unicode version 4.1 with its new support [...]
Many of the reading selections in Robert Auty’s Handbook of Old Church Slavonic: Part II Texts and Glossary (London: The Athlone Press, 1960) present little challenge as they are from the OCS translation of the New Testament and so are already familiar to the student. However, one selection sure to be unknown to readers is [...]
Jean Perrot, former professor at the Sorbonne (University of Paris III) and at the Practical School of Higher Studies (EPHE), recently published a collection of some of his articles. Regards sur les langues ouraliennes: Études structurales, approches contrastives, regards de linguistes (Paris: ADÉFO/L’Harmattan) ISBN 2-296-00851-8. It cost only 30 euro, nice to see that this [...]
For those in Helsinki or planning to visit during this time, the Helsinki Summer University is hosting an interdisciplinary conference called “The Finno-Ugric World” August 22–23. The deadline for registration is August 11, and it’s free, so there’s no reason not to go. I’ve included some information and the programme, in Finnish only since that will be the language of the event.
Irina Nikolaeva’s A Historical Dictionary of Yukaghir has just been published by Mouton de Gruyter in the publisher’s well-known “Trends in Linguistics” series. That unfortunately means it’s priced out of most students’ reach, though it does make it likely that many university libraries will order it as a matter of course. Nikolaeva describes the work [...]
I have updated my guide “LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Indo-Europeanists”. It now provides new solutions for PIE labiovelars and glides recommended by Prof Arlo Griffiths of the University of Leiden, and the method of typesetting the unspecified laryngeal resonant has been fixed so that it actually works now. As always, feedback is appreciated.
Over at Mari.ee, the web’s best source of Mari news in Russian, Mari, Estonian, and English, there’s a rich introduction to Mari literature by Valeri Alikov entitled “Without Books, There is No Literature”. Alikov is a native speaker of Hill Mari, which gives his work a refreshing perspective on a literary world usually dominated by [...]
On the URA-List, Johanna Laakso brought attention to an announcement at an Adobe employee’s weblog suggesting that Adobe will not be supporting the Cyrillic characters used in Mari, Udmurt, and Komi-Zyrian, as well as the neighbouring Turkic languages Bashkir and Chuvash. Apparently even common Old Church Slavonic characters will not be provided. Feedback can be [...]