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 October, 2006.
Despite the fact that I speak one member natively, the Germanic language family has generally seemed fairly opaque to me. Of the Indo-European languages, high school studies in Latin pulled me to Romance, and residency in Ukraine towards Slavonic. However, one of the neat things about studying at University of Helsinki is that a Swedish [...]
Computer font projects face the challenge of covering not only the English alphabet but the many other Latin variants as well as even more exotic scripts. An example is the DejaVu fonts, recommended for viewing my personal website and weblog, by the way (but make sure you update upon a new release). I was naive [...]
LingNews.net, a conglomeration of language-related links founded by Bridget Samuels, recently linked to a Times of India article reporting the end of Sanskrit studies at Cambridge. Sad news, although I never thought before that there even was significant scholarship in Sanskrit there, since Oxford and SOAS get all the attention. The article mentioned an online [...]
In my Introduction to Finno-Ugrian Linguistics course we covered the differences between Finnish dialects in some depth. Although they are a bit unpolished, here I present my notes on the characteristics of each dialect or dialect group. These notes are based on a handout prepared by Riho Grünthal, which I have translated into English and expanded.
(The academic publisher LINCOM Europa doesn’t have much distribution in the United States, so I can’t review its offerings on Amazon.com as I do with most everything else I read.) Gunter Schaarschmidt’s Upper Sorbian is a 2002 volume in LINCOM’s Descriptive Grammar Series. (I hadn’t heard much about this series before, but it seems to [...]
This is a really cool resource of the kind I wish I saw more of: the St. Petersburg Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences offers a Comparative Nenets-Nganasan Multimedia Dictionary which has Russian and English headwords as well. Just reading the introduction is worthwhile, as one can immediately see how the two languages [...]
A post by Johanna Laakso on the Ura-list announced The Inari Sámis, a website put up by SIIDA with information on this small and little-known Sámi people. It’s available in English, Finnish, and Inari Sámi. In other news, the Sámi contestants have won at Liet Lavlut 2006, an alternative to the Eurovision contest that celebrates [...]
After finding my guide “Typesetting Old Church Slavonic with LaTeX” Isao Yasuda wrote to tell me about his package OldSlav, which enables the typesetting of older Cyrillic texts with beautiful traditional fonts provided by the SlavTeX collection. This is of limited appeal to students of historical linguistics, but very useful indeed for those who have [...]
The Early Indo-European Languages Online series of short introductions put up by the A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture, Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, has a couple of new offerings. Introduction to the Ancient Sanskrit Texts cannot really compete with the traditional primers, but it does provide useful supporting [...]
A discussion over at sci.lang alerted me to several materials about the reconstruction of earliest stages of Chinese. Jacques Guillaume’s Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology is, for all its lecture-note brevity, a fine presentation of the basics of the field. William Baxter’s Etymological Dictionary of Common Chinese Characters contains many Middle Chinese reconstructions. Finally, the [...]