Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

The sentiments of the late phonetician Peter Ladefoged about language preservation have always bothered me, and a recent citation of his in Jean Aitchison’s Language Change: Progress or Decay? (Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed. 2001) serves as salt on the wound. Ladefoged wrote: Last summer I was working on Dahalo, a rapidly dying Cushitic language [...]

A neat discovery recently was Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 38th ed. 1978), the handbook for transforming inconsistent manuscript into the beauty that is the traditional Oxford appearance, which is continued today most notably in the Clarendon Press offerings. Originally written by typesetter Horace Hart [...]

Continuing the dubious practise of using my notes as blog material, I figure that since I spent so much time translating the following handout by Prof Ulla-Maija Kulonen, I might as well make it available for others. One of the areas where Khanty and Mansi have grown apart is in nominal declension. Note the different [...]

Polish language geek Piotr Kozlowski, who has a friend married to a Mari woman, has put up a Polish-language overview of Mari. Even for those who cannot read Polish, the sound clips there accompanying the Mari text are sure to prove useful.

I came across an old article from a 1989 issue of TUGboat called ‘Lexicography with TeX’ that describes how the Institute of Lexicography of the University of Iceland typeset its etymological dictionary with TeX. The results are very handsome, and considering that the trials and tribulations they had to go largely disappeared in successive versions [...]

I’ve started a collection of Mari flashcards based on the textbook Марийский язык для всех (Yoshkar-Ola: Marijskoj Knižnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1990). So far the vocabulary of the first three chapters is included, and I’ll be occasionally updating the collection.