Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

(Writing this in Moscow, it turns out that I won’t be going to Mari El after all, but instead for various reasons will be going on immediately to Romania. This is the third time I’ve planned a trip to Mari El without success, and I’m starting to wonder why it’s so difficult to make it [...]

On the URA-List Johanna Laakso has posted a passionate call to action, spurred by the recent publication in Hungary of a collection of writings by Angela Marcantonio. I reproduce it here with her permission and make some comments below. After forwarding the announcement of Angela Marcantonio’s new book in Hungary and discussing the recent “developments” [...]

I will be in Mari El for the next several days. Updates will be infrequent, but perhaps more interesting than usual, and I’ll try to use the Internet every day to post new material I’ve already prepared for this weblog.

I’m happy that next year’s summer courses in Finno-Ugrian languages are finally being announced. Here’s the one for Udmurt: The Udmurt State University, the Faculty of Udmurt Philology are organizing summer courses of Udmurt under the program “The Udmurt language and the culture of the Udmurts”, which will be held 12.07.–01.08.2007. The courses will provide [...]

Sergei Chavain’s poem Oто (‘The Grove’), written in 1905, is traditionally considered the birth of Mari native literature. In the Mari animist religion, groves function as temples. The poem’s protest against the destruction of a sacred grove is a metaphor for the tribulations of the Mari nation under Russian imperial rule. I found a book [...]

I knew the Turkish language reform involved some odd notions of linguistics, but Brent Brendemoen’s chapter on the process in The Turkic Languages (Routledge, 1998) introduced me to the weirdest part yet, the Sun-language Theory: There are strong indications that Atatürk was not entirely happy with about the lists of proposed replacements for the Arabic [...]

It’s not often I learn anything on Wikipedia, reference to current scholarship being so rare, but an addition today to the article on Siever’s Law suggests an interesting recent development: A second difficulty has emerged much more recently (Sihler 2006): the actual passages from the Rigveda cited in Edgerton’s two large articles in 1934 and [...]

Johanna Laakso on the URA-List draws attention to two doctoral theses completed recently at the University of Helsinki. It’s nice that the university makes these works publicly available on the Web. The first is rigorously linguistic, Janne Saarikivi’s Substrata Uralica: Studies on Finno-Ugrian Substrate in Northen Russian Dialects. I’ll be going to the public defence [...]

At the beginning of each month my scholarship pays out, and I usually hit up Helsinki’s many used bookstores. At any antiquary in Helsinki one can find publications of the Finno-Ugrian Society for very cheap, which worryingly suggests that the field is shrinking, though it makes it quite easy to build up a good home [...]