Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Several days ago I came across Peter Herrity’s two-volume translation of Karel Horálek’s An Introduction to the Study of the Slavonic Languages (Nottingham: Astra Press, 1992) ISBN 0-946134-26-X (Volume I) and 0-946134-34-0 (Volume II). Horálek’s original Úvod do studia slovanských jazyků was published in 1955 in Prague, with a second edition following in 1962. The [...]

Scholars of Finno-Ugrian linguistics can boast that their field actually predated comparative Indo-European linguistics. János Sajnovics’s work Demostratio idioma Ungarorum et Lapponum idem esse appeared in 1770, fifteen years before Sir William Jones’ rather off-the-cuff and tangential remark on the resemblance between Sanskrit and the European classical languages. Sámuel Gyarmathi (a Kolozsvári, by the way) [...]

I’m taking the Finno-Ugrian Studies department’s Introduction to Historical Linguistics this semester. As I’ve long since become familiar with the comparative method, basic issues of areal convergence, and types of sound change, I assumed that the course would serve only for university credits and for improving my Finnish comprehension. But as all examples are drawn [...]

In Fall 2005 I wrote a post about Rusyn, that little-known Slavonic language of the Carpathians. Oddly, that post brings more visitors to this weblog through Google searches than any other. It seems that there is more interest in Rusyn out there than one might expect. In addition to his Rusyn textbook from the 1970s, [...]

Thinking about the summer helps me get through the cold and dark days of winter, bad enough in Cluj and just hellish in Helsinki. Here are some thoughts: Last exams are in the first several days of May. That means I can immediately take off for Mari El. For real this time. I mean it. [...]

Alkukoti, a yearly review for students and young people about activities in the Finno-Ugrian world issued by the University of Helsinki student union, can now be read online. I’d rather read it on paper, since it is very stylishly printed, but hopefully this will bring it to an audience that can’t just pick up a [...]

As far as I know, there’s no historical grammar of Hungarian available in English. But as I think my Hungarian has improved enough lately to try one produced in Hungary. While stopping in Budapest on my way back to Helsinki, I wanted to get Akadémiai Kiadó’s new history of the Hungarian language, but that being [...]

Leafing through a few Slovak resources in the library yesterday evoked the image of a fractured landscape. The dialects considered Slovak actually differ on those specific phonological developments which usually define other Slavonic languages. In Rodolf Krajcovic’s A Historical Phonology of the Slovak Language (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1975) one reads: Up to the present day [...]

It should come as little surprise that in addition to the many other fields in which he showed interest, Benjamin Franklin had some thoughts on the learning of languages as well. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin he writes: I had begun in 1733 to study languages; I soon made myself so much a master [...]

LanguageHat often posts about poetry, and I should get to do so once in a while as well. After all, along with what languages are (grammar and lexicon), and who uses them (their population of speakers), there’s also the matter of what they are good for. Sure, that most often means conversation, but towards a more eternal edifice it means literature, and within it poetry is the very exploitation of a language’s possibilities. That’s why I’m very passionate about the verse of Pia Tafdrup, which showed me that Danish is much more than the seemingly random succession of schwa, /y/, and glottal stop that I first heard it to be.