Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

I’ll briefly interrupt my seaside repose in Vama Veche to peddle some wares. I have some books I left in the US some years ago that a relative has put on eBay. Of most linguistic interest is Assimil’s Occitan textbook, one of only two guides I’ve ever seen for conversational Occitan. Lovers of Romance languages [...]

While mainstream publishers use plenty of hyperbole in the titles of their textbooks, from Teach Yourself’s ‘Instant’ series to Hugo’s ‘In Three Months’ books, the product usually still works somewhat if you put enough work into it. Only recently, however, have I discovered that there’s a wide variety of snake-oil products for language learning, and [...]

In addition to my entirely respectable studies of historical linguistics, I must confess a love of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, whom unless you’ve been living under a rock this last decade you know as the appalling reporter from an entirely fantasy Kazakhstan. There’s something just so enthralling about Borat’s accent and lexicon that makes [...]

As readers must surely have noticed, this weblog went on a long hiatus back in January. In the spring semester, I was focused so much on learning Mari that most of my other activities came to a standstill. That concentration paid off, as after just six months I was able to fairly comfortably converse in [...]

When I was in Cheboksary in May I purchased a copy of Konstantin Ivanov’s Narspi, a long poem that holds a prominent place in Chuvash literature. The Russian facing-page translation is not only difficult for me, as I’m used to the functional Russian of linguistics books, but also apparently somewhat loose. I’m not yet sure [...]

Since I was on an agonizing week-long journey from Kazakhstan to Mari El at the time, I completely missed the sad announcement that Winfred Lehmann has passed away. Lehmann was always my favourite of the contemporary Indo-Europeanists. On one hand, he was doing major original work in fresh new fields like syntax, and he applied [...]

This is unfortunate news for both Erzya-language publishing and for the press freedoms of Russia’s language minorities. There’s an English-language article at the Finnish-Russian Civic Forum on the start to this: Authorities in Russia’s autonomous Republic of Mordovia have pressed charges against the independent newspaper, Erzyanj Mastor (“Land of Erzya”), demanding its closure, Radio Svoboda [...]

As I write this I’m staying in a village in the Chuvash Republic called Bol’shoe Janikovo, an hour’s drive southeast from Cheboksary. The vigour of the Chuvash language is immediately apparent. As my hosts presented me to all of their neighbours, they may have asked me some detail in Russian, but when I had answered [...]

From the 3 August 2007 issue of the Mari newspaper Кугарня (Friday) here’s an except from the humour page. Эше ик мут — эше ик страф! Ик гана кевытыш пурышым, но тушто шуко шым кудалт — вич минут гычак лектым. Ончем, милиционер шога да машинам йоҥылыш шогалтымылан штрафым воза. Воктекыже миен шогальымат, ойлем Ну йӧра, [...]

I had a very difficult time finding a decent Chuvash textbook here in Cheboksary, which was quite unexpected considering Chuvash is among the largest minority languages in Russia. G. A Degtiarev’s Изучаем чувашский язык (Cheboksary: Chuvashkoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1995) is sold in a few bookstores, but it is an oddly structured book that assumes some [...]