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 September, 2007.
Here’s an amusing photo from the International Finno-Ugrian Students’ Conference (IFUSCO), held last May in Saransk, Mordovia, where I happened to be wearing my t-shirt with the Glagolitic script on the same day that a student of Hungarian from Warsaw was wearing his ancient Hungarian script t-shirt.
YLE, the Finnish broadcasting company, has run a Russian-language programme called Uzy Druzhby, but it is now supplemented with news snippets in Erzya and Komi. These can be listened to online. I’ve always been rather disappointed that the library of my department doesn’t have audio material for students to reach real proficiency in listening, but [...]
Many readers here might be familiar with Georges Perec’s novel La disparition (ingeniously translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void), where the mad French writer succeeds in never once using the letter e in the course of the book’s 300 pages. This type of text is called a ‘lipogram’, from the [...]
I had never thought before to check YouTube for linguistic and ethographical material, but there’s a few interesting videos. Very helpful is an interview with Chuvash children about folklore, where the Chuvash-language dialogue is accompanied by subtitles with the Chuvash in romanization. There’s also The Chuvash through Images with the song ‘Shănkăr-shănkăr shyv juhat’’ There [...]
At the international edition of the Helsingin Sanomat a fascinating article recounts how Finland got an chance to buy Karelia back from Russia but turned it down. The article is pretty blunt about what might have ensued with all the new Russian speakers: Russia would have hardly been likely to agree to massive internal migration [...]
Wishing to do some Finnish exercises before returning to Helsinki next month, I picked up the Romanian-language Finnish textbook Limba finlandeza: simplu și eficient (Iași: Editura POLIROM, 2005), ISBN 973681677X. It is written by Enikő Molnár Bodrogi, Ildikó Eva Pályi and Ildikó Varga Piroska, three lecturers affiliated with the Universitate Babeș-Bolyi of Cluj-Napoca, evidentally the [...]
Since I mainly learnt Romanian in the course of living in Cluj and just speaking with friends and shopkeepers, I know few of the peculiar inflections found in the literary language. Lately I’ve been trying to improve my grasp of the literary standard, and the first challenge is the simple perfect tense. It has disappeared [...]