Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Here are another couple of short Mari texts. Popular literature during Soviet times must have been exceedingly dull. I can’t wait until my Mari is good enough to read something deep, like Sergei Chavain’s novel Elnet. Тамле шӱр ― Таче шӱр сай огыл, ом коч,— манеш Шарепа. ― Весым шолташ ом тӱҥал ынде, ярсаш ок [...]

The report drafted by Katrin Saks of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the situation of the Finno-Ugric and Samoyed peoples in Russia has now been published. Before going into a long collection of statistics on populations, native-language publishing, congresses and so forth, there is an introduction which summarizes the general challenges [...]

I am trying to improve my French for a winter trip to francophone Africa. However, being an obsessive historical linguist, I am not content just to brush up on conversation, and so I’ve checked out some books from the library on the whole evolution of the French language. One is Peter Rickard’s A History of [...]

(This is the sort of post that I write more so that people doing web searches can come across it than for frequent readers who may not find this too interesting.) The textbook Old Icelandic (Oxford University Press, 1982) by Sigfrid Valfells and James E. Cathey is one of the most friendly introductions to a [...]

I’m currently reading through André Hesselbäck’s Tatar and Chuvash Code-copies in Mari (Uppsala, 2005), the sort of doctoral dissertation I wish I could have written. It contains an account of the differing opinions on the origin of the Mari noun plural markers. These suffixes are -βlä (Hill Mari), -βlak (eastern Meadow Mari dialects, and -šaməč̂ [...]

Geoffrey Lewis is one of the foremost historians of the Turkish language, and I’ve mentioned him here before in a December 2006 post on the ridiculous so-called ‘Sun-Language Theory’. His work The Turkish Language Reform: A Catastrophic Success (Oxford University Press, 2002). That is rare among monographs for its entertaining tone, and you don’t even [...]

One of the most frustrating things about pursuing a career in the academy is that I read an enormous amount of literature but cannot remember half of it. Many of the ideas the author puts forth stay with me, but when I wish to use them in argument, or when I realize I have forgotten [...]

Gábor Bereczki’s paper ‘The Character and the Scale of Turkic Influence on the Structure of Finno-Ugric Languages’ in Comparative-Historical Linguistics ed. Bela Brogyanyi and Reiner Lipp (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993) gives several examples of Turkic influence on Mari that I should keep in mind as my studies progress. The Mari vocative ending /-j/ with kinship [...]

From the announcement at Mari.ee I’ve translated into English the following news about a new documentary on conditions in Mari El. The announcement originally came from the website of Estonian television, and the film is Finnish. How international. On Saturday, 20 October Estonian television will air the documentary film ‘Thought Crimes in Mari El’ Human [...]

Here’s a small anecdote from among the reading selections in one of my Mari textbooks. I’m not sure whether this is a heartwarming example of community solidarity, or if the old man is an unabashed parasite (in the original Greco-Roman sense of the term). Пошкудышто канат Кеҥеж — оласылан каныме жап. Сандене талук наре тыршыше [...]