Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Back in the 1960s a certain scholar (who will remain nameless) wrote in one of his masterworks that he would subsequently get to work on another thrilling volume. As far as I could tell, that planned volume was never formally published, but I thought that perhaps it would be found in any papers left to [...]

It’s that time of year again when Mari State University announces its summer courses in the Mari language: Summer School in Mari Language and CultureYoshkar-Ola, July 7-25, 2008. Mari State University is happy to announce Summer School of Mari Language and Culture organized by the Department of Mari Language and Literature and International Office, and [...]

In an article in the collection Comparative-Historical Linguistics: Indo-European and Finno-Ugric ed. Bela Brogyanyi and Reiner Lipp (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993), Denis Sinor makes the intriguing case that English hullabaloo ‘tumultuous noise, uproar, clamorous confusion’ is of Turkic origin. Common Turkic ala ‘multicoloured, dappled, spotted; piebald’ is attested in virtually all Turkic languages beginning with [...]

It’s interesting to note that Hungarian and Chuvash both express the concepts ‘last year’, ‘this year’, and ‘next year’ with lexically very different words: Hungarian Chuvash ‘last year’ tavaly пӗлтӗр ‘this year’ idén кӑҫал ‘next year’ jövőre, következő évben ҫул Granted, I’ve only studied European languages and Mandarin Chinese, but this seems like a very [...]

While my understanding of spoken Danish has now surpassed my understanding of spoken Swedish (it’s the Swedes who speak as if they have potatoes in their mouths!), I still love jokes about how Danish is completely unintelligible. I got a lot of laughs out of this bit (Parts One and Two) from the Norwegian comedy [...]

Chuvash, and its now-extinct sister languages, show r in many instances where the rest of the Turkic family shows z, e.g. Turkic buzagu ‘calf’ ~ Proto-Chuvash buragu (Chuvash păru). In his summary Nutshell Chuvash András Róna-Tas makes a convincing argument for the dating of rhotacism in the ancestor of Chuvash. The argument depends on the [...]

It’s interesting to note that the names of the days of the week are nearly the same in Mari and Chuvash. Meadow Mari Monday Šočmo ‘birth’ Tuesday Kuškyžmo ‘riding day’ Wednesday Vürgeče ‘blood day’ Thursday Izarnja ‘small holiday’ Friday Kugarnja ‘great holiday’ Saturday Šumatkeče ‘Sabbath day’ Sunday Rušarnja ‘Russian holiday’ Chuvash Monday Tuntikun ? Tuesday [...]

Three Mari speakers have written a long statement in the form of an ‘open letter to Bill Gates’ calling for the inclusion of certain characters to the standard Windows fonts so that Mari speakers no longer have to rely on antiquated solution. Much Mari content on the web is still written in 8-bit encoding schemes [...]

In his 1965 work Lexicon of Musical Invective, an anthology of critical assaults on composers which cites ‘biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements,’ Nicolas Slonimsky makes the following comparison of new music to foreign languages: The Phenomenon of Non-acceptance of the Unfamiliar is revealed in every instance when custom clashes with an alien mode [...]

Such is the title given to German Kalinin’s letter to the editor in the January 24, 2008 issue of the newspaper Marijskaja pravda. Kalinin complains about a matter I myself noticed in Yoshkar-Ola, the translation of street signs into Mari by simply replacing Russian ulitsa (‘street’) with Mari urem without changing the rest of the [...]