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 April, 2008.
The 24th International Finno-Ugrian Students Conference (IFUSCO) will be held in Helsinki, May 14–18. I got my hands on one of the tote bags to be given out to all attending the conference. This features the word ‘hello’ in a number of Uralic languages, missing only a handful such as Nganasan and Selkup. It was [...]
Jeremy Bradley, a student at the University of Vienna has learnt Meadow Mari and is preparing some new Internet resources for the language. What may be the most important new offering is the Meadow Mari Multilingual Dictionary, allowing queries in English, German, Russian, Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. The more I have to work with online [...]
In Historical and Linguistic Interaction Between Inner-Asia and Europe ed. Árpád Berta (Szeged, 1997), the Proceedings of the 39th Permanent International Altaistic Conference (PIAC) in Szeged, Hungary June 16–21, 1996, András Róna-Tas contributes the paper ‘The migration of the Hungarians and their settlement in the Carpathian Basin’. It sketches the stages by which the Hungarians [...]
As recently announced on Finnish linguistic lists, the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland has published a new publicly accessible database. Evita contains references to linguistic literature dealing with the origins of Finnish words, from 1966 to the turn of the 21st century. Jussi Ylikoski announces the birth of the electronic version of the [...]
Another appalling bit of news out of Mari El, where yet another activist has been beaten. An activist of the Mari people’s movement has fallen into a coma after he was beaten by unknown assailants. On the night of April 18 Valery Mochaev, an activist of the Mari people’s movement was beaten with unusual cruelty, [...]
This brief passage from the writings of Sergei Chavain, the founder of Mari letters, is a bit too romantic nationalist for me, but I suppose this would be a good mindset for me to adopt before I return to Mari and Chuvash villages, where I will probably have to help out some amount in local [...]
Now that I have one year remaining in my master’s studies, the time has come to choose a subject for thesis. Here is the proposal as approved by the department today. For my master’s thesis, I would like to systematically describe the inventory of verbs of motion in Mari. Learners of Mari are confronted with [...]