Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

While advances in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European may come a bit slower than they once did, evidentally there are new discoveries to be made in Indo-European linguistics. At the National Library I came across today Ignacio J. Adiego’s The Carian Language Handbuch der Orientalistik 86 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). It’s a description of Carian, one of [...]

In a post made last October I present Andre Hesselbäck’s views in Tatar and Chuvash Code-copies in Mari (Uppsala, 2005) on the history of the Mari plural suffix -βlak. The second Mari plural marker, -šaməč has just as uncertain an etymology as the first. This suffix has traditionally been connected to the Chuvash plural suffix [...]

I encourage my readers in the sidebar to view this weblog with the fonts provided by the Dejavu project. However, I would like to remind readers that it’s not enough to just install these fonts, as one also should upgrade them frequently. Version 2.25 of the Dejavu fonts was released earlier this week, and in [...]

If you are even in the least bit interested in Central Asian languages and cultures, I cannot recommend enough the ‘Music of Central Asia’ recordings out on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, a joint effort of the Smithsonian Institution and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Each installment features authentic folk traditions played by enthuasiastic and still [...]

In the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, David Greer reviews Robin Adamson’s The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis? (Multilingual Matters, 2007). I’ve not read Adamson’s work yet, but I was intrigued by this bit from Greer’s review: Adamson transitions from an historical perspective to the modern situation in Chapter 2 [...]

Here’s some more from the father of Mari literature: ― Родо-влак!— маний Кыргорий тӱҥалеш, те шке ушан еҥ улыда. Те йӱштыжымат, шокшыжымат мый дечем утларак ужын улыда. Тендан коклаште чал вуян, чал подашанжат уло, а мый ужар вуян рвезе веле улам. Мый тендан туныктен ом керт, ом мошто. Мый тыланда кузе тӱняште калык ила, тудым [...]

Mari as spoken today possesses a voiced velar stop g, but the earliest fieldwork expeditions recorded the voiced velar fricative ɣ instead. This voiced velar fricative arose in some early stage of Mari as a reflex of Proto-Uralic intervocalic k, e.g. Finnish koko ‘whole, entire’ ~ Meadow Mari kugu, Hill Mari kogo ‘big, important’. This [...]

In his opening speech of the Fifth International Finno-Ugrist Students’ Conference, held in Helsinki in May 1988, the late Mikko Korhonen made the following complaint: Unfortunately, prospects for the future do not appear to be bright. At the moment, in many countries, there is a demand that universities work according the principle of economic productivity. [...]

Doing a search on Amazon.com will match not only book titles, but also the text of any book that has been digitized. Sometimes this means you get returns from books rather far removed from your studies which unexpectedly make reference to them. One example is that in a search for ‘Cheremis’, the now obsolete English [...]