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.
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You are currently browsing the Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog weblog archives for June, 2008.
The guesthouse I’m staying at in Bishkek has a large pile of random paperbacks left by travelers, and today I was flipping through Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Books, 2003). It is Menzies’ thesis that the great fleet launched by the Chinese emperor Zhu Di on 8 March 1421 [...]
I’ve encountered two different Turkic terms for ‘city’, spread rather haphazardly across the Turkic languages. Initially I knew Chuvash хула xula (which was borrowed into Mari as ola e.g. Yoshkar-Ola ‘Red City’). In Kazakhstan one quickly learns the obvious cognate қала qala. Crossing the border into Kyrgyzstan revealed a completely different word here on the [...]
The 1989 collection The New Sound of Indo-European: Essays in Phonological Reconstruction ed. Theo Vennemann (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989) has a fond place in my heart. I spent much time pouring over this collection, volume 41 of the series Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, as it was one of the few Indo-Europeanist publications [...]
I. A. Andreev’s textbook Чувашский язык (Cheboksary: Chuvashkoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1996) challenges the student to read real literature almost from the very beginning. Here’s one exercise, A. Timbaj’s poem Ҫулталӑк (The Year) Ултӑ хӗр те ултӑ ывӑлПурӑнаҫҫӗ ырӑ-сывӑ.Ват Ҫулталӑк ачисем,Тӗлӗнтермӗш ячӗсем.Хӗрӗсем кулаҫҫӗ ӑшшӑн,Ма хӗпӗртес мар-ха ашшӗн?—Пурте тӑхӑннӑ чечен,Ӗҫ тытсан — вӑр-вар, ӗҫчен.Пӗрисем акаҫҫе тырӑ,Теприсен юрри [...]
I found this little bit of trivia from Raija Barten’s Mordvalaiskielten rakenne ja kehitys (Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society, 1999) worth translating and sharing. Mordvin also has Indo-Iranian and Iranian loanwords which are not found in other Finno-Ugrian languages. Some 18 items have been found (Korenchy 1988: 675; only Hungarian has more of these loans: in Hungarian [...]
I arrived in Almaty two days ago and have had much better luck acquiring Kazakh language resources than on my last visit. My first find was Тіл ұстарт: қазақ тілі/казахский язык учебный комплекс. (Almaty: Жибек жолы, 1996) ISBN 5-7667-3819-6. This is yet another one of those annoying textbooks that seem so common in the former [...]