Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

In the most recent edition of Teach Yourself Modern Persian (London: Hodder & Soughton, 2004), author Narguess Farzad pokes fun at the textbooks of yesteryear with their obsolete examples no longer useful for the contemporary student. He quotes from the Reverend William St Clair-Tisdall’s Modern Persian Conversation Grammar (1923), which features a dialogue between a [...]

Continuing on from my last post on the difficulties of learning colloquial Finnish, I thought it might be helpful to summarize how various introductory materials for English speakers handle the divide between the literary standard and popular speech. Leila White, From Start to Finnish (Helsinki: Finn Lectura, 2003). Teaches the standard language only. In the [...]

My last several posts on Finnish textbooks have gotten some traffic from people doing web searches for Finnish learning materials. Since there’s people out there in need of guidance, I’d like to write something to make people aware of the immense gap between the standard Finnish of textbooks and what one will hear on the [...]

While I have learnt some languages fairly quickly and feel that I have mastered grammar if not idiom, Russian continues to present challenges. No matter how much I speak the language (it’s sometimes my daily working language in Helsinki), how much time I spend in Russia among native speakers, and how many textbooks I work [...]

Whitney, Arthur M. Teach Yourself Finnish (London: English Universities Press, 1954). It’s amazing how long it took textbook authors to realize that the most effective way to teach a modern language would be to equip the reader with how to handle himself in common everyday situations. The first incarnation of Teach Yourself Finnish, written by [...]

Austerlitz, Robert. Finnish Reader and Glossary (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1963). Routledge printing 1997, ISBN 0700708154. Nowadays, a foreigner wishing to learn Finnish can choose from any number of well-designed courses, whether for classroom use or self-study, in print or on DVD, but it wasn’t always this way. Until just a couple of decades [...]

Back in April an article about the weirdness of Pirahã appeared in The New Yorker, written by John Colapinto. It has come to my attention now that popular news sites like Slashdot and Digg have featured stories on the supposed lack of numbers in the language. While in many respects the article is informative, especially [...]

Rénhírek, the excellent Hungarian-language weblog on Finno-Ugrian issues maintained by László Fejes, brings my attention to a remarkable item seen in Mari El. In his post he writes: In Mari El it is pretty rare to come across Mari-language signs, especially ones that are not put up by the local government. (Of course, local government [...]

Though I’ve studied Indo-European linguistics for many years, I never before read an issue of Indogermanische Forschungen, the field’s main journal. Today, while browsing in the National Library of Finland, I came across issue 112 (2007) of the publication, and it provided some entertaining reading material. Francisco R. Adrados’ paper ‘Must we again postulate a [...]

Harrison, David K. When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2007). ISBN 978-0-19-518192-0. Every two weeks, a language dies. Over the past several years there have been several books written about this sad phenomenon, ranging from popular works such as Mark Abley’s Spoken Here: [...]