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 August, 2008.
In his Sumerian Grammar (Leiden: Brill, 2003), Dietz Otto Edzard quickly disposes with the idea of easily linking Sumerian to other language families. Would that these arguments were formulated with maximum effect for Hungarian nationalist crackpots and their layman supporters among others: Scholars have wasted much effort looking for living cognates of ancient Sumerian, not [...]
While the most frequently cited Indo-European loans in Mari are from the Iranian languages, there are a few examples that suggest that at one point the Baltic or Germanic languages contributed material to the Finno-Ugrian languages while there was still a continuum from Scandinavia to the Volga basin. Knowing that Finnish h is often from [...]
The international edition of Helsingin Sanomat continues to offer material for people interested in the Uralic languages with a profile of Pekka Sammallahti, the foremost living scholar of the Sámi languages and the author of what is for many students the way into the field, The Saami Languages: An Introduction. The bit on language preservation [...]
In the collection Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence ed. Joseph C. Salmons and Brian D. Joseph (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998) there is a paper and a response to it that brought to my attention a surprisingly widely attested and versatile Indo-European root. Four scholars, Alexis Manaster Ramer, Peter A. Michalove, Karen S. Baertsch and Karen L. [...]
Helsingin Sanomat recently featured an article on a family trying to preserve Skolt Sámi, and I’m happy to see that this has made it to the English-language edition for the benefit of international readers: A flurry of activity is going on in the living room of an apartment in Ivalo in Finnish Lapland. Two-year-old Janna-Maria [...]