Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

I’ve now returned to Helsinki, but shortly before leaving Chuvashia I bought Nikolaj Ivanovich Ashmarin’s great dictionary of the Chuvash language. Begun in 1928, the Словарь чувашского языка ran to seventeen volumes. The first several volumes include definitions in Latin and Russian, but most of the volumes have definitions in Russian only. There are citations [...]

Over at his excellent weblog Rénhírek, László Fejes has written several concise introductions to the vowel harmony of various Uralic languages. I’ve translated below his Nganasan description. The Nganasan vowel inventory We the following vowels in Nganasan: i, y, ü, u, e, ə, o, a. The majority of these can be compared to the similarly [...]

While reading a piece of Chuvash poetry, I discovered that the Chuvash word tuj ‘to feel’ is cognate with what in other Turkic languages means ‘to hear’, e.g. Turkish duymak, Kazakh тыңдау. We find this same relationship in a number of other language families. Latin sentīre ‘to feel’ became Italian sentire ‘to hear’. Bulgarian чувствувам [...]

An irksome downside of using Russian-language books for studying the minority languages of Russia are the patriotic poems offered as reading selections. In Andreev’s Чувашский язык we find many such praises of the region which are very familiar to those who were schooled here. Take, for example, Valeriy Akhun’s Тӑван ҫӗршыв (Native Land): Тӑван ҫӗршыв [...]

My one day in Kazan’ this year was spent mostly looking for Tatar learning materials, which seem less visible this time than during my last visit in the spring of 2007. The easternmost bookstore on ul. Baumana, where I saw many Tatar books before, has now gone out of business (though the big sign Китаплар [...]

When I was in Kyrgyzstan in June, I lost my Russian-English-Russian dictionary, Random House’s pocket dictionary that had served me well for over six years. I looked around for a new one in Bishkek, but options were few and in the end I got a cheap dictionary that evidentally had been made by a local [...]

The Mari El regional government’s newspaper Марий Эл is often a tiresome piece of propaganda that seems bent on crowding out independent Mari media, but at least it sometimes teaches vocabulary on important international themes while other Mari newspapers revolve around the same rustic necessities of village life. Казань аэропортышто пограничник-влак кугу тӱшка дене наркотикым [...]

У Сугынь (Хельсинки: Библийым кусарыме институт, 2007) ISBN 978-952-5634-12-9. Last year a translation of the New Testament into Meadow Mari was finally published. While the Chuvash New Testament in my departmental library is a century old, there was long a conspicuous lack of a Bible translation into its large northern neighbour whose half a million [...]

Mikko Korhonen’s history Finno-Ugrian Language Studies in Finland 1828–1918 (Helsinki: Societas Scientarum Fenica, 1986) has a number of interesting anecdotes, but this one proved a bit disconcerting considering that tomorrow I leave for a month of fieldwork in Mari El and Chuvashia. Korhonen tells of the early Neogrammarian scholar of Finno-Ugrian linguistics, Arvid Oscar Gustav [...]

I don’t recall the issue being so clearly explained in any of my initial readings, but it seems clear that the appearance of h is constrained in most of the Baltic Finnic languages. One notes that Baltic Finnic has h from pre-consonantal *k in a number of common words, such as Finnish lähteä ‘to leave’ [...]