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.
As this weblog contains content in numerous languages, written in various scripts, readers are encouraged to download and regularly update the fonts developed by the DejaVu font project.
You are currently browsing the Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog weblog archives for November, 2008.
While I do hope to learn Japanese one day to read the works of such great novelists as Kawabata and Mishima, I doubt I will ever be more than the most casual of dilettantes in Japanese historical linguistics. That said, I do like skimming books on the field, and have heard enough of Roy Andrew [...]
I find it rather odd that Romanian has /f/ in some borrowings from Common Slavonic and Hungarian when the CS original had /x/. I don’t think I’ve come across this kind of shift in any other languages. To give examples: CS praxŭ ‘dust’ ∼ Ro. praf ‘dust, powder’. CS vrŭxŭ ‘top, summit’ ∼ Ro. vârf [...]