Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Yesterday I bought in a Cluj used bookstore a Crestomație de literatură română veche (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1983), a selection of early Romanian-language documents edited with commentary, and printed on surprisingly good paper for the Ceaușescu era. As one might expect, the chrestomathy begins with the letter of Neacșu of Câmpulung, the first attestation of [...]

In a Nenets course this fall, I’ve used a lot the Comparative Nenets-Nganasan Multimedia Dictionary compiled by St. Petersburg scholars Marina Lublinskaya and Tatiana Sherstinova, with headwords in those two languages and in Russian and English. The Introduction presents the two languages and their history in a fashion accessible to readers who don’t necessary have [...]

A couple of years ago I read a fascinating paper by the Slavicist B.O. Unbegaun entitled ‘Les noms de la neige en roumain’, collected in Selected Papers on Russian and Slavonic Philology ed. R. Auty & A. E. Pennington (Oxford, 1969). While this theme is especially interesting to me because Cluj lies almost exactly on the isogloss between the words nea and omăt, I thought this paper would appeal to a fairly wide audience, and I felt it didn’t deserve to lie forgotten in an old Festschrift. So, I have translated it here into English. There’s probably a great deal of Franglish, but I’m tired and will further edit later.

Last week Der Spiegel had a photo gallery of selections from a recent ‘Atlas of True Names’, a series of maps showing cities under the etymological meaning of their names. Rome, for instance, is found as ‘Currenton’ (I suppose from a PIE root meaning ‘to flow’, cf. Greek ῥεῖ). Lots of fun. It turns out [...]