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 February, 2009.
A recent article at the website of BBC News has been getting some attention in popular Internet fora. Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say. Reading University researchers claim ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘two’ and ‘three’ are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years. Their computer model analyses [...]
It occasionally happens that a word newly encountered, which I suppose to be completely defunct and perhaps even a hapax legomenon, is met again soon after somewhere very different. While reading Saint-John Perse’s work Amers, his long poem in honor of the sea, I was not sure of the definition of one of the terms [...]
None of the recently published Tatar textbook has much in the way of long texts, but I’ve found a book that will fill that gap. Asija Gyjlaedzhetdinova’s Татар телен өйрәнүчеләр өчен тектстлар (Kazan: “Яңалиф” нәшрияты, 2004) ISBN 5943520155 is a collection of short texts meant for school pupils who already know some Tatar, but it’s [...]