Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

Though they may not be of any real value, texts written in proto-languages make for fun reading. The study of the Uralic languages doesn’t have anything like Schleicher’s fable, but there’s at least this bit by Janne Saarikivi: ― Muna ki̮nta-uralan śarnaja wolem. Ken tuna wolet? ― Muna si̮xmi̮ käxlen śarnaja wolem. Muna tunem ki̮nta-uralam. [...]

In Indo-European linguistics I so often heard that the proto-language had four clearly defined seasons that I never thought that there could be other prevalent systems of natural cycles. In the collection Проблемы исторической лексикологии чувашского языка (Cheboksary, 1980) N. I. Yegorov contributes a paper titled ‘О названиях времен года в тюркских языках’ (The names [...]

Those who think the interchange of mid and high vowels in Kazan Tatar is amusing might enjoy these examples from North Saami. In this language, low and high vowels (*a and *ä at one end and *i at the other) swapped places in secondary syllables sometime in the past. *nimi ‘name’ > namma. *sompa ‘ring’ [...]

In last month’s issue of the University of Helsinki’s magazine, Yliopisto 2 (20. helmikuuta 2009) writer Maria Manner profiles Juha Janhunen, one of our linguistics luminaries. Prof Janhunen oversees Altaic studies and his own research has ranged from the Samoyed languages of the Uralic family to the internal relationships of Mongolian. Here’s my translation of [...]

I’ve posting Sergei Chavain’s poem Ото (The Grove) here before, but it’s worth showing again in the content of this abstract of Kim Vasin’s study Сергей Чавайн: Жизнь и творчество (Sergei Chavain: His Life and Work) on Chavain’s role in Mari literature. Ик тымык ото уло мемнан элымше,Шога тудо ото кугу ер серыште.Тушто ладыра деч [...]

As the Chuvash have much the same sort of village life as the Mari, and there are still occasional vestiges of Chuvash pagan practices, I thought I should familiarize myself with the Chuvash names for trees as I recently did for Mari. Yulia Dmitrieva made this task much easier with her paper ‘Названия деревьев в [...]

For expressing the equivalent of English ‘I want to…’ Mari has a desiderative conjugation formed with the suffix -ne-, e.g. knigam ludnem ‘I want to read the book’ < ludaš ‘to read’. But there is another expression for appetites and desires, the passive participle with possessive suffixes followed by the 3rd person singular of the [...]

I’ve always found amusing the idea that the Slavs distinguished between themselves and the Germanic tribes as *slověne ‘people of speech’ and *nemĭci ‘mutes’. Evidentally such an opposition exists right the languages I focus on. The now passé appelation ‘Cheremis’ for the Mari, Russian čeremis ~ Tatar čirmes ~ Chuvash śarmə̑s may be derived from [...]

One of my many projects with Mari is a translation of Sergei Chavain’s novel Elnet into English. Portions of the translation will appear here in due time. In the meantime, this description of the novel by Ville Ropponen, from a review of the recent Finnish translation, may do much to introduce the work. The novel [...]

I’ve long heard that words for ‘apple’ and ‘gold’ are well-traveled Wanderwörter, appearing in languages from northwestern Europe to the eastern extremes of Asia. Common Turkic, for example, has alma and altïn respectively. But there’s a suspicion that many more examples of common vocabulary can be found in both Indo-European and Turkic, perhaps loaned from [...]