Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

In his textbook Teach Yourself Beginner’s Hindi Script Rupert Snell offers the following charming anecdote: Legend has it that in the days of the Raj the British memsahibs, indifferent to real Hindi, would learn simple Hindi commands by assimilating them to English phrases: ‘There was a banker’ was to be interpreted by servants as representing [...]

While the poetry Gennady Aigi wrote in Russian from the 1950s through the 1980s was published in three large collections after perestroika, his Chuvash-language poems were much smaller in number and appeared in the individual collection Сурхи йӗпхӳ (Springtime Drizzle) put out by Chuvashkoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo in 1990. These poems date from 1948 to 1989 [...]

Continuing my exploration of Tatar ortographical ambiguity, I might mention the fairly common words сәгать /sægæt/ ‘hour’ and мәкаль /mæqæl/ ‘riddle’. Typically such words would be straightforwardly spelt with two front low vowel signs, e.g. һәйкәл ‘monument’. However, Tatar speakers here directly represent the frontness only of the first vowel in сәгать. The second vowel [...]

While its modified Cyrillic script in general serves Tatar quite well, and I don’t understand the urgency with which some call for a switch to the Latin alphabet,there are some cases where Tatar’s Cyrillic system is frustratingly ambiguous. In Proto-Turkic the velar stops had back allomorphs [q] and [ɣ] before back vowels, and front allomorphs [...]

Sergei Chavain’s 1907 short story ‘In the Forest’ (Чодыраште) does everything it can to make the Tatars seem like the cruelest foes of the Mari. Surely these attitudes were wholly due to the influence of the Russians. In the Russian national mythos, the Muslim Tatars were a diabolic people whose ‘yoke’ was thrown off by [...]

This excerpt from the second chapter of Konstantin Ivanov’s long poem Narspi describes the wealth of Mikheter, father of the maiden Narspi. This wealth, immense in a village, pales next to the riches outside of Chuvashia, a fact which I suspect Ivanov was aware of. «…Михетере мӗн ҫитмен?Мӗнӗм ҫук-ши ҫуртӑмра?Кӗмӗл тенкӗ, тӗртнӗ пирСахал-ши-мӗн ҫӳпҫемре?Тырӑ-пулӑ туллиехИшӗлмест-и [...]

It’s funny how some train of reasoning one casually embarks on can reveal major connections between languages that one should have noticed from the start years ago. While thinking yesterday of the Mari lüštaš ‘to milk’, I realized that it couldn’t be descended from the Proto-Uralic root lüps- as it is, because ps > št [...]

For a long time I have been worried by some of Peter Ladefoged’s remarks on endangered languages which have been widely quoted in the literature of the last 15 years. The most noteworthy is his anecdote of talking with a Dahalo speaker who is proud that his sons have been to school and claims, smiling, [...]