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 June, 2009.
One of the peculiar parallel developments in Mari and Chuvash is that they both employ a different verb in basic go expressions than the rest of their respective language families. For the Uralic family, the central verb of source- and path-oriented motion in the proto-language was *mene-, based on comparison of Khanty, Hungarian, and North [...]
The Crestomație de literatură română veche edited by I. C. Chițimia and Stela Toma (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Dacia, 1984) that I picked up for cheap last year in a Cluj antiquary has so much trivia on Slavonic hangers-on in the early modern Romanian lexicon that I could do an endless series of posts here. Less visible [...]
Turning the pages of Timofej Jevsevjev’s Mari song collection as edited by Saarinen (1994) reveals a large amount of stock imagery and phrases with which the Mari liked to make up songs. Take for example the folksong epigram from Sergei Chavain’s novel Elnet: Кеҥежым кайышым лышташ йымач, / Телым кайышым лум ӱмбач. (‘In summer my [...]
There has been discussion here previously about Tatar’s flip-flop of mid and high vowels, where Common Turkic high vowels /u/, /ü/ and /ı/ were reduced and lowered, and the Common Turkic mid vowels /e/, /o/ and /ö/ rose up to fill their place. Poppe (1968: 9) gives the following vowel inventory for standard Tatar: front [...]
It’s remarkably common cross-linguistically for the word ‘head’ to be found either in source-oriented expressions of motion, or in expressions meaning ‘begin’, both of which might be joined into the same semantic sphere. For the former, consider the English verbal phrases ‘head off to’ and ‘head down to’. In Veps, this phenomenon appears in nominal [...]
You may have noticed that the site has a new name and URL. I am feeling more confident in my research, having nearly completed my M.A. and thinking ahead to my application for doctoral studies, so I think the site deserves a new look. I also want to write in a more serious manner than [...]