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 August, 2009.
The Chuvash branch of Turkic actually preserved some lexical items common to the whole Turkic family, but you’d never guess it from looking at modern Chuvash. Here the early Chuvash loans into Hungarian prove essential for knowing the whole history of r-type Turkic. The first example is Proto-Turkic *teŋiz ‘sea’. Chuvash must have inherited this, [...]
A few weeks ago the online Mari-language newspaper Čolman published an article which gives a little view of life in a Mari village in the Republic of Bašqortostan. The article was entertaining enough, but it left me feeling a little depressed. Even if children grow up in a village where they learn about their native [...]