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 December, 2009.
In the opening chapter of his Introduction to African Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), George Tucker Childs expresses a frustration that I’m sure will be familiar to many: A linguist? When meeting new people, particularly in the United States, one is soon asked, What do you do? Admitting that one is a linguist engenders a [...]
Weblog reader William Taylor draws my attention to the Sino-Platonic Papers, an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the purpose of which is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or [...]
In translating Sergei Chavain’s novel Elnet into English, one of the most difficult aspects of this mainly straightforward tale is the bilingualism of its setting. The simple Mari villagers whose trials and tribulations the novel depicts often come into confrontation with officials who speak only Russian. Chavain highlight these villagers’ citizenship in two worlds by [...]