Christopher Culver’s Linguistic Weblog

In the course of updating the installation of the LaTeX typesetting system on my computer, I was randomly reading the supplied documentation and discovered a remarkable Greek typeface that I had never come across before. This typeface is most notable for its use in printed editions of the Philokalia, the great compendium of Orthodox teaching [...]

Somehow I missed John McWhorter’s article ‘The Cosmopolitan Tongue: the universality of English’ in the World Affairs Journal last autumn. McWhorter’s contribution is a standard description of the increasing rate of language death and what exactly is being lost, but he tries to look on the bright side that at least peoples that are losing [...]

One of the interesting lexical relationships in languages of the Volga region is that between currency and animal hides. Meadow Mari ə̂r ‘kopek’ was originally identical to ur ‘squirrel’, though when the word was used in the latter sense it did not undergo the sporadic reduction of high vowels in Mari. This equivalency exists also [...]

Paul Goble’s Russian political blog Window on Eurasia recently featured a post whose linguistic ramifications are intriguing: Olzhas Suleymenov, the Kazakh author of a book that some have helped lead to the rise of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, says that he welcomes its translation into Ukrainian because Ukrainians will understand that [...]

The phenomenon of vowel rotation in Volga Tatar – the reduction of original high vowels and the raising of original mid vowels to fill their place – is evident to anyone who knows any other Turkic language. In fact, especially troublesome for this language learner are such reversals as Tat. iske ‘old’ ~ Turkish eski [...]