Cambridge University’s Research News brings a press release that ought to excite readers here. A cuneiform inscription has been discovered in Western Turkey, dating to the end of the 8th century BC, written in a previously unknown language. One notion is that it may be Shubrian – the indigenous language spoken in the Tušhan area [...]
In a post over at the blog Memiyawanzi, the proprietor alerts us to the latest entry in the red-cover Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series, Linguistic Fieldwork: A Student Guide by Jeanette Sakel and Daniel Everett (yes, that Daniel Everett). He offers us a short review, and as with all new introductions to fieldwork I was [...]
In researching my M.A. thesis on verbs of motion in Mari and Chuvash, I discovered a typology developed by Leonard Talmy that categorizes languages according to the semantics of their motion verbs. Basically, it comes down to whether the main verb in a sentence about motion expresses the manner of motion, or the direction of [...]
As a followup to yesterday’s post on the debate about relying on SIL International for linguistics resources, I should mention that SIL is not the only Christian organization producing documentation of minority language that the academy finds useful. The Institute for Bible Translation has published translations of individual gospels, children’s Bibles and occasionally entire Bibles [...]
The September 2009 (Volume 85, Number 3) issue of Language features a series of articles on the controversial relationship between the academy and the Christian missionary organization SIL International. The authors make some good points on the problems inherent in relying so much on an organization with an agenda beyond saving languages, and one that [...]
One paper I’ve always admired is Gerd Fraenkel’s ‘Mutual Intelligibility Between Turkish of Turkey and Azerbaijani’ in American Studies in Altaic Linguistics ed. Nicholas Poppe (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1962). After writing in an earlier work that these two languages are about as mutually intelligible as Danish and Norwegian, Fraenkel decided to validate this assertion with [...]
As I am working hard to expand my Romanian vocabulary and am furiously absorbing words from all the various texts I read, I was reminded of this XKCD strip. The foreign learner often has no way to know that the vocabulary he learns from older texts is now obsolete. When I recently compared, for example, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]