Just two briefly mention two substrate hypotheses which I’ve come across in the last 24 hours: Theo Vennemann posits a Semitic substrate for Proto-Germanic, an encounter made possible by Phoenician colonization of the North Sea area. Among the supposed loanwords are the names of the Germanic gods Pol and Baldur, none other than the Semitic [...]
In Romani: a linguistic introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Yaron Matras gives several examples of how the Roma people have been very inventive with names for the countries and people encountered on their westward migration (pp. 26–27): Characteristic of Romani is – alongside replications of nations’ self-ascription (e.g. sasitko ‘German’, njamco ‘German’, valšo ‘French’) – the widespread [...]
Sheldon Pollock, one of the most prominent scholars of Sanskrit literature today, has contributed a jeremiad entitled ‘Crisis in the Classics’ to the journal Social Research Vol. 78 No. 1 (Spring 2011) on the decline of classical philology in India. The article is available as a PDF and its 28 pages have so much good material that [...]
In his textbook Teach Yourself Beginner’s Hindi Script Rupert Snell offers the following charming anecdote: Legend has it that in the days of the Raj the British memsahibs, indifferent to real Hindi, would learn simple Hindi commands by assimilating them to English phrases: ‘There was a banker’ was to be interpreted by servants as representing [...]
It’s not often I learn anything on Wikipedia, reference to current scholarship being so rare, but an addition today to the article on Siever’s Law suggests an interesting recent development: A second difficulty has emerged much more recently (Sihler 2006): the actual passages from the Rigveda cited in Edgerton’s two large articles in 1934 and [...]
LingNews.net, a conglomeration of language-related links founded by Bridget Samuels, recently linked to a Times of India article reporting the end of Sanskrit studies at Cambridge. Sad news, although I never thought before that there even was significant scholarship in Sanskrit there, since Oxford and SOAS get all the attention. The article mentioned an online [...]
The Early Indo-European Languages Online series of short introductions put up by the A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture, Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, has a couple of new offerings. Introduction to the Ancient Sanskrit Texts cannot really compete with the traditional primers, but it does provide useful supporting [...]
Yves Codet has come up with LaTeX Unicode hyphenation patterns for Sanskrit and Prakrit in the Devanagari, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu scripts. These work only for the Xetex form of TeX (formerly for Mac OSX only, coming soon to Linux and Windows). Nice to see that progress continues to be made in typesetting non-European [...]
Christian Coseru at Australia National University has written a guide on Sanskrit Unicode Text Processing using Emacs (‘the One True Text-Editor’) and LaTeX. Of course, it is just romanisation, because full Devanagari support isn’t ready yet in Emacs, but it should prove useful to comparative linguists. Coseru links to a page by J Hanneder on [...]