The following recipe joke comes from an article at the Bashkir Mari newspaper Чолман: Олигарх дене пайремым эртараш шонет гын, тудлан тамле кöстенечым ямдыле. Тидлан ик комбо, литрат пеле йошкар арака, 500 грамм кол шыл, 15 муно, 3 стакан рис, 1 банке кол консерве (ÿйыштö ямдылыме), 3 шоган, 1 банке оливке, 250 грамм майонез, шинчал, [...]
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 [...]
I’m not really sure what to make of this passage in András Róna-Tas’ paper ‘Turkic influence on the Uralic languages’, found in The Uralic Languages ed. Denis Sinor (Amsterdam: Brill, 1988). Róna-Tás is describing borrowings between Ancient Turkic and Proto-Samoyed: PS kåptə̂- ‘to castrate’, kåptə̂ ‘a castrated reindeer ox’ (Ne, Ng, En, Sk: JJ 60) [...]
While my understanding of spoken Danish has now surpassed my understanding of spoken Swedish (it’s the Swedes who speak as if they have potatoes in their mouths!), I still love jokes about how Danish is completely unintelligible. I got a lot of laughs out of this bit (Parts One and Two) from the Norwegian comedy [...]
Here’s an amusing photo from the International Finno-Ugrian Students’ Conference (IFUSCO), held last May in Saransk, Mordovia, where I happened to be wearing my t-shirt with the Glagolitic script on the same day that a student of Hungarian from Warsaw was wearing his ancient Hungarian script t-shirt.
In addition to my entirely respectable studies of historical linguistics, I must confess a love of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat, whom unless you’ve been living under a rock this last decade you know as the appalling reporter from an entirely fantasy Kazakhstan. There’s something just so enthralling about Borat’s accent and lexicon that makes [...]