Opening a Harrassowitz (Wiesbaden) or Winter (Heidelberg) publication from the 1950s and 1960s is to discover a wealth of linguistic information organized just the way it should be. Even if the author’s prose is abysmal and his pedagogical method suspect, I just find it so easy to absorb information out of these books on the [...]
It’s nice to always be learning new languages over an academic career and continually expanding one’s knowledge, But had I come across de Rachewiltz & Rybatzki’s Introduction to Altaic Philology (Leiden: Brill, 2010) as an undergraduate, I think I would have found the following passage intimidating and slightly foreboding. After mentioning the extant ancient Turkic [...]
Last October I wrote a post on some odd words attributed to the Kalmaks in the Kyrgyz poem Kökötöydün ašı. The manuscript of the Manas epic prepared by Wilhelm Radloff features these and more in a passage where the Kyrgyz lord Kökčö, hearing that Manas has moved his camp towards him, tries to gather intelligence [...]
In last month’s issue of the University of Helsinki’s magazine, Yliopisto 2 (20. helmikuuta 2009) writer Maria Manner profiles Juha Janhunen, one of our linguistics luminaries. Prof Janhunen oversees Altaic studies and his own research has ranged from the Samoyed languages of the Uralic family to the internal relationships of Mongolian. Here’s my translation of [...]
In Biliktu Bashi: G.J. Ramstedt’s Career as a Scholar, a biography of the comparative linguist and founder of the Altaic school, Harry Halén tells of Ramstedt’s time in Mongolia: Having obtained some Mongolian textbooks Ramstedt noticed that the language was really quite easy. He found the Russian-Mongolian phrasebook by Colonel Voloshinov (Русско-монголо-бурятский переводчикъ. 2nd ed., [...]