I found this little bit of trivia from Raija Barten’s Mordvalaiskielten rakenne ja kehitys (Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society, 1999) worth translating and sharing. Mordvin also has Indo-Iranian and Iranian loanwords which are not found in other Finno-Ugrian languages. Some 18 items have been found (Korenchy 1988: 675; only Hungarian has more of these loans: in Hungarian [...]
The Sami-titled Festschrift for Pekka Sammallahti Sámit, sánit, sátnehámit. Riepmočála Pekka Sammallahtii miessemánu 21. beaivve 2007, published last spring as Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 253, is now available online. There are a number of interesting papers here, published in Sami, German, Finnish or English. One of them in particular, Juha Janhunen’s ‘The primary laryngeal [...]
YLE, the Finnish broadcasting company, has run a Russian-language programme called Uzy Druzhby, but it is now supplemented with news snippets in Erzya and Komi. These can be listened to online. I’ve always been rather disappointed that the library of my department doesn’t have audio material for students to reach real proficiency in listening, but [...]
This is unfortunate news for both Erzya-language publishing and for the press freedoms of Russia’s language minorities. There’s an English-language article at the Finnish-Russian Civic Forum on the start to this: Authorities in Russia’s autonomous Republic of Mordovia have pressed charges against the independent newspaper, Erzyanj Mastor (“Land of Erzya”), demanding its closure, Radio Svoboda [...]
Niina Aasmäe’s doctoral thesis Stress and Quantity in Erzya (PDF), recently defended at the University of Tartu, is now freely available on the Web.
On the URA-List, Johanna Laakso brought attention to an announcement at an Adobe employee’s weblog suggesting that Adobe will not be supporting the Cyrillic characters used in Mari, Udmurt, and Komi-Zyrian, as well as the neighbouring Turkic languages Bashkir and Chuvash. Apparently even common Old Church Slavonic characters will not be provided. Feedback can be [...]
You’ll need some knowledge of Russian to make your way through it—most links on the sketchy English version of the site lead to Russian pages—but the “Minority Languages of Russia on the Net” is a great list of resources, such as an English-Moksha (Mordvin) dictionary, an ethnographic study of the Eastern Mari, and a Russian-language [...]
An announcement from the Ura-list about a new book by the scholar Helimski: Mari und Mordwinen im heutigen Russland: Sprache, Kultur, Identität / Hrsg. von Eugen Helimski, Ulrike Kahrs und Monika Schötschel (Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica, 66). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005 ISBN: 3-447-05166-3 http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/ Im immer noch polyethnischen und mehrsprachigen Rußland stellen die Siedlungsgebiete der [...]
Following the launch of the Info-RM site with news in the Erza and Moksha varieties of Mordvin, announced here a couple of months ago, Эрзянь правда (Erźa Truth) now provides more news in that apparently most lexically Russified of Uralic languages.
There is a fantastic new Russian news site about life in Mordovia that carries all news in both the Erźa (a.k.a. Erzya) and Moksha Mordvin languages. Translations in English and Russian are also provided, meaning that the site provides a small remedy for the lack of learning materials for those languages in English. The first [...]