Some Book Recommendations

I've been reading two fantastic books right now that I wanted to pass along to everyone:

Velimir Khlebnikov: A Critical Study By Raymond Cooke -

It is available at amazon.com and runs around $25. A little on the pricey side but it's a fascinating piece. I had never heard of Khlebnikov prior to reading a biography on Mayakovsky. So I decided to check him out. Sadly it seems hard to find stuff about Khlebnikov. This book is very accessible and not overly "academic." What I like about it is it covers a wide range of Khlebnikov's ideas and samples of his works so you can pick out what you like to explore further. I am so amazed by this man.

Truly ahead of his time he was part of the Russian group of "Futurists" in Russia in the 1920s. His hallmark was transrational language. Basically he felt there was meaning behind not just words themselves but in their very letters. For example he made poems out of the sounds of birds and felt the first consonant of words often had an intrinsic meaning often related to time and space. He was a mathematics enthusiast as well as a writer and linguist so he combines his passion for numerology along with his interest in semantics. His experiments with language were far reaching. He even wrote a 400 line poem completely in palindromes. Not all of his theories about the intrinsic meaning of language hold up in the modern age but people are amazed how many of them do. The guy was just a total genius.

You probably won't understand everything presented in the book but it will get those brain cells humming and if nothing else you will really be impressed by the man behind it.

The Development of Russian Verse - Meter and its Meaning By Michael Wachtel

Again at amazon.com for around $25. There are tons of books about Russian poetry but very little on how to actually understand it. This book fills that void. What i like about it so much is it covers a little of everything from ballads to ultra modern forms. Basically they show how poets borrowed forms and themes from one another throughout the ages and added their own little twists to them. It's fascinating how poets reinterpret forms and themes utilizing their own personal style. It's not too terribly technical - the poems are analyzed in depth so even if the original makes no sense to you at all the author works through it to help you grasp it meaning. What I love is that I have discovered a whole host of new writers that I hadn't heard of before from this book that I am eager to explore further. The variety, presentation and overall theme are very well done and a great starting point for those interested in learning more about Russian poetry beyond Pushkin.

Languages Of India

I found a really interesting site:

http://acharya.iitm.ac.in/mirrors/vv/teacher/select.html

It gives you sound files of native speakers reading the alphabets of basically all the major languages of India from Hindi to Kannada, Punjabi, Gujarati etc. In addition it gives the braille sign and even a video clip of the sign language for each letter as well. Apparently the site is for people who have hearing and sight problems etc. It's very unusual but also a terrific resource. The only thing I haven't got to work successfully on it yet are how to get the fonts to show up properly but when you run your mouse over a letter at the bottom of your screen it gives you the transliteration so that helps at least a bit. Charts of the letters are relatively easy to find elsewhere on the internet such as www.omniglot.com it's just the sound files for the letters that are nearly impossible to find.

What led me to all of this is that I am currently doing a Cherokee Indian writing series on my podcast Armchair Linguist on iTunes and for the next series I really want to do Kannada. I love the writing systems of India I'd like to eventually do shows on all of them.

Italian AudioBooks

For those of you interested in Italian audiobooks here is a free site:

http://www.liberliber.it/audioteca/c/collodi/index.htm

I'm not all that great in Italian but from what I can tell looks like they have a pretty good selection. The one I have linked above is for Pinocchio which they say is good for beginners like me.

Romani Language

This is a really neat link:

http://romani.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/files/cd1.shtml

You can download mp3s and an interactive DVD all about the Romani language as it is spoken in Britain. It also talks about Romani throughout the rest of Europe a little as well. The rest of the site is really more for the heavy duty researches (looking up grammar forms etc.)but this part in and of itself is really neat for a quick intro.

Learning Estonian

I saw that game show Deal or No Deal go to Estonia so I got curious about the language. I know not a deep compelling cultural reason to look at a language but then I'm not all that conventional anyway :)

Seems to be a bit tough to find resources but this one doesn't look bad:

http://www.learningestonian.com/

Everything is free and there is audio. It looks like it's still a bit under construction as not all of the links are working properly (i.e. audio)but hopefully that will all get ironed out soon.

This one appears to be more complete and looks really good especially for a grammar overview:

http://www.engetranslations.ee/Introtoestonian.htm

Typing In Russian

As we know so well it is downright painful most of the time to type in Russian without installing 10,000 different fonts most of which don't work or you can never remember what key goes with what letter etc.

So I finally found a solution:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/screen_e.htm

I love this because it's free, has the keyboard on the screen that you can either mouse click or simply type on your keyboard like you normally would. No installing anything. Just copy and paste your text wherever you want once you're done. This is the simplest alternative I've found so hopefully it will help out some of you.