Praise for Two of My Papers

Mutual Intelligibility of Languages in the Slavic Family

Intelligibility studies are both interesting and of importance for the study of phonology, grammar, historical linguistics, and the effect of language contact situations, as well as the sociocultural factors influencing languages perceived as high or low status, and so on.

Lindsay here presents the intelligibility between many of the Slavic languages in great detail – and this clears up many common and unspoken questions about these languages…the paper comes well recommended!

This work yet remains unpublished. At the moment, it is 260 pages. At this point it is pretty much a book. It is simply a massive overview of all of the Slavic languages and it does add some new languages to Slavic. It also changes the classification around a bit. This might be harder to publish, as Slavicists are a pretty stuck-up lot and if you are not a Slavicist yourself, they pretty much don’t want to talk to you or publish your work.

Turkologists are a bit like that too, but there are not nearly as many of them, and they accepted my work as an amateur.

I did have one Slavicist tell me that all of this data has never been published before in a single work. Sure it has mostly been published, but most of it is in obscure journal papers that no one reads.  And no doubt a lot of good Slavicist work is being done in Slavic languages themselves and not in English. I know it is true in the Balkans as much of the work is still published in Serbo-Croatian.

I sent the paper out to a few Slavicists, including some of the top ones in the field, but I never heard back from them. All of these folks are extremely busy even at an advanced age and this is pretty much a book after all. They are always behind in their reading, preparing new papers, teaching, etc.

Mutual Intelligibility Among the Turkic Languages

A massive paper by Robert Lindsay on the study of mutual intelligibility of the Turkic languages, dispelling many myths and including language examples, historical considerations, and more – heartily recommended for any Turkologist or student of any Turkic language!

This paper was published as an 81 page chapter in The Handbook of Endangered Turkic Languages, Volume 1. There is a url of it in published form if you would like to it.

I haven’t got much other feedback from it except from a major Turkologist who said she really liked it. I was amazed.

A Turkologist whose work was quoted incorrectly was very angry at me for misquoting what she said. I am not a Turkologist myself so this stuff is going to happen. I tried to assuage her but she wasn’t having anything of it.

No one yet has written a book review on this book, nor has anyone commented on my re-do of Turkic, cumulatively adding 14 new languages and changing the classification a bit. The Wikipedia article about Turkic classification does not include mine. There is a chart at the end with my classification in it.

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