Asked GPT which classical composers it would recommend to me, knowing my personality by now. It said Arvo Pärt and Sibelius. Those are, of course, exactly the two I’ve been listening to for years. Nothing left to discover here, apparently.

"Ruins of Bulgar" (1860), published as part of the celebrated Meyer's Universum series.

Hot take: Sprachbund is not a historical object but an epistemic placeholder. It is just a way of saying: “something happened historically between these 3+ languages, but we have not yet reconstructed exactly what, where, when, and how.”

In 1852, the Chuvash writer Spiridon Mikhailov-Yanduš recorded a curious hierarchy of languages. “The more sensible Chuvash” knew of 77 languages in the world—but regarded only six as principal: Tatar, Chuvash, Cheremis, Mordvin, Kalmyk and Russian.

Far too much attention is paid to distinguishing scholarship from pseudoscience, and far too little to distinguishing good scholarship from bad scholarship. In small, specialized fields, the latter problem can be especially damaging.

It took me years to realize that two Malovs I knew from very different parts of Turkology were father and son. Euthymius Malov (1835–1918), an archpriest in Kazan, taught “anti-Muslim subjects” at the Kazan Theological Academy.

I should probably learn by heart al-Muqaddasī’s list of commodities traded in the 10th century from Volga Bulgharia to Khwarazm: sables, miniver, ermines, and the fur of the steppe foxes, martens, foxes, beavers, spotted hares, and goats;

A small Baader–Meinhof moment today. I first learned about the Udmurt belief concerning the seventh son in a family, believed to possess special magical powers. He is called śeti̮ ni̮lpi — literally ‘a braid-decor child’ (I have no idea why).

In 1861, German-American linguist Frederick Louis Otto Roehrig, who had worked on several North American language families, wrote to Kazan University—in Tatar, in Arabic script—proposing scholarly contact with the Tatar educator Ibrahim Khalfin.

Bronze Age barrows, a common feature of the Volga–Kama landscape, were traditionally called Ulăp tăpri ‘Ulăp’s earth’ among the Chuvash: soil thought to have fallen from the bast shoes of Ulăp, the giant primordial ancestor.

I recently started working systematically through the surviving written evidence for the language of pre-Mongol Volga Bulgharia, and was struck by how often individual forms are interpreted with remarkably little regard for the broader linguistic history of the region.

Two Chuvash-language pamphlets from our family library, both printed in 5,000 copies. One, from 1958, attacks belief in the vĕri śĕlen — a flying fiery serpent said to enter the homes of lonely people through chimneys, enter into various kinds of relations with them, and cause severe illness.

Two Chuvash weekday names become much more transparent when compared with parallel naming patterns in the neighboring languages of the Volga–Kama region. tu-nti=kun ‘Monday’ is the first case: it is derived from tu- ‘do’, originally ‘give birth’.

One of the most satisfying things is realizing that your home landscape is inside history, not outside it. In 922, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān crossed a river he called جرمسان *Śärəmsän — and entered Volga Bulgharia.

And this epitaph from the vicinity of Kazan, dated 1297/98, commemorates a Volga Bulghar lady named الطن برت *e̮ltə̑n bʏrtɪ, literally ‘A Grain of Gold’. The modern Chuvash equivalent is Ïlttə̑n pə°rčə°.

One of the most astonishing things to come out of my recent dive into family genealogy was discovering the name of my great-great-great-great-grandfather: Ӑntikkav, son of Sandräv, born around 1809.

I genuinely don't know where people find the motivation to publish reviews of other people's work. Especially after recently spending a month of my life explaining, in exhaustive detail, why an abysmally shitty piece of research is, in fact, an abysmally shitty piece of research.

Recently a European colleague invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited volume on a very niche topic with very few potential contributors, and also asked for data to which my team has exclusive access. I happily agreed to both.

For a very long time, I have been struck by how catastrophically the level of research in my field declined between the turn of the 20th century and the second half of the century—and, in many respects, beyond.

An epitaph from the city of Bolghar, dated 1309/10, commemorates a man named وُرُمْ الِبْ *wʊrʊm ålɤp, literally ‘Tall Ulăp’. The stem *wʊrʊm ultimately yielded Chuvash vărăm ‘long; tall’. Ulăp is the giant progenitor of Bulgharo-Chuvash mythology.

From Bulgharo-Chuvash epigraphy: an inscription dated 1306. جَرِمڛَن شِونَ بَرڛَ وَلتِ Transliteration: ǰArImsAn šIwnA bArsA wAltI

My current understanding of the Bulghar–Chuvash substrate in Tatar ethnogenesis is as follows. The language of the Volga Bulghars from the late 7th to the early 13th century belonged to the R-Turkic branch. Its modern descendant is Chuvash.

Around 1050, the Ghaznavid author Gardīzī completed his Zayn al-akhbār, a compilation drawing on Arabic and Persian geographical works, including several sources that are now lost.

Almost twenty years ago I came across this example in Ashmarin’s Chuvash dictionary. Ever since, at least once a month, I have found myself thinking about the note attached to it: “Proverb.”

I have recently started checking our family tree, known mostly from oral tradition, against archival records. For three baptized Chuvash lines this is possible through church registers. The fourth, unbaptized line is mostly invisible there.

An attic with a chest full of Chuvash books

So here is Mari written in Arabic script: پستملا يمو پيرکم پو Pə̑s(t)mə̑la, Jumo, perkem pu 'Bi-'sm-illāh, Jumo [the Supreme Deity], grant [us] prosperity!' Documented in Mustafād al-Akhbār fī Aḥwāl Qazān wa-Bulghār (1885) by Shihāb al-Dīn Marjānī.

This week, the leading Chuvash archaeologist Nikolai Myasnikov and I presented a major joint study. Combining comparative linguistics, archaeology, and written sources, we addressed one of the central problems of Chuvash ethnogenesis: the origin of the ethnonym Chuvash.

1990: Uli Schamiloglu notes that research on the ethnogenesis of the Kazan Tatars largely remains trapped in the paradigm of 19th-century romantic nationalism, while the “Volga Bulgars → Kazan Tatars” continuity functions as a dogma not only in politics, but in scholarship as well.

Our project on documenting Turkic runiform inscriptions has just published its first article in Turkish, devoted to our 2024 fieldwork. A good moment to recall that season: Southern Khakassia, searching for Yenisei Turkic inscriptions at local burial grounds, and life in a wooden yurt.