HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: phopkins@sol.UVic.CA (Paul Hopkins)
Subject: Re: Ethmylogy for Baltic etc
Organization: University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. CANADA
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 92 07:19:16 GMT

In article <0095E423.4A8F95C0@VENUS> tjk@VENUS (tjk@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Tom Kazmierski)) writes:
>
>I learned from you that Scandinavians refer to it as "East Sea"  - like the 
>Germans. Does anyone know about the Finns? Surely, it's not "East" for them :-)
Well, believe or not, it is.
The Finnish term for 'Baltic Sea' is Ita"meri,
which literally means 'Eastern Sea'.
Interestingly enough, their neighbours to the south, the Estonians, 
call this body of water the La"a"nemeri,
which literally means 'Western Sea'.
So either the Estonians are better with the compass than the Finns :-),
or the Finnish term is a loan translation from Swedish.
Any other suggestions?
>
>Regards
Paul Hopkins
(former) treasurer of the
Finno-Ugric Studies Association of Canada
but certainly not a native speaker of either Finnish or Estonian!
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: sci.lang and its Mutilation
Followup-To: alt.usage.english
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 21:34:33 GMT

kartik@hls.com (Kartik Chandrasekhar) writes:
>
>I was disturbed to see how the language is used here in the USA.
>What I have really come to despise are expressions such as:
>
>"I did not get the invite."
>"Dont do drugs." (Seen on billboards all over the country.)

When one learns a language in school that is not one's mother-tongue,
one has to memorize a lot of rules that come naturally to a native
speaker.  It is easy to get so wrapped up with these rules that one
begins to see the rules as the language itself, and not as abstrac-
tions from it.  It is also easy to superimpose the norms of standard
written English on living speech communities, forgetting that, be-
cause you are not part of a living community of first-language Eng-
lish speakers, you haven't had the opportunity to learn the various
subtleties - regionalisms, levels of formality, etc. - that charac-
terize British, American, Australian, South Afreican, Canadian (etc.)
speech.

If you find colloquial dialects unbearable, given your background,
then try reading alt.usage.english.  You may find partial fulfillment
there....

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
From: jrt@hawk.dsto.gov.au (J.R.Terry-AEG)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Dilemma = Dilemna ??
Date: 28 Jul 92 20:33:35 GMT

mstede@cs.toronto.edu (Manfred Stede) writes:

>It appears that people from various parts of Canada spell the
>word `dilemma' with `mn' instead of `mm', which is interesting,
>because no dictionary (including Canadian) seems to support this
>view.

>Does anyone else know/use this spelling?
>Any clue how (where) this spelling originated?

>cheers,
>manfred

Is it not perhaps yet another example of (North) American english (?)
speakers almost total inability to spell correctly? :-)

Or, perhaps I should in this group rather say, they seem not to be
capable of adhering to established spelling conventions! :-)

When in doubt, consult the dictionary (preferably OED).

(Flame-proof suit now being worn!)


>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>Manfred Stede                                 mstede@cs.toronto.edu				
>Dept. of Computer Science              
>University of Toronto    
>Toronto M5S 1A4, Canada 
-- 
John R Terry					    jrt@aeg.dsto.gov.au
Head, Avionic Computer Systems,			    Ph:  +61 8 259 6982
Aircraft Systems Division, DSTO Salisbury, S.Aust.  Fax: +61 8 259 5507
Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.classics,sci.anthropology,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.philosophy.meta,rec.arts.books
From: hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger Greenwald)
Subject: Re: Eyes as Windows of the Soul
Organization: University of Bergen, Norway
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 92 00:04:17 GMT

In article <3971@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us> lancelot@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us writes:
>
>Not sure about the first verbalization, but Julian Jaynes has some
>very interesting things to say about the concept in THE ORIGINS OF
>CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (pp. 168-173 esp.).

I thought this was sci.lang. Science: none. Language: atrocious.

>idols of the "black virgins" in Europe, to say nothing of sloe-eyed 
>Egyptians, Senegalize women, and bicameral southern women here in 
>the U.S. ;@} ;@} ;@} ....

Tell me about thse bicameral women: do they have hearts with only
two chambers, or do they perhaps consist of a House and a Senate? :-)

>Julian Jaynes:"...hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it 
>engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute 
>control over behavior than is possible with consciousness."                    

And gobbledegook can cause this extra hypnosis because it disengages
the general syntactical paradigm, which allows a less absolute
control over meaning than is possible with semantics.
("which" has no antecedent, and the lack of a comma in the original
reverses the intended meaning, but why quibble when the whole
thing is nonsense anyway?)

Just my opinion, of course :-). (Is there an "alt.voodoo", by the way?)


-- 
Roger Greenwald
Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Mary, merry, marry--kick it off the air!
From: jimmay@csuchico.edu (Jim May)
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 15:56:37 GMT
Organization: California State University, Chico

Will someone please cut this discussion of the Mary,merry,marry 
pronunciation off before it takes over sci.lang like it did a few months 
ago.  We went for a long period as if English were the only language in 
the world.   The arguments were exhausted then, ad nauseam.  If some 
people choose to rehash this why not do it in the English usage discussion 
group, not here.  I believe most of us are more interested in languages 
(that's plural!).

Jim May
CSU Chico
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: schiller@tira.uchicago.edu (Eric Schiller)
Subject: Re: Chomsky's "Minimalist" paper
Organization: Center for Information and Language Studies / University of
	Chicago
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 21:26:13 GMT

Oh, dear the Chomsky: A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory,
the sanitized MIT Working Papers version (not the samizdat draft
we all came to know and love during the winter of '92.

Well, let's see...
	End of Projection Principle
	End of DS and SS (as we know it...)
	Many new notions, like Procrastination and Greed
	X-bar is now fundamental

I kid you not.

Whether these are new theses or feces is yet to be determined, but it
sure does make for interesting and often entertaining reading. We had
a study group going here at UC, but our exegesis remains unfinished. IN
any event, it is going to be influential, so everyone should study it
carefully if you want to be able to talk to people at WCCFL or NELS.

Seriously, I think this is a radical departure from GB and does make much
of the work of the last ten years moot, especially all the mental
acrobatics reconciling the facts of language with the now-discarded
projection principle. The addition of much computer-oriented jargon may`
be an attempt to sell the theory to the computational world. It is a 
major paper with many new and rediscovered ideas.

Those stil unconvinced of the radical nature of the paper consider this:
Raising to Object is back!

Eric Schiller
University of Chicago
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: what has happened to "ascribe" ?
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Keywords: logocide
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 92 02:26:40 GMT

In article <1992Jul21.190619.21438@alf.uib.no>, hlirg@alf (Roger Greenwald) writes:
>A worse one is that the New York Times usually contains at least a few
>sentences every day in which the verb does not agree with the subject in
>number.  The most common case is that of sentences that begin with "There is"
>or "there was," and then follow up with a list of items, each of which is
>singular. (There is anger and frustration in Sarajevo tonight.) But there are
>many other cases as well.

It may be regrettable, but it is also a wide-spread dialect phenomenon.
Further, the items need not be singular in the list:

	There's cats and dogs and Hallowe'en spooks in the yard!

For a number of speakers of English, this is perfectly grammatical, although it
may conflict with the usual standards.

>You can say the writers can't count from one to two; or you can say that the
>plural form of "to be" is gradually disappearing from English. The latter is a
>linguist's type of description. In this case it's probably correct, even if it
>may be regrettable.

I don't think it is a case of the plural forms disappearing in other than a
particular context which is syntcatically determined.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
From: arild@milan.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de (Arild Hestvik)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Chomsky's "Minimalist" paper
Date: 23 Jul 92 06:00:57 GMT
	<SCHILLER.92Jul21162632@tira.uchicago.edu>
	<1992Jul22.012952.2118@athena.mit.edu>
	<SCHILLER.92Jul22162611@tira.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: arild@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de
Organization: IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany

In article <SCHILLER.92Jul22162611@tira.uchicago.edu> schiller@tira.uchicago.edu (Eric Schiller) writes:

   [...]
   I find myself in agreement with much of what David Pestsky claims in his
   post (which presumably the reader has seen on the way here), and where
   I do not I will need to post more explicit material than would be of
   interest to most of sci.lang. 
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Too bad. Just when sci.lang was getting interesting again..

   If at times I seem a bit disrespectful, this is a consequence primarily
   of the rather offensive rhetoric I sometimes encounter there (examples
   to follow from the paper itself) and especially from the fact that
   some (many, even at times perhaps most?) of the GB crowd seem to pay
   no attention at all to work done in other frameworks. The content of
   the proceedings of NELS can be compared with that of CLS or BLS or
   ESCOL, and the reader can judge. Not to mention the content of LI
   these days.                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   ^^^^^^^^^

They just had an article using HPSG (Pollard and Sag). That's at least some
attention. 

   [...]
   I'll just leave with a teaser for David:
   How do you handle the Russian construction:

   mnye (bylo) pomoch' yemu

So, what does it mean (for the rest of us)?

-Arild Hestvik
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: david@gdstech.grumman.com (David Nettles)
Subject: *** QUESTION ***
Organization: Grumman Data Systems-Woodbury
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 17:00:48 GMT


WHAT DOES NATIVE AMERICAN MEAN?




****************************************************************************
   David E. Nettles
   Grumman Data Systems         Internet: david@gdstech.grumman.com
   1000 Woodbury Road              Phone: (516) 682-8464
   Woodbury, NY 11797                FAX: (516) 682-8022
   MS D12/237
****************************************************************************

-- 
****************************************************************************
   David E. Nettles
   Grumman Data Systems         Internet: david@gdstech.grumman.com
   1000 Woodbury Road              Phone: (516) 682-8464
Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.classics,sci.anthropology,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.philosophy.meta,rec.arts.books
From: holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
Subject: Re: Eyes as Windows of the Soul
Organization: Boise State University Math Dept.
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 15:10:13 GMT

In article <1992Jul31.000417.1991@alf.uib.no> hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger Greenwald) writes:
>In article <3971@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us> lancelot@cruzio.santa-cruz.ca.us writes:
>>
>>Not sure about the first verbalization, but Julian Jaynes has some
>>very interesting things to say about the concept in THE ORIGINS OF
>>CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND (pp. 168-173 esp.).
>
>I thought this was sci.lang. Science: none. Language: atrocious.
>
>>idols of the "black virgins" in Europe, to say nothing of sloe-eyed 
>>Egyptians, Senegalize women, and bicameral southern women here in 
>>the U.S. ;@} ;@} ;@} ....
>
>Tell me about thse bicameral women: do they have hearts with only
>two chambers, or do they perhaps consist of a House and a Senate? :-)
>
>>Julian Jaynes:"...hypnosis can cause this extra enabling because it 
>>engages the general bicameral paradigm which allows a more absolute 
>>control over behavior than is possible with consciousness."                    
>
>And gobbledegook can cause this extra hypnosis because it disengages
>the general syntactical paradigm, which allows a less absolute
>control over meaning than is possible with semantics.
>("which" has no antecedent, and the lack of a comma in the original
>reverses the intended meaning, but why quibble when the whole
>thing is nonsense anyway?)
>
>Just my opinion, of course :-). (Is there an "alt.voodoo", by the way?)
>
>
>-- 
>Roger Greenwald
>Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)

I agree with the sentiments of the second poster.  Jaynes's position
is absurd.  Here is an obvious reason: if there were anything in his
hypothesis, large parts of the population of the world would _still_
be in his presumed "bicameral" state, and their psychological
differences from the rest of us would be obvious and profound (the
hypothesis would have been proposed long before the 20th century).
The shift from "bicamerality" to "consciousness" world-wide could not
be established world-wide in only a few thousand years; it would only
have occurred in the "civilized" world and nearby areas (and it is
hard to see why it would even have occurred throughout the "civilized"
world, which is not unitary, seeing that consciousness is supposed to
be younger than "civilization"!)

					--Randall

-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: Penn State University
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 13:57:24 EDT
From: Callec Dradja <GRV101@psuvm.psu.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: what has happened to "ascribe" ?
 <8200@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil> <1992Jul21.190619.21438@alf.uib.no>

In article <1992Jul21.190619.21438@alf.uib.no>, hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger
Greenwald) says:
>
>
>A worse one is that the New York
>Times usually contains at least a few sentences every day in
>which the verb does not agree with the subject in number.
>The most common case is that of sentences that begin with
>"There is" or "there was," and then follow up with a list
>of items, each of which is singular. (There is anger and
>frustration in Sarajevo tonight.) But there are many other
>cases as well. You can say the writers can't count from
>one to two; or you can say that the plural form of "to be"
>is gradually disappearing from English. The latter is a linguist's
>type of description. In this case it's probably correct, even if it
>may be regrettable.
>--
>Roger Greenwald
>Greenwald@hf.uib.no (address valid only until 10 August 1992)

I think that this phenomena is not new. We talked about this very
topic in one of my grammar classes and it seems that in a list,
Standard English speakers will use a verb that agrees with the nearest
subject. This type of speech has been used by educated speakers for
quite some time.

If you look at the deep structure of your example, you would say,
'There is anger in Sarajevo tonight and there is frustration in
Sarajevo tonight.'

                                   Gregson Vaux

********************************************************************
* If all we do is live and die,           *  Gregson Vaux          *
* then tell me about the birds that fly.  *  Penn State University *
* If all we did was die and live,         *  Semitics & English    *
* would springtime be there to forgive?   *  GRV101@psuvm.psu.edu  *
********************************************************************
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Mary, merry, marry--kick it off the air!
From: jimmay@csuchico.edu (Jim May)
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 16:09:24 GMT
Organization: California State University, Chico

Will someone please cut this discussion of the Mary,merry,marry 
pronunciation off before it takes over sci.lang like it did a few months 
ago.  We went for a long period as if English were the only language in 
the world.   The arguments were exhausted then, ad nauseam.  If some 
people choose to rehash this why not do it in the English usage discussion 
group, not here.  I believe most of us are more interested in languages 
(that's plural!).

Jim May
CSU Chico
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.soviet
From: pem@Minsk.DoCS.UU.SE (Per-Erik Martin)
Subject: Re: Ethmylogy for Baltic etc
Organization: Student
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 01:33:47 GMT

In article <1992Jul25.223032.17461@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

>In English we talk about the Baltic Sea and say "The Baltcis"
>for the countries Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In Swedish
>we call the sea "\stersj|n" (The East Sea), but we still
>talk about "Baltikum" to refer to the area. I never wondered
>where this name comes from, it's only a name I assumed.

>However, while looking through a Latvian-English dictionary I
>found that Whiterussia was "Baltkrevija" in Latvia. "Huh, Baltic
>Russia?", I thought. Anyway, I looked up "balt" in the dictionary 
>and sure enough "balt" is the Latvian word for "white".

>But then comes the question is just "balt" = "white" a random
>coincidence, or is there really a connection with name of
>the area or the sea?

Interesting. My (small) ethymological dictionary gives a rather poor
description of the word "baltic", only mentioning that the English
"Baltic" comes from the Latin "(mare) Balticum", and further refers
to the Swedish word "b{lte" (belt) and suggests "the sea that forms
a belt (surrounding the nordic countries)", which I frankly don't
believe at all.
My English dictionary, otherwise filled with ethymological notes,
fails to give any explanation at all.

I think the Latvian word "balt" gives a much better explanation.
It's worth mentioning that the old Norse names for the Baltic countries
were Estland (still is in Swedish), Livland and Kurland, if I remember
 correctly. Don't know if they had any common name for all three of
them. The Swedish word "Balticum" must be a loan from Latin.

>Speaking of coincidences, the Swedish word for "street" is "gata",
>Latvia has "gate" (although "iela" is more widely used) and
>Lithuanian has "gatve". Here, however, it must either be a case
>of false cognates, or a loan in some direction.

"Gata" has a common Germanic origin. It's known in Old Swedish and
Old Danish with the specific meaning (city) street, and you find it
in the German "Gasse" (small street) and Gothic "gatwo". The Old Norse
word was "gat", meaning opening, passage, or hole. (Still around in
Swedish, "gatt", in "Kattegatt" and "spygatt".)  From Old Norse it
found it's way through Old Frisian "jet" (opening), to Old English
"geat", which today is known as the English "gate". (I think it's known
in Scottish and northern English dialects meaning "street" as well,
probably from Old Norse.)

With that background I think it's safe to say that it's a loan in
Latvian and Lithuanian from Swedish or Danish (both have had some
historical influence in the region).

--
 |\/|\/|\/| Per-Erik Martin,
 |  |  |/\| Department of Computer Systems, Uppsala University,
 |/\|  |  | Email: pem@minsk.DoCS.UU.SE
From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: More evidence for "dilemna"
Date: 21 Jul 92 16:35:47 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

Re the Toronto library catalog:  The thing to do is look at the actual
books and see if "dilemna" is printed on them, or if it was a typing
error when the data was put in the catalog.

Hmmm, wait just a moment...

The UGa library catalog has 
  "Corporate social responsiveness: the modern dilemna [sic]"
and
  "The death of Ramon Gonzalez: the modern agricultural dilemna"

Does the OED list "dilemna"?
-- 
==========================================================================
Michael A. Covington, Ph.D. |  mcovingt@uga.cc.uga.edu  |  ham radio N4TMI
Artificial Intelligence Programs | U of Georgia | Athens, GA 30602  U.S.A.
==========================================================================
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Newsgroups: sci.lang,sci.classics,sci.anthropology,talk.philosophy.misc,sci.philosophy.meta,rec.arts.books
Subject: Eyes as Windows of the Soul
From: zeleny@husc9.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Date: 29 Jul 92 02:26:10 EDT
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

I have it on good authority that Merleau-Ponty attributes the origin of the
above commonplace to the Phoenicians.  Unfortunately, I've been unable to
find the attribution in his works.

A question for all commonplace experts: what is the earliest occurrence of
this locution known to you? has it found significant representation in the
arts? in which languages and cultures does it occur? is there a religious
significance to it? has it been discussed in scholarly literature?


mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
whose soul is looking forward to all answers
Newsgroups: sci.lang