HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Persons without a native language
Date: 13 Sep 92 19:31:39 GMT
Reply-To: weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener)
Organization: The Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology
In-reply-to: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu

In article <1992Sep9.093216.42859@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, miner@kuhub writes:
>Many human beings have apparently managed to reach adulthood
>without acquiring a native competence in a single language.

Hans Freudenthal was a Dutch mathematician, famous for much within
mathematics, but also for being terribly disfluent in English, Dutch,
and German (and probably other languages).  There are numerous stories
about him.  A colleague visits from Germany, so HF speaks to him in
his best German.  The colleague responds in his own broken Dutch, and
the conversation continues like this, neither realizing what language
the other is trying to speak, until finally the colleague mentions
that he thought HF knew German.  His masterpiece, LINEAR LIE GROUPS,
(coauthored with De Vries) is also dysfluent in a mathematical sense.
My own introduction to HF was when a professor gave me one of his
(German) papers to read, and after a week, I was horrified at how badly
my mathematical German had deteriorated.  When I mentioned this to the
professor, he just laughed, and explained the situation.

B Traven, the mostly unknown author of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRE MADRE,
was apparently faulty in both his German and English.  In his case, it
is hard to identify what's going on, since he went to extreme lengths
to obfuscate his national origin.  See the Guthke "biography" for details.

Among the deaf, total adult languageless is not uncommon.  See Susan
Schaller A MAN WITHOUT WORDS for one case history.  The author found
linguists unhelpful, unfriendly, and skeptical.
-- 
-Matthew P Wiener (weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu)
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Persons with several native languages
Date: 15 Sep 92 17:38:11 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <Bun334.A0E@acsu.buffalo.edu>, v187ef4y@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Patrick J Crowe) writes:
> In article <1992Sep15.083451.43001@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
>  writes...
>> 
> [deletions]
>>I raised, but I don't think the issue of multilingualism poses the
>>same question for competence theorists as does the apparent existence
>>of large numbers of people who -- just to consider phonological
>>competence, since it's probably easiest to deal with -- speak all
>>their languages with an accent.
>>-- 
> 
> This reminds me of Jimmy Carter's quip when he became President: "Isn't it
> great to have a President without an accent?"  I'd have to say that only the
> mute 'speak' their language without an accent, so 'native language' has to 
> be defined in some other manner.  Or perhaps it's not a linguisticly meaningful
> concept?
> 
> Pat Crowe
> _Spreading Evil, Pat Crowe's Autobiography_  New York (1927)

It is a linguistically meaningful concept.  A foreign accent consists
in adaptations to a non-native phonology.  I am not referring to
regional variations within a language.  A speaker of English who for
example regularly substitutes her native phoneme /X/ for English
phoneme /Y/ "has a foreign accent" and might be said not to have
native phonological competence.  There are many more complex
possibilities. 

Persons without a native competence in any language would not have
native competence in any of them, syntactic, semantic, or
phonological.  It's just that I've always thought the phonological
phenomena are especially clear for the non-linguist to perceive.
 
********************************** +.............................+
*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
*There is no privileged position.* :are my own and are not to be :
*	-God, Derrida, others    * : attributed to my employer   :
********************************** +.............................+
From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: TrueType fonts?
Date: 12 Sep 92 03:14:04 GMT
Article-I.D.: athena.1992Sep12.031404.9333
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

Where can I get Windows 3.1 TrueType fonts for Cyrillic and for
phonetics?

-- 
+ Michael Covington - Artificial Intelligence Programs - U of Georgia - USA 
+ Unless otherwise noted, these are private opinions, not official statements.
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: RFC: ASCII representation of IPA (technical draft)
Date: 9 Sep 92 14:25:29 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Sep9.013412.15286@hplabsz.hpl.hp.com> evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum) writes:
<(hmm, "{pzd}" is palatalized, "{phd}"?)

Or "{fzd}" ("{fsd}" for me), for "faryng-".  (My turn to pretend not
being able to spell.)

<The text I'm working from (Ladefoged--I couldn't find an
<actual copy of the standard or Pullum's book) uses the same diacritic
<for "velarized" and "pharyngealized", and notes:
<
<    There is very little difference between velarized and
<    pharyngealized sounds, and no language distinguishes between the
<    two possibilities.  In Arabic there is a series of consonants that
<    Arabic scholars call emphatic consonants.  Some of these sounds
<    are velarized, and some are pharyngealized....

Caucasian-style emphasis (glottalisation, aka ejectivity), on the
other hand, is orthogonal to pharyngealisation, and the two coo"ccur
in Ubykh, yieldind four different voiceless uvular stops (actually
six, because there is labialisation as well).  Comrie says so.

<Is there a good reason not to follow the IPA model and just use [~]
<for both?

It is fine for the tilde to stand for pharyngealisation as well as
velarisation, but before that it must stop standing for nasalisation
of vowels, because vowels as well as consonants can be pharyngealised.

-- 
 `If ye hiv ears oan yer heid - then use them tae lissen.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: phopkins@sol.UVic.CA (Paul Hopkins)
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Organization: University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C. CANADA
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 92 04:55:38 GMT

In article <3769@randvax.rand.org> jim@rand.org (Jim Gillogly) writes:
>Yes, it's really male.  The definitive dictionary, "Plena Vortaro", says:
No matter what the "Plena Vortaro" says, it is NOT definitive. It was
superceded in authority in 1970 by the "Plena Ilustrita Vortaro", and
while the PIV may be the most authoritative dictionary of Esperanto, it
is widely recognized to be in need of considerable revision. Thus,
just because the PV (or the PIV for that matter) defines 'patro' in
a particular way does not mean that this is the definition accepted
by all or even most Esperanto speakers.

As in all languages which have a vigorous speech community, the meanings
of words in Esperanto are defined according to their use in the community,
not (necessarily) according to the way some Esperanto lexicographer has
defined them in a book.

Paul Hopkins
phopkins@sol.uvic.ca
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee)
Subject: Re: phonological constraints
Organization: University of Hawaii
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 10:33:30 GMT

In article <1992Sep8.173617.22444@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
}...
}As for *processes* and borrowings of foreign words:  Very rarely is a set of
}borrowings so large, or so prestigious, as to influence the phonological system
}of the borrowing language.  (Thus, although speakers of English may learn to
}pronounce a uvular or velar fricative, in "croissant" or "Tijuana", these *are*
}learned as conscious pronunciations and will very likely disappear in casual
}speech.)  Even when such a level of borrowing takes place, it will introduce as
}small a change in the system as it can, and will be unlikely to result in a
}pronunciation considered as "native" by a speaker of the language from which
}the borrowing took place.
}...

I like Paul Kiparsky's proposal that certain phonological rules never apply in
lexical (non-derived) environments, which rules I would take to include the
phonemic processes (those whose effect is to define a phoneme system).  Then,
to take one of your examples, suppose that one of those processes is x -> h,
not suppressed in English because x is not a phoneme of English.  If the
phonological form for "Tijuana" is /tixwana/, this may not be changed to
[tihwana] by the process, since the environment is lexical (the conditions
for application are satisfied within a lexical item).  Consequently, the
pronunciation of /tixwana/ will be [tixwana] (not [tihwana]).

Phonemic processes are not blocked in borrowing, because at the time a form is
borrowed, it is not (yet) a lexical item in the borrower's grammar.

In this account of non-native pronunciations in certain exceptional forms,
there is no impact on the phonological system whatever.  However, there
is no apparent way to accommodate your observation that such pronunciations
"will very likely disappear in casual speech".  I wonder if that is really
true.

--
Greg Lee <lee@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: latin phrase & rixe
From: bthurman@uncavx.unca.edu
Date: 10 Sep 92 12:07:54 -0500
Organization: University of North Carolina at Asheville
Nntp-Posting-User: bthurman

quick Latin's a dangerous game.  mortui, rather general 'dead'; necati, usually
by poison or the like; trucidati, of butchery or slaughter, sometimes as in
battle; was trucidati a hoste 'casualties of the enemy' meant?  would your use
of comrades not suggest that?  probably nostri (masc. pl.'our own soldiers')
trucidati a hoste nobis (dat. pl. for us) cibus fiunt would be inferred rather
than hyper-simplistic mortuos edimus (medieval manducamus 'munch out on')? 
someone more expert help out: would not sumus ita duri, ut nostri trucidati
cibus nobis fiant say the whole thing?
as for rixe item: was not the original point about ss in Italian and why it's
not found in pace & felice?  was it not a valid response that, because
vernacular syntax favors oblique cases, survival as from pax and felix would be
out of the question?  if P. be right about rixe, that it was a conscious
borrowing, bearded Bill would need to look elsewhere for original Latin x that
was part of the root and that never passed out of any stage of the development
of French.  may work on this some day. thanks, Peeters.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: k and s
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 92 17:53:45 GMT

In article <1992Sep6.144349.9939@news.Hawaii.Edu>, lee@uhunix (Greg Lee) writes:
>In article <1992Sep4.190501.22021@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>}...
>}I get a lot of palatalization in the stop portion of the affricate, too.  I
>}would be surprised if you don't.
>
>Depends what you mean.  The second d of "did you" has raised tongue-mid,
>with or without any change to the y, as do d in "deed", p in "Pete", l in
>"lean" (in agreement with the raised position for the following segment).

Rather than an apicoalveolar, I get a laminoalveolar stop, followed by a
homorganic fricative, and a palatal on-glide to the vowel.  "A lot of
palatalization."

>It would make good sense to call that raising of the mid of the tongue
>"palatalization".  People don't seem to use the term that way, though,
>reserving it for cases where there is some concomitant of the raised
>tongue-mid: on-glide to following vowel, frication, or change in
>position of primary articulation.  In going from careful pronunciation
>"did you" to casual "didja", so far as I can tell, in my speech there is
>no change to the d (counting the zh as reflex of y).  That is a general
>fact about the assimilation of alveolars for me, since although t/d/n do
>assimilate to following labial, dental (e.g., "tenth"), and velar stops,
>none of them assimilates to a following palato-alveolar in position (cf.
>"inch", "cat shit", "sideshow").

For "inch" and "cat shit" I get the same sort of laminal rather than apical
stop--although it's unclear whether there really is a nasal stop in "inch" at
all.

The voicing contrast in "sideshow" seems to lead to maintaining the different
positions of articulation between the apicoalveolar stop and the palatoalveolar
fricative.
-- 
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: dchung@efi.com (Daniel Chung)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: [pronoun] Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Date: 14 Sep 92 16:58:56 GMT
Organization: Electronics For Imaging, Inc.


     Those who want "recasting" is just avoiding from facing the problem.
They say, "we cannot use 'he', then why don't we avoid 'he' and 'she'
altogether and use 'they'"?  You still haven't answered what to use for
"a person".  By the way, I have not heard any response for the Chinese
pronoun.

					ZHONG Qi-Iao
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: compounding
Date: 7 Sep 92 10:27:40 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <PmBkqB1w164w@jwt.UUCP> bbs-hrick@jwt.UUCP writes:
>All the languages that I know of which permit compounding
>are AN (Adjectives usually precede Nouns) (e.g. English, German, 
>Mandarin, Esperanto).  In these languages, compounds are 
>modifier->head, e.g. "birdsong" versus "songbird."  I'm wondering 
>if an NA language would have head->modifier compounds (e.g.
>"mansnow" instead of "snowman"),

Not necessarily.  There are NA languages with modifier->head compounds,
such as Basque, Ewe, or Guarani'.  Note that these are all GN.  Modern
Persian, however, is NG NA, and its compounds are also modifier->head.
One might argue that the compounding mechanism in Persian is older than
the NG NA order.  Ditto for Modern Greek, which is NA/AN-ambivalent.

>and if this actually occurs or would be a violation of some "universal."

If what actually occurs?  Head->modifier compounds?  I think they do.
Something tells me that NG NA languages such as Thai or Vietnamese are
the place to look for them.

-- 
 `If ye hiv ears oan yer heid - then use them tae lissen.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was: Cognitive linguistics...)
Date: 8 Sep 92 18:56:44 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology

In article 28257@athena.mit.edu, pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>In article <81918@bcsaic.boeing.com> rwojcik@atc.boeing.com writes:
>>... Presumably, if you have a speech
>>impediment, that doesn't mean you can't notice it.  The process system, minus
>>the perceived impediment, comes to tell you what is legal phonological form.

>This isn't too plausible, if I follow what you're saying.  If someone
>has, say, extreme cerebral palsy, with total inability to produce
>intelligible speech, does the theory predict that this person will
>develop a radically different phonological system from those less
>disabled or impediment-free?...

I don't know.  Does the cerebral palsy imply a destruction of the part of the
brain that coordinates the articulation of the speech tract during speech 
production?  Does it corrupt that part of the brain?  Or does it just interfere
with it?  Nothing in Natural Phonology says that you can't develop a radically
different phonological system.  In fact, since Processes are directly tied to
articulatory difficulty, you would probably expect children with deformed speech
tracts to develop some different phonological processes to compensate.  The 
processes are not necessarily "innate ideas" in the cartesian sense.  They don't
necessarily get transmitted genetically, such that an individual with a radically
different speech tract would be stuck with Processes designed for a kind of
generic speech tract.  Theoretically, the process system grows in the earliest
stages of development to address the child's experience with its body.  (Hence,
NP is what Lakoff would call an "experiential" approach to language.)  Later on,
the Processes are modified to allow smooth articulation of the target language.

>If one approaches syntax from a principles-and-parameters point of view,
>the child's task is not grammar-testing, but a process of elimination of
>wrong grammars.  How this happens is a topic of research, hampered by
>its double-acrostic character: grammatical theory itself is still poorly
>developed.  An explicit computational theory of possible grammatical
>switches is developed in a recent unpublished paper by Ken Wexler and
>Ted Gibson, and there is other, similar work out there.

I don't know how the child can escape grammar-testing at some level, no matter
how sophisticated its set of internal switches.  What is the data that tells you
to flip the switches?  Generative linguistic theory defines the data in terms
of well-formedness judgments.  Such judgments are used to test the validity of
grammatical analyses.  But what do you do when you don't have a grammar to give
you such intuitions?  
-----
Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA
From: jim@rand.org (Jim Gillogly)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Date: 5 Sep 92 16:18:48 GMT
Organization: Banzai Institute

In article <1992Sep4.065059.28372@sactoh0.sac.ca.us> jcl@sactoh0.sac.ca.us (John C. Laviolette) writes:
>         Is "patro" really male, or is it merely being used for a male role?

Yes, it's really male.  The definitive dictionary, "Plena Vortaro", says:

	Patro. 1. Virseksulo naskiginto de ido;...

so it's designed to be that way.  There is no separate word for parent,
although I would expect most people to understand "*gepatro" in that sense.

Whether this is a flaw in the language depends on your politics.
-- 
	Jim Gillogly
	jim@rand.org
From: lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: k and s
Date: 6 Sep 92 14:43:49 GMT
Organization: University of Hawaii

In article <1992Sep4.190501.22021@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
}...
}I get a lot of palatalization in the stop portion of the affricate, too.  I
}would be surprised if you don't.

Depends what you mean.  The second d of "did you" has raised tongue-mid,
with or without any change to the y, as do d in "deed", p in "Pete", l in
"lean" (in agreement with the raised position for the following segment).
It would make good sense to call that raising of the mid of the tongue
"palatalization".  People don't seem to use the term that way, though,
reserving it for cases where there is some concomitant of the raised
tongue-mid: on-glide to following vowel, frication, or change in
position of primary articulation.  In going from careful pronunciation
"did you" to casual "didja", so far as I can tell, in my speech there is
no change to the d (counting the zh as reflex of y).  That is a general
fact about the assimilation of alveolars for me, since although t/d/n do
assimilate to following labial, dental (e.g., "tenth"), and velar stops,
none of them assimilates to a following palato-alveolar in position (cf.
"inch", "cat shit", "sideshow").

--
Greg Lee <lee@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: On the /bt/ cluster in English
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1992 01:02:56 GMT

In article <1992Sep5.081704.42795@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
 
>
>There has been quite a lot of discussion about the /bt/ cluster in
>English.  Consider this: every speaker of Coastal Southern I know
>pronounces "Baptist" as "Babtist."  If this is an innovation--or
>especially if it's an innovation--it certainly militates against the
>idea that the cluster is unnatural.  (Strangely, these speakers don't
>seem to voice the /p/ in "baptize," "baptism," etc. -- I could be
>wrong on this.)
>
>*- Ken <miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>* :All opinions expressed herein:
>
Equally common, if not more so, is /babdist/, which, if taken by itself,
presents a puzzle with respect to "assimilation" accounting simply for
the apparent change from /pt/ to /bd/!
 
 
Xref: sparky sci.lang:7024 soc.culture.esperanto:1662
From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: Ido vs. Esperanto
Date: Sat,  5 Sep 92 05:25:08 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world
  <1992Aug15.151746.29130@news.columbia.edu> <64141@cup.portal.com>
  <1992Aug17.221506.25602@ima.isc.com>

This is a response to a request by
Karl Heuer for me to post a list of
those features of Ido that I consider
to correct "major flaws" in Esperanto:
1. Ido uses no diacritical marks. It
follows the suggested alternatives 
provided by Zamenhof himself in using
ch and sh, while j has the value of
Esp. jh and y of Esp. j. The sound
of Esp. hh is absent, as it should be:
that is a difficult sound for speakers
of most languages in the world.
2. The accusative is not marked when
the noun in question follows the verb.
In most sentences, therefore, when one
uses the word order of English, French,
or even Chinese, one does not need to
mark the accusative: it is obvious
from the structure of the language.
Since, of the major languages of the
world, only Japanese and the Indic
languages are not SVO in declarative
sentences, this is in fact the natural
way of doing it.
3. Ido's adjective is invariant. Like
English and Chinese, the Ido language
has no need for agreement.
I will comply with the request of the
poster to whom I am replying, and omit
most of the other differences, but since
many other people have pointed out one
other major flaw in Esperanto, I will
add one final point:
4. In Ido, the masculine and feminine
are handled by the SAME mechanism.
The -in- if Esperanto is retained, and
in parallel is the masculine suffix
-ul-.
Mind you, I do not maintain that Ido
is the best choice for today, 1992.
If I were to pick a language to push
now, it would be Novial or the rather
similar Intal. My intent was to point
out simply that Ido was an improvement
and enough of an improvement that I
can accept Ido where I cannot accept
Esperanto.
I think that ANY world interlanguage
in order to make much progress must
be simpler to learn than English.
Esperanto, on the plus side, has the
virtues of regularity in spelling and
morphology (though its morphology is
not as regular as its advocates main-
tain), but on the minus side it has
the burden of noun-adjective agreement
and an accusative ending which is
easy to learn but far from easy to
know when to use. (Zamenhof misused
it himself in several of his writings!
And I presume he was an expert on his
own creation.) 
Xref: sparky sci.lang:7103 alt.usage.english:7306