HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: nyoung@desire.wright.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: infants and bilingual training
Date: 13 Aug 92 19:51:20 GMT
Organization: Wright State University

Two bilingual cases: (1) A friend of mine who teaches Spanish here
began speaking only Spanish to his daughter at her birth. The child's
mother and two older brothers are monolingual, speaking English only.
By the time I got around to visiting the child, she was nearly 2
years old. When I walked into the house, I began speaking Spanish
with her. She gave me one of those looks that said "You speak my
daddy's language. But you're not my daddy. What planet are you from?"
Since that time, she has come to expect me to speak to her in Spanish.
Furthermore, she is beginning to show all the signs of bilingualism
noted years ago by Haugen in various studies. The chief of these is
my personal favorite: the child is spoken to in language A (the parent's
language) but answers in language B (the language spoken outside the
family but understood as well by the parents). When Dave speaks to
his daughter in Spanish, she will often answer in English. She does
the same with me from time to time.

(2) I was raised in a family where my mother, of Pennsylvania Dutch
heritage, used local words in family contexts. So I ended up with a
lot of fractured German and some battered Italian in my social 
vocabulary. My father swore and commented on life in Tex-Mex Spanish.
Only when I got older did I realize that I was listening to my father
in Spanish, answering him in English and not telling my mother what
he had just said. (If I had, she would have washed out two mouths.)

Both of my children have been cursed by my mutterings in Norwegian,
Spanish, German and Esperanto. They are not bilingual, but they
understand me. At least they respond appropriately. In all, I have never
seen anyone become a social or educational misfit from being exposed
to or brought up in a polylingual situation. Further gibberish from me
cannot make up for all the evidence. Simply put: bilingual families
and the children raised in them suffer no harm to anyone.

Nils Young
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Karandash/Caran d'Ache
Date: 21 Aug 92 11:37:33 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <Aug.20.14.59.43.1992.1332@pilot.njin.net> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
<In article <10426@scott.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
<
<> Surely _karanl1k_ is derived from _kara_,
<> not from _karan_, by means of the suffix _-l1k_.  Where did the
<> _-n-_ come from?
<
<I don't really know. Karanlik and karangi are in two different
<dialects so maybe for words ending in a vowel it might have
<been necessary to stick an 'n'.

It shouldn't be necessary to stick an _-n-_ before _-lIk_.  That
suffix has the same form after vowels and after consonants.

<I know that the arka in arkadas ends in a vowel too.

Obviously.  :-)

<Maybe it was arkandash at one time. I'm not sure.

Not likely.  It seems pretty certain that the _-da,s_ in _karanda,s_
is the same as _ta,s_ `stone', whereas the one in _arkada,s_ is the
`co-/-mate' suffix _-DA,s_.

(I use capitals for sounds whose actual realisation depends on the
assimilation laws.)

<I can't explain that either. It's possible that the word was
<originally karan and not kara. That could explain karanlIk,
<and karangI.

True.  Of course, it would be nice to be able to find _karan_ as such
somewhere in the Turkic-speaking area.

<I checked Redhouse. Karan is archaic for to curse or damn. It
<seems to be derived from black, blackening a name ? 

Aha.  Getting closer.  Yes, it probably could be that.  Maybe the word
was initially _karan_, as you suggest.

-- 
 `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: evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum)
Subject: Re: Why are you still *axeing* questions?
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 18:36:20 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard

In article <1992Aug17.210041.42411@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>Messages about "axe" for "ask" are still assuming "axe" is a *new* form
>resulting from metathesis, or transposition of SK to KS.
>
>As I pointed out (14940 Aug 17), "axe" is the *original* form.  It is
>the standard form, "ask" that is new.  Old English for this verb was
>_acsian_.  The change in the standard dialects was KS to SK; the non-
>standard dialects kept the original form.

There are several problems with this, not the least of which being
that many (if not most) of the dialects which use this form are
neither isolated nor particularly linguistically conservative and tend
to trace their populations back to immigrants (voluntary or otherwise)
who first adopted English long after the normal pronunciation had
changed.

The final nail in the coffin, however, is that /sk#/ -> [ks] is a
"mistake" that is made by almost all children (in at least my dialect)
learning English as a first language.  Including me.  And not only in
words which had that form in Old English (my Old English was pretty
weak at age two): "flask", "tusk", "mask", and even "basket" got the
same treatment.  It really seems that there are just too few such
words for it to be recognized as phontactically legal (sort of like
initial unstressed /sp/: all the kids I know went through a phase of
pronouncing "spaghetti" /pIs'kEdi/).  So it would hardly be surprising
that dialects which tend to be less concerned with "correct" speech
and more amenable to reduction in general would preserve it in adult
speech.

Evan Kirshenbaum
    HP Laboratories
    3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U
    Palo Alto, CA  94304

    kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
    (415)857-7572



Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.esperanto
From: hau4@ellis.uchicago.edu (sven  hauptfeld)
Subject: Re: [Anglolingvo/English] easy to learn English?
Reply-To: hau4@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 18:13:30 GMT

In article <2A885C3B.10024@noiro.acs.uci.edu> cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>
>And I'd rather not speak a language that classifies my mom as a female
>father, thank you.
>

Perhaps you are unjust to Esperanto. I know of no language that contains
gender information while being gender-symmetric, i.e. in which you can tell
if the person mentioned is male or female AND in most such cases neither is
derived from the other with an ending meaning "female" ("male" in any 
language?). Esperanto simply avoids exceptions in this case, like
in everything else.

Anyway, Esperanto is not meant to be the language in which one would express
love to one's mother, but a language of communication between people of
different nationalities - who are usually unattached enough that there's no
need to worry about such lack of emotions.

Sven

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: baron@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Dennis Baron)
Subject: acronym
Organization: University of Illinois
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 20:17:49 GMT

Was it on this discussion group in the context of _foobar_ that someone
mentioned the acronym WEFT standing for "Wrong every f...ing time"?
If so, does anyone know its origin/source/register?  Reason I ask is
that we have a noncommercial, non-NPR radio station in town with the
call letters WEFT.  Did somebody put something over on the FCC?

Dennis

__


debaron@uiuc.edu               (\                   217-333-2392
                               \'\             fax: 217-333-4321
Dennis Baron                    \'\           __________
Department of English           / '|         ()_________)
Univ. of Illinois               \ '/          \ ~~~~~~~~ \
608 S. Wright St.                 \             \ ~~~~~~   \
Urbana IL 61801                   ==).            \__________\
                                 (__)             ()__________)
From: cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Lojban: a constructed human language
Keywords: Lojban, Loglan, artificial, Sapir-Whorf, MT, NLP
Date: 19 Aug 92 18:52:26 GMT

A recent poster inquired about Lojban.  Limited on-line information about
this constructed human language is available from the Planned Languages
Server at <langserv@hebrew.cc.columbia.edu>.  Send the message "help"
or "index lojban" to this address for more details.

Lojban also has a Listserv-based mailing list for postings in and about
the language (novices welcome).  Send the message "subscribe lojban <your-name>"
to <listserv@cuvmb.columbia.edu>.

Much fuller detail is available in hard copy.  Send your postal address to
<lojbab@grebyn.com> to be placed on the Logical Language Group mailing list
or to receive specific information.  The Logical Language Group is a non-profit
organization dedicated to the promotion of Lojban; it is supported entirely
by contributions and by voluntary payments for materials sent.  (Some materials
are sent only if prepaid.)  The first book (a proto-dictionary and concise
language reference) is expected by the end of 1992, with a textbook and
reference grammar to follow.

Lojban is part of the Loglan Project, an ongoing effort dating back to 1955
to develop a constructed language to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (very
roughly, "how you speak determines how you think").  Additional purposes
that have arisen for the language include machine translation, human-computer
communication, international communication, and personal growth through
linguistic mind-stretching.

There is no connection between the Logical Language Group and the Loglan
Institute, Inc., and the CEO of the Institute has disavowed Lojban as a
legitimate part of the Loglan Project; however, the legal struggle between the
two institutions has recently terminated, allowing Lojbanists to use the word
"Loglan" in their promotional material (such as this posting).  Limited
cooperation between Lojbanists and other Loglanists has consequently resumed.
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english,soc.culture.usa
From: gmw1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Gabe M Wiener)
Subject: Re: Problem with 'they' (etc) as 3p singular common gender pron.
Reply-To: gmw1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Gabe M Wiener)
Organization: Columbia University
Date: Sun, 23 Aug 1992 05:28:41 GMT

In article <1992Aug23.023626.22025@midway.uchicago.edu> gal2@midway.uchicago.ed\
u writes:
>
>I don't think anyone has mentioned yet that in today's English 'they' /
>'them' / 'their(s)' cannot refer to (some?) specific singular antecedents:
>
>* Every good chef knows their ingredients.

20 years ago, this would have been properly written as "every good chef
knows his ingredients."  But since the PC crowd has been jumping up and
down about nonsexist usage, today I would write the sentence as "all good
chefs know their ingredients."  Seems a lot better than the his/her
business, especially since the English-speaking world is unable to grasp
the linguistic concept so prevalent in other languages, namely that a
generic male pronoun can refer to people in general, not just men.


--
Gabe Wiener - Columbia Univ.     "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings 
gmw1@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu       to be seriously considered as a means of 
N2GPZ in ham radio circles        communication. The device is inherently of
72355,1226 on CI$                 no value to us." -Western Union memo, 1877
From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: ethymology of foobar
Summary: Military acronym
Date: 18 Aug 92 03:35:40 GMT
Article-I.D.: athena.1992Aug18.033540.23727
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <1992Aug17.215943.39694@urz.unibas.ch> smit@urz.unibas.ch writes:
>In many of manuals I've seen the word 'foobar' as a placeholder
>for any name. (e.g. "send the file 'foobar')
>
>Does anybody know the origin of that word?

Military (humorous) acronym, 
"fubar" = "fouled/f..ked up beyond all recognition".  

Similar to "snafu" = "situation normal, all f...d up".

-- 
+ Michael Covington - Artificial Intelligence Programs - U of Georgia - USA 
+ Unless otherwise noted, these are private opinions, not official statements.
+ VOTE NO GEORGIA LOTTERY - don't tie education to an unpredictable income.
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Lojban: a constructed human language
Date: 20 Aug 92 07:15:42 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1hVZ6t#2HDKkz2XVsJy4RVsxR3lmvbW=cowan@snark.thyrsus.com>, cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) writes:

> Lojban is part of the Loglan Project, an ongoing effort dating back to 1955
> to develop a constructed language to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (very
> roughly, "how you speak determines how you think").  Additional purposes
> that have arisen for the language include machine translation, human-computer
> communication, international communication, and personal growth through
> linguistic mind-stretching.

A friendly comment: this project ought *also* to be of interest to
linguists concerned with universals.  It would be of interest if human
beings could learn to speak and understand it fluently; it would be of
even greater interest if children could acquire it from their parents.
If it's still somewhat like the 1955 Loglan, anyone with a symbolic
logic background can easily see what's being attempted.






Xref: sparky sci.lang:6448 soc.culture.esperanto:1412
From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: [Anglolingvo/English] easy to learn English?
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 92 06:56:45 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: usa
  <1992Aug12.181330.3716@midway.uchicago.edu> <64057@cup.portal.com>
  <1992Aug15.151746.29130@news.columbia.edu>

Pierre Jelenc says "Ido is dead/"
Then how come I get Ido-Vivo in the
mail three times a year?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: affixes in Esperanto
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Distribution: usa
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 03:33:52 GMT

In article <1992Aug14.161000.4764@spss.com>, markrose@spss (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>The reference to Indo-European is also strange; I think Esperanto can only be
>described as a member of the Indo-European family, though an artificial one.

As an Indo-Europeanist, I have to say no, it cannot be so described.

The concept of an Indo-European language is strictly an historical one, based
on the *regular* derivability of the attested stage(s) of a language from an
artificial construct, the reconstructed parent language called Proto-Indo-
European.  This is not the usual direction of the definition given in intro
texts, but it is the correct view with regard to the history of linguistics and
the actual practice of historical and comparative linguists.

Esperanto, for all that it may use roots that are derived by a logical process
from various Indo-European languages, cannot be regularly derived from the
reconstructed parent.  Neither its derivational nor its inflectional morphology
is do derivable, nor is there a regular set of phonological correspondences
between Esperanto and the Indo-European languages properly constituted because
of its mixed heritage in its roots.*

It is therefore *by definition* *NOT* an Indo-European language.

-----

* Note that this is not the same as the massive borrowings by languages such as
English from other Indo-European languages.  Such borrowings can be recognized
precisely because they do violate the correspondances which can be set up for
relatively basic vocabulary sets; eliminating them from consideration leaves a
large corpus for comparitive study.  I believe that no such elimination is
possible for Esperanto, because of the way its vocabulary has been created:  In
essence, it is *all* borrowed and has no core.
-- 
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_
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters)
Subject: Iconicity
Organization: University of Tasmania, Australia.
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 01:59:38 GMT

Could anyone provide any pointers to (or even better, quotes of) definitions
(preferably in French but English is OK) of the concept of "iconicity"?
Thanks!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Bert Peeters                         Tel: +61 02 202344
Department of Modern Languages               002 202344
University of Tasmania at Hobart        Fax: 002 207813
GPO Box 252C                            Bert.Peeters@modlang.utas.edu.au
Hobart TAS 7001
Australia
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: New words for gender neutral pronouns in English
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 19 Aug 92 02:46:42 GMT

In article <SCHILLER.92Aug18174601@tira.uchicago.edu> schiller@tira.uchicago.edu (Eric Schiller) writes:
>Of all the proposals posted, yours is the least likely to succeed.
>It is sexist to the core, since the pronunciations would
>be identified with the men:
>
>es = 'is
>E = 'e
>
>dialectally short for his and he in h-drop lects.
>
>Anyway, you can't impose new words on people. If the speakers so
>desire, some formulation will arise on its own.

IT ALREADY HAS!!  People are using "they" as a singular, gender-neutral
pronoun more and more; it sounds a little unusual, but you get used to
it, and I've found myself using it a few times as well.  As in:

Could the slob who parked in my space move their damned car?

As I said, it's a bit unusual, but you get used to it quickly.

Regards,
Janis C.
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: axe
Date: 19 Aug 92 17:53:12 GMT
Article-I.D.: orion.2A928A88.25055
Organization: University of California, Irvine

In article <9208191614.AA08482@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> lucas@WATSON.IBM.COM ("Bruce Lucas") writes:
>I'm somewhat surprised at the knee-jerk arguments apparently from
>political correctness against the explanation of laziness for
>the substitution of "axe" for "ask".  If we take "lazy" to mean
>"tending to do what is easy rather than what is right", then laziness
>explains the metathesis if
>
>1. /sk#/ is more difficult to produce than /ks#/ (I'm not a linguist -
>   did I get the notation right?), and
>
>2. The accepted norm where the subject learned to speak ("what is right"
>   in the definition above) is "ask" rather than "axe".
>
>Now, either of these could be wrong on technical linguistic grounds:
>point one if /sk#/ is not in fact easier to produce than /ks#/ (although
>introspection and observation of children having difficulty producing
>this combination leads me to suspect otherwise), and point two would
>be wrong if the subject was raised in an environment where "axe" was
>the norm rather than "ask" (which in fact I could believe is true).

I still think it must have something to do with the rather novel
character of /s/ when used in complex consonant clusters; it occupies an
unusual status in many other languages, and also in English although not
as much since English is known for occasional 5-segment long consonant
clusters anyway.  (As an aside, the previous discussion on whether or
not English is easy to learn never touched on the issue of
pronunciation.  English is a bit of a bear that way, compared to stuff
like Spanish and Japanese -- mostly due to the long consonant
clusters.  These make it alien to a speaker of a more CVCVCV language.)

At any rate, I suspect that this metathesis is in part driven by the
unusual behavior of /s/ when used as the first member of a cluster.

Regards,
Janis C.
 
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: Gender neutral pronouns
    <1992Aug15.110024.29464@discus.technion.ac.il> <36779@uflorida.cis.ufl.edu> 
    <10431@spark.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 01:56:36 GMT

In article <10431@spark.ed.ac.uk>
iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
 
>
>(That's "thou were", right?  Or is it "thou wert"?  Damn.)
>
Howzabout 'thou wast', laddie?  No mumbling aboot subjunctives, now!
   We all know those moody things have been abolished by all right thinking
   persons.
 
          Lang may yer lume reek.
 
>--
>Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
 
jarea@ukcc.uky.edu
 
           ki seminat ispinaza non andet iskultzu
 
     (oh damn and blast:  another of those wretched subjunctives!)
 
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: Question about ASCII IPA
    <1992Aug19.203114.13853@bcrka451.bnr.ca> 
    <1992Aug19.231944.28751@news.eng.convex.com> 
    <1992Aug20.114459.26366@aisb.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 00:49:29 GMT

 
>|> From the keyboard of stu5s14@bcrka287.bnr.ca (James Cherry):
>|> :I noticed in Tom Christiansen's post the following IPA symbols and his
>|> :descriptions of them:
>|> :
>|> :    F) voiceless bilabial fricative
>|> :    M) labio-dental nasal
>|> :    V) voiced bilabial fricative
>|> :
>|> l'm sure there are some languages with an /F/ but
>|> I can't remember any right now.
>
Ewe (spoken in Nigeria contrasts bilabial versus labiodental fricatives.
both voiceless and voiced (as in the name of the language, which contains
a fricative, not a glide).
From: djohns@elm.circa.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Gender neutral pronouns
Date: 12 Aug 92 22:48:45 GMT
Organization: University of Florida, Gainesville

In article <1992Aug5.194441.6056@alf.uib.no> hlirg@alf.uib.no (Roger Greenwald) writes:

# Please tell us why you think it is so terrible that FIRST person
# should have a gender marking? I would assume that in 99.99% of
# cases, the SPEAKER is in fact either a male or a female. And in
# 99.99% of cases, in person or on the phone, the person spoking to
# will know whether the speaker is a male or a female. In most cases
# of writing where the author's name is attached, this will also be
# the case. Someone who wished for some reason to hide gender behind
# initials or a pseudonym or whatever can also, of course, change the
# gender marking in the text.

Can we assume, then, that Hebrew doesn't mark gender in plural
pronouns and that it doesn't have generic or hypothetical first and
second person pronouns?

David Johns
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6452 soc.culture.esperanto:1428
From: EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: [Anglolingvo/English] easy to learn English?
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 92 15:34:03 PDT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world
  <1992Aug12.181330.3716@midway.uchicago.edu> <64057@cup.portal.com>
  <1992Aug16.025821.5613@sol.cs.wmich.edu>

Steve Brewer challenges my use of the
term "successors to Esperanto." I
was using the word "successor" only
in the meaning of "follower." A
portion of the Esperanto world did
leave to support Ido, and a portion
of those ultimately went to develop
Novial. In that sense, these languages
are successors to Esperanto.
Steve asked why the Idists did not
simply call their language Esperanto.
In fact they wanted to, because it
was in fact intended that Ido be a
form of Esperanto designed to meet
the objections of those members of
the 1907 Delegation who were not
Esperantistists. This idea ran into
the problem that Zamenhof was still
alive and refusing to accept any
changes.
Newsgroups: sci.lang