HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: MHAASE@dosuni1.rz.uni-osnabrueck.de (Martin Haase)
Subject: Portuguese infinitive
Organization: University of Osnabrueck, FRG
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 18:13:03 GMT

I am in search for data (i.e. example sentences) on the Portuguese
personal infinitive. I am especially interested in examples where
only the personal or impersonal infinitives can be used, and in the
semantic and/or stylistic differences where both are possible (with
illustrative examples). If you have bibliographic data as well, please
let me know.
Here are some concrete questions:
1) Is there some preference for one of the two constructions with modal
verbs (can, want, know)? What about constructions such as "to let/make
someone do something"?
2) What about the personal / impersonal infinitive after verbs of
perception (see, hear) and verbs of saying (say, think, ask)?
3) What about infinitives after prepositions?
4) What about negated infinitives?
Please reply directly to me (preferably with concrete examples).
Thank you very much!
Martin
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Haase:  mhaase@dosuni1.bitnet, mhaase@dosuni1.rz.Uni-Osnabrueck.de
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: what is a phoneme
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 01:03:52 GMT

rmk4@midway.uchicago.edu writes:

>>What is a phoneme?  (Not a joke question; I just discovered that
>>I honestly don't know, and suspect that nobody else does, either.
>>Perhaps this is just sheer arrogance on my part, though, so I ask
>>everyone now...).
>
>Maybe it's not a joke, but it's certainly a bit coy.  You wouldn't ask if you
>didn't already know what answers you were going to get.

Honestly, I didn't know what answers I'd get.  Every now and then it's fun
to ask a question that will separate true students of linguistics from the
gabby pack.  This time I have some real concerns that, despite supposed ad-
vances in phonology, nobody knows what a phoneme is, despite its widespread
use (in various forms) in the literature.  I'm just fed up with my own shabby
attempts at defining the bloody thing, and thought I'd use my frustrations
to spice up sci.lang.

>Let's cut to the chase:  Sure, the phoneme isn't the end-all be-all of 
>linguistics.  This doesn't mean we don't know what one _is_.  I offer the 
>following evidence that I know what a phoneme is:  Give me a reasonable amount
>of data about any language, and I'll give you back at least one phoneme of
>that language.  Obviously, this isn't a spectacular claim about the 
>descriptive power of the concept, but it does show that I know some definition,
>even if it's only a procedural definition (how to find one).

What's your procedural definition, in brief.

Note:  I'm being coy, but I'm not fishing for any specific answer.  I really
want to know if anybody can tell me what a phoneme is, or how to find one.

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: st891487@pip.cc.brandeis.edu
Subject: Another HELP: English word (we think)
Reply-To: st891487@pip.cc.brandeis.edu
Organization: Brandeis University
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 01:10:29 GMT

Does anybody out there know what a "gastine" is? We're sure it's a noun,
we think it's English, and we're positive it's a real word. We also can't
find it in any dictionaries. It rhymes with "gasline", that's not a typo.
Help Help!

Thank you again for your support,

-Ximena Cearley
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: dasher@well.sf.ca.us (D Anton Sherwood)
Subject: Re: Esperanto a natural language?
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 12:02:29 GMT

In article <1993Jan19.160056.46522@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>
>Bernard Comrie did a quite readable book on linguistic universals;
>it's a little out of date now but not much.  Unfortunately I can't
>recall the exact title, but check the author in a good university
>library or check Books in Print.

"Language Universals and Linguistic Typology".  I'd give the ISBN but I've
lent my copy to autarch@well.sf.ca.us -- email him if you want it!

There are two editions.  The first has a yellow cover, the second blue, both
with the same Mondrian tree (or is it a Klee tree?).
-- 
Anton Sherwood                                       dasher@well.sf.ca.us
+1 415 267 0685              1800 Market St #207, San Francisco 94102 USA
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto a natural language?
Keywords: Language acquisition of esperanto
Date: 22 Jan 93 12:06:50 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <Z6U06ED@minnie.zdv.uni-mainz.de> knappen@obelix.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE writes:
>Date: Wed, 01 Jan 92 12:10:14 PST
>From: paul hopkins <PASHE@UVVM.UVic.CA>

>[...] the table of corelatives
>(kio, tio, cxio, kie, tie, cxie, ... ) seems a regular pattern, but only
>when it is presented to us as a whole pattern.

Yet many languages (such as Hindi, or the Polynesian family) come very
close to having very similar tables of almost the same regularity.

>Children learning Eo as a first language may not see it this way, but
>rather as a class of primitives, like cxi, nun, almenaux....

I'm not sure I understand this.  What do "nun" and "almenau" have to
do with the table of correlatives?  Actually, the very existence of
"nun" goes against the idea of a regular table of correlatives.

>As evidence of this i cite an observation i made
>a few years ago listening to a pair of children who had learned Eo as their
>first language. Perhaps influenced by English, their second language (or
>perhaps not, who knows?), they felt a need for a single word equivalent to
>English 'this' (in Esperanto: 'tio cxi'/'tion cxi', 'tiu cxi'/'tiun cxi',
>so they created the word 'toncxi'.

They must have been influenced by English, otherwise I'm at a loss for
an explanation of why French kids don't feel a need for a single word
substitute for "celui-ci".  On the other hand, it is interesting that
they disregarded the distinction between "tiu-chi" and "tiun-chi",
"tio-chi" and "tion-chi".

-- 
 `D'ye mind tellin me whit the two o ye are gaun oan aboot?' (The Glasgow
Ivan A Derzhanski  (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk; iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)    Gospel)
* 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: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 01:51:30 GMT

In article <Jan.21.21.56.23.1993.850@pilot.njin.net>
hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
 
>
>
>The timing could be off if the time-scaling factor is not taken
>into account.  I promise I'll have the paper ready soon. What
>I promised to send is almost finished.
>--
>     That's all right:  we're in no real hurry.
From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
Date: 28 Jan 93 03:25:26 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

In article <1776@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen) writes:


> Stone age man spent more time sitting around the camp fire talking than anything
> else.  It turns out that hunter-gatherer economics requires *less* intensive
> effort than anything since.  A hunter had *far* more spare time than *we* do.

Yeah, and they toasted marshmellows, drank wine and discussed how
they could improve their syntax and their lexicon. They discussed
whether they should expand their lexicon by compounding or by vowel
alternation vs postifixation of morphs.


> What has domestication to do with anything?  A hunter-gatherer invaraibly has
> a better natural vocabulary than a farmer or rancher.


I assume the trick here is in the meaning of 'natural'...
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
   hubey@pilot.njin.net               ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Vowel systems of ....
Date: 23 Jan 93 08:33:28 CST
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <16B5E12ECF.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
> In article <Jan.21.22.05.32.1993.1068@pilot.njin.net>
> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>  
>>
>>
>>Hello again :-)
>>
>>Can anyone direct me to a book which might have vowel systems
>>including dipthongs of all languages (and maybe hopefully of
>>consonants).
>>
>>
>  
> Ian Maddieson at UCLA has done a work, which may not include diphthongs.

This (if I remember correcly) is the final product of the USPID (?)
project, using an unusually large database, and is very good:

	Ian Maddieson
	Patterns of Sounds
	Cambridge University Press, 1984

I don't recall whether it gives phoneme inventories (I think it does),
but it gives interesting generalizations about vowel systems, etc.

The whole enterprise is inherently flawed, though, because very large
surveys have to rely on, and, crucially, interpret, other people's
descriptions.  You're never sure whether you're looking at phones,
phonemes, graphs, half-done analyses, or what. (This doesn't apply to
the Maddieson book, where I think the research was first-hand.) 

For instance if you wanted to include Amerindian vowel systems (the
poster did say "all languages") you might discover Joel Sherzer's _An
Areal-Typological Study of American Indian Languages North of Mexico_
(North-Holland, 1976).  This attempts to give sound inventories of
many languages, but it's rather disastrous.  As an easy example,
Potawatomi has the vowel system

			i		o

				schwa

			e		a

but since Hockett in his IJAL Potawatomi description used "u" for
schwa, Sherzer gives the vowel system as

			i		u

			e		o

				a

For other examples see my review in _Language Sciences_ back around
1977 or so.
 
> Then Hockett's _Manual of Phonology_ has a let of inventories.  However
> these may not be arranged to suit your needs.

Even Hockett made mistakes; his Winnebago phonemes are wrong.  Same
problem: reliance on second-hand data that has to be interpreted.

-Ken
-- 
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | Nobody can explain everything to everybody.
opinions are my own      | G. K. Chesterton
From: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Tones in PIE?
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Cisco Systems (MIS)
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 93 15:52:42 GMT

In article <1993Jan24.114225.28870@enea.se>, sommar@enea (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>Rich Alderson (alderson@cisco.com) writes:
>>First, lets make our terminology more precise:  Lithuanian, Latvian, certain
>>Slavic languages, ancient Greek, and Vedic Sanskrit are supposed to have (or
>>have had) *pitch contours*, rather than *tones* as that term is usually used.
>
>So let me ignorant layman ask: how would you describe the two different
>accents in Swedish, are they tones or pitch contours?  Not that I'm
>questioning anything, I just want to be able to relate to something I know.
>From where you wrote elsewhere, I would guess the answer in the latter.

Your very well-informed guess is correct.

>>The final upshot of all this is that we usually reconstruct the PIE accent as
>>a pitch rise based on the Greek and Sanskrit evidence for its pitch nature.
>>In addition, the oldest Indo-European languages do not show the kinds of
>>vowel reductions we expect from a stress accent, as in the history of
>>Germanic or Latin, or the Romance languages.
>
>Again, I want something to relate to. Do I understand right that none of the
>accents in ancient Greek are the same as the one single accent as Romance and
>West-Germanic languages? (And which is one of the two possible in Swedish?)

That is correct.  The grammarian Dionysios of Halicarnassos described the
accents of his time fairly carefully, using terminology which he explicitly
imported from music:  That the acute was a rise of a musical fifth, that the
grave was a lowering of the "tonos" = "musical pitch," and that the circumflex
was a fall after a rise.
-- 
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: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Subject: Re: Tones in PIE?
Organization: Enea Data AB
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 22:13:14 GMT

Leo Connolly (connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu) writes:
>All Germanic languages have abandoned the Indo-European accent system,
>replacing it with a strong dynamic accent on the first syllable (except
>that verb prefixes were not stressed; noun prefixes were).

Except of course that since then a deluge of loanwords has distorted
the system so much, that the naive pronounciation of a foreign word
is seldom on the first syllable. Guess where Swedes put the stress when
they pronounce the name of northern Swedish village of Korpilombolo.

(Although, I'm not entirely sure that the reason is foreign influence.
Swedish words which are not compounds or inflexions are seldom more
than three syllables long, so putting the stress on the first of five
syllables probably feels very akward.)
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
From: mastr@husc8.harvard.edu (claudia mastroianni)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: "n'ha" == "daughter of" ? Language?
Date: 23 Jan 93 00:09:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1993Jan22.190927.19692
Organization: Harvard University Science Center

In article <1993Jan19.232437.5103@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>In article <1993Jan18.002137.6847@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
>> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>> 
>> 
>>>Well, whatever n'ha is, it isn't Romance....
[deletion]

>> 
>> No, it isn't Breton. In Breton c'h is a single letter (just like
>> ch, dd, ff etc in Welsh) that represents a velar fricative (i.e.
>> = Welsh ch).
>
[Much deletion]

I'm sorry, I didn't see the origin of this thread, but I suspect all you
real linguists (by comparison, this is my first semester as a Ling. major)
are barking up the wrong tree.

Any science fiction fans out there?

You see,  Name n'ha Mother's-name  is the form of address used in a science
fiction series I know and love.  If you knew this and are speculating whether
it was taken from a real language, I apologize for wasting bandwidth.
If you didn't, read on.

It's the Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley.  The women, known as
Renunciates or Free Amazons, took an oath that gave them relative freedom
in the extremely patriarchal society the novels are set in.  They used,
for example, Claudia n'ha Charlotte (that'd be me! -- not that I go by it) to
avoid taking a man's name.  This *was* fiction only, until (female) fans
of Bradley's novels started to adopt this convention.  The author has been
asked by women, at science fiction conventions, to take their oaths (lifted
direct from the novels) so that the women feel they are true Renunciates
as in the novels.  Some legally change their names, so this is indeed what
you might find on someone's birth certificate, but the word "n'ha" was 
invented, by Ms. Bradley.

The language she invented does resemble some real languages, but does not, so
far as I know, come from any particular language.  Nor did she give elaborate
glossaries, a la Tolkien.

Hope this helps,

Claudia Mastroianni
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: bon6@quads.uchicago.edu (rahul  bonner)
Subject: Re: Tones in PIE?
Reply-To: bon6@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 08:14:54 GMT

In a previous article, I quoted a passage from _Ka:'sika:_ that describes
the Vedic accent in terms of a difference in place of articulation of a
vowel.  Rich Alderson replies (much has been deleted):

>Of course, a 5th century commentary would be 1000 years after Panini, with the
>problems of transmission of texts and of concepts.

This is true, but the situation is even more complex.  Panini himself
does not deal with phonetics systematically; he assumes a great deal
of meterial covered in the _pra:ti'sa:kyas_, texts that are concerned
with the correct pronunciation of the Veda.  The authors of _Ka:'sika:_
were probably more influenced by this same tradition of phonetic
description than by the stress accent in their own dialects.

>I have read of at least one modern school of pandits who pronounce the *marked*
>syllables differently, relegating the _uda:tta_ to less prominence, based on a
>notion that what is mentioned is important and that since the _uda:tta_ is
>defined in terms of the surrounding syllables, *those* are the important ones.

A good example of the corruption of tradition: if they have to rely on
books to learn the Veda, then their status is questionable.  There is
a word for such a man in Sanskrit: _pustakapa.n.dita_, i.e., someone
who has to look everything up because he's too lazy or too incompetent to
work from memory.


Rahul Bonner
From: oneil@husc10.harvard.edu (John O'Neil)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: yacc like grammar of natural languages?
Date: 26 Jan 93 19:11:16 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc10.ONEIL.93Jan26111116
Organization: Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services, Cambridge, MA
In-reply-to: hansg@risken.vd.volvo.se's message of Tue, 26 Jan 1993 07:00:11 GMT

In article <hansg.728031611@risken> hansg@risken.vd.volvo.se (Hans Granqvist) writes:
>This may be a strange question, but having read in the latest issue of
>BYTE about Machine Translation, I thought, why not express the source
>language in yacc to resolve all ambiguities like "the can can be filled"
>where "can" is noun or verb?

There are two immediate problems with such a scheme, which have noting
to do with lexical ambiguity:

(1) There are phenomena in natural language (including Swedish, I
believe) which are provably not context free.  Since the syntax used
in YACC is less than context-free (LALR(1), I believe), one of the
difficulties would be to change the syntax people used with the
translator.

(2) In a computer language grammar given to a compiler compiler like
YACC, the syntax and the semantics of each token is defined before
hand to be simple and unambiguous.  Although our knowledge of natural
language semantics is incomplete, we *do* know that it's doesn't have
those properties.

Good Luck.
--
John O'Neil
"Occasionally I believed I had thoughts of my own --  who does not now
 and then become the victim of such delusions?"
						-- Paul Feyerabend
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: what is a phoneme
Date: 27 Jan 93 09:56:59 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1993Jan27.040154.20592@midway.uchicago.edu>, goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:
> What is a phoneme?  (Not a joke question; I just discovered that
> I honestly don't know, and suspect that nobody else does, either.
> Perhaps this is just sheer arrogance on my part, though, so I ask
> everyone now...).

I'll go way out on a limb and make most of the readership made at me
with this definition:

	A phoneme is the minimal psychological construct representing
	certain sounds which occur in a given language.

This accounts nicely for allophones, which are the actual sounds
corresponding to a given construct, and does not lock us in to stupid
attempts to locate phonemes out there in actual speech, as the
structuralists before Chomsky tried to do.  It also avoids the
Chomsky-Hallean stupidity of *denying* phonemes entirely in favor
of feature matrices, which are fine for analyzing and contrasting
sounds and for constructing phonological rules, but which tell us
nothing about how speakers conceptualize sounds.

Attack if you dare; I'm spoiling for a fight.

--Leo Connolly
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Clowning around in Latin textbooks (was Re: Esperanto a natural language?)
Summary: bozo bozeis bozei bozomen bozete bozousin
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Cisco Systems (MIS)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 93 17:53:07 GMT

In article <C1FCnA.7pw@spss.com>, markrose@spss (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <16B5E12A48.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU> JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:

>>Solely in the interest of "le sport", let's consider first the Latin sentence
>>"Loquitur latine."  [...]
>
>>(By the by, I used "latine" in the above example as my Latin reference works
>>do not indicate to which declension "Esperanto" belongs in Latin.)
>
>I wonder if the Catholic Church has come up with an official New Latin
>translation for "Esperanto."  Failing that, one could perhaps loan-translate--
>Sperans, nonne?  Or perhaps lingua Doctoris Sperantis?
>
>My Latin primer, _Latina pro populo_, claims that the word for 'clown' is
>_bozo_, borrowed from the Greek; it even supplies a useful illustrative
>sentence: "Bozo in insula tres imperatores in Romae sunt pares."  
>Or were Humez and Humez just pulling my leg?  

According to my _English-Greek Dictionary:  A Vocabulary of the Attic Language_
(compiled by S. C. Woodhouse; Routledge and Kegan Paul):

Clown, subs. use adj. -- Ar. and P. a'groikos, P. and V. skaio's.  _Peasant_:
P. and V. autourgo's, ho. erga:'te:s, ho.  _Buffoon_:  P. and V. gelo:topoio's.
_Play the clown_ v.:  P. gelo:topoiei~n.

Clownish, adj. a'groikos, skaio's, Ar. agrei~os.

(Ar. = Aristophanes, P. = "in prose," V. = "in verse."  Accents follow the
accented vowel or diphthong; colon marks length of preceding vowel; smooth breathing unmarked, rough marked by <h>.)
-- 
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: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Subject and object confusion (Was: Re: "n'ha"...)
Date: 21 Jan 93 16:19:21 GMT
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1993Jan21.052233.17711@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:

[Stuff omitted]

> Breton has
> a very strange phonology, by the way, and, if I read correctly 
> between the lines of Pierre Trepoz's Grammaire Bretonne, stranger
> points of grammar: in certain types of phrases, you cannot distinguish
> between subject and object. The only other language I know of that
> does that, and is famous for it, is Lisu, spoken somwhere in Nepal,
> is memory serves..

This shortcoming is hardly peculiar.  *Many* languages lose the ability
to distinguish subject and object in certain situations.  Here's a
German example:

	Das ist die Frau, die meine Grossmutter ermordet hat.
	'That is the woman who killed my grandmother.'
	'That is the woman whom my grandmother killed.'

Word order cannot be used to disambiguate this sort of relative clause,
since with the relative clause-initial and the verb clause-final,
there's nothing left but _meine Grossmutter_, whose grammatical func-
tion (and continued existence) are in doubt.

Strangely, Germans rarely notice the ambiguity.  If asked to translate
such a sentence, they will produce a translation and swear it is correct,
but about half will kill off the grandmother, the other half the other
woman.

Pragmatically, of course, such a sentence is uttered only in contexts
where speaker and hearer both know who was done in.

By the way, aren't there some French constructions where it's unclear
whether a noun following an infinitive is an object or subject?  I
could add another German example of a different type:

	Wir lassen ihn nicht operieren.
	'We won't let him operate.'
	'We won't let him be operated on.'

Here it is unclear whether accuasative _ihn_ is the object or the natural
subject of the infinitive _operieren_.

--Leo Connolly