HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: lip@s1.gov (Loren I. Petrich)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Method of learning 17 languages
Date: 11 Apr 92 07:43:31 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Livermore CA

In article <35012@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> daj@reef.cis.ufl.edu (David A. Johns) writes:
>In article <2786@sersun1.essex.ac.uk> tysoj@essex.ac.uk (Tyson J R) writes:

:# As to the questions of linguistic theory and ethnocentricity I
:# differ again from the judgement I am imputing to Scott: I am afraid
:# that I agree with Chomsky on the relative value of the narrow but
:# insightful versus the broad but superficial.  I wish that we saw
:# more work like Jelinkek's recent studies of Salish and recent
:# studies by Evans in Mayali, but there is also little doubt that
:# Universal Grammar proceeds best from people delving deeper and
:# deeper into what they know well (language wise).

:I have trouble grasping how this could possibly be true.  Unless you
:believe some specially gifted researchers have access to their own
:underlying abilities independently of the language they speak, there
:is no way for a specialist to distinguish what is universal from what
:is peculiar to his own language, is there?

:I'm reminded of Ivan Derzhansky's remark about a theory of biology
:based on an exhaustive study of bees, with the results cross-checked
:against wasps and hornets.

	Count me in on this one also.

	If trying to analyze a language one knows well is the way to
go, then it surely must be possible to have someone whose native
language is not English to try to do a Chomskyan analysis on it.
Surely there must be some noteworthy linguists around that do not have
English as their native language; and if this is not a reasonable
procedure, then why not?

/Loren
From: sharder@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Soren Harder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Linguistics TV Schedule
Keywords: : -)
Date: 15 Apr 92 14:05:18 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

>	Det er en dygtig land....

>					--Scott

If I should judge your Danish from the above, Mr. Horne, (as I suppose
it was meant to be the Danish national anthem) it is absolutely
existing, but you shouldn't count it among the 17 you speak fluently
(which I don't know whether you do !). The correct title is 'Der er et
yndigt land', and your version has a (slight) syntactic(/lexical)
error in the gender of land, and a semantic anomaly in 'dygtig'
(='good at ...'). The fluctuation between 'det' (=it) and 'der'
(=there) is acceptable.

Sorry for being so 'slag-scott-off'-ish.


Soren Harder

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Soren Harder, (MSc student)
Centre for Cognitive Science, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh
E-mail: sharder@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
From: brandon@husc8.harvard.edu (Joshua "Mr._Do" Brandon)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Devanagari: Syllabary or Alphabet?
Date: 13 Apr 92 15:50:40 GMT
Organization: Harvard University Science Center

In article <1992Apr12.225857.21555@midway.uchicago.edu> bon6@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>
>The fact is that Devanagari is neither purely syllabic nor purely
>alphabetic.  It is not a pure alphabet because the basic unit of
>representation is the syllable, usually one or more consonants
>with a vowel sign above, below, to the right or to the left.
>
>But Devanagari differs from a pure syllabary in that it does not
>present a completely unique symbol for each syllable.  You can
>analyze the syllables of Devanagari into consonant and vowel
>components, which are more or less constant in form across the
>entire inventory of syllabic symbols.
>
>In other words, the <e>-component of the syllable <ke> is the
>same as the <e>-component in <ge>, <te>, <re> etc., and the
><k>-component of the syllable <ke> is the same as the <k>-
>component in <ki>, <ku>, <kai> etc.  But the <e>-component
>of <ke> can not occur independently, unattached to a consonant
>sign.
>
>The advantage of such a syllabic-segmental script over a pure
>syllabary is obvious: fewer symbols to memorize.  All the
>Brahmi derived scripts of South Asia are of this type, as well
>as some elsewhere, such as Ethiopic.  (Question: Have the
>Southeast Asian scripts derived from Brahmi, such as Burmese,
>Khmer, Thai, etc. retained this feature?)
>
>                               -- Rahul

Also, Hebrew and Arabic work exactly the same way.  Someone here posted a
while ago that Devanagari was derived from Semitic scripts, but I don't
know anything about that.  For that matter, are there any Semitic scripts
that don't work that way?

(The consonant signs (only) of Hebrew and Arabic are commonly referred to
as alphabets, but this is a non-technical usage....)

Joshua Brandon	    Harvard/Radcliffe College	  brandon@husc.harvard.edu
   "It's hard to eat a carrot with a bit in your mouth." --- Emily Bryant
YAZ/mycroft
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cases vs. Adverbs (was: -ze and -the in Attic Greek)
Date: 7 Apr 92 08:54:02 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Apr7.021115.16371@Csli.Stanford.EDU>, andrews@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avery Andrews) writes:
> A reasonably rational way to draw the distinction between
> `cases' and `adverb formers' is that cases apply semantically to
> NPs of a fair degree of syntactic complexity, while adverb formers apply
> only to nominal stems.

This seems wrong.  Those formants such as English possessive -'s that do
apply to syntactically complex NPs are the antithesis of case as the term
is most commonly understood.  In a case language such as Greek or
Latin, the translation of (1) would make 'man' genitive (_viri_ and
_tou^ andro's_ respectively.  We don't.

	(1) The man I was talking to's wife is named Xanthippe.
	    a. Uxor hominis cui locutus sum Xanthippe nuncupatur.
	    b. Greek (left as an exercise to the reader)

> On these grounds, Gk. -thi, -then and -phi
> would come out as adverb formers, on the basis of what I know,
> while -de works like a case, in fact, like a `semantic case'
> in a typical Australian language.

I suggest another distinction (which I'm sure isn't original but can't
attribute at the moment).  Only morphemes which apply to most or all nouns
(not NPs) may be called case.  Those which apply only to a very limited
subset of nouns (e.g. only to certain place names) should be called
adverbs.  Further, we should expect that any case should be specifi-
cally called for by certain verbs and/or certain adpositions.  By these
standards, Greek -thi, -then, -phi, and -de are adverb formatives.

Note: my standards leave the status of the Latin "locative" in doubt:
while only certain words have it, the city names are all identical
either to ablative or genitive forms of the name (Romae, Carthagine).
Further, they are not required as such: they simply replace prepositional
constructs with names of cities and small islands.
Are they a separate case?  Darned if I know.  Ruri 'in the country' looks
dative (though datives aren't used for place), while domi 'at home'
doesn't look like anything.  Call them adverbs.

--Leo Connolly
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: epstein@sunc7.cs.uiuc.edu (Milt Epstein)
Subject: Re: Ambiguity a goal of language
Reply-To: epstein@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 1992 16:06:24 GMT

In <1992Apr9.064536.6806@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

>In article <1992Apr9.054542.7981@sunb10.cs.uiuc.edu>, epstein@cs.uiuc.edu writes:
><
><I understand that Chinese has sentence affixes that can be used to
><alter the interpretation of yes-no questions of the form of our
><examples above.
>
>Sentence affixes?  I can't think of any.  Would you please give an
>example?  (I'm assuming here that you're thinking of Mandarin.  It seems
>to me that Cantonese has something of the sort; but as my Cantonese is
>quite limited, I won't say anything else.)

The only example I really know of involves the greeting "ni-hao?".  I
understand that it can have at least the following forms:

     ni-hao?
     ni-hao-a?
     ni-hao-ba?
     ni-hao-ma?

and that the differences in meaning (perhaps pragmatics) are things
like whether the speaker expects an answer, whether they are already
supposing the answer is yes, and similar.  I don't know the technical
term for these suffixes, so I tried to use the intuitive term
"sentence affixes".  I also have no idea what types of questions these
suffixes appear on or whether Chinese has any indirect speech acts
(and hence whether these suffixes are relevant to the previous
question of whether indirect speech acts are ambiguous -- if these
suffixes do play the role of signalling the intention of the speaker,
then they are potentially relevant).


>You gave the example `Do you know what time it is?'.  In English, intonation
>would probably disambiguate.  (If my watch is broken, I probably won't shout
>the question at you; if you're my teen-age daughter and waltz in at three
>in the morning, I probably won't be very calm.)  This particular example
>wouldn't hold in Chinese; the two sentences would be different in much more
>than a single sentence-final particle.

Are there clearer examples of indirect speech acts in Chinese (e.g. a
request to pass the salt masquerading as a yes-no question about one's
ability to pass the salt)?  On what other types of questions are the
suffixes I mention above used?  

(I recently saw a flyer for a talk here about someone studying the
meaning of these suffixes -- their conclusion was that they more
represented what the speaker believed the hearer's attitude to be, not
what the speaker's attitude was, which I got the impression from the
flyer was the more accepted belief.  Unfortunately, it looks like I
tossed the flyer.)

-- 
Milt Epstein
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois
epstein@cs.uiuc.edu
From: ct@dde.dk (Claus Tondering)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: A thirty-letter alphabet (Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?))
Date: 10 Apr 92 08:25:49 GMT
Organization: Dansk Data Elektronik A/S

horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

>In article <167C112344.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
><
><Let's hear it for putting the thorn back in English
><where it has belonged for over a millenium!

>And edh, wynn, and ash.

I know thorn and edh, but what are wynn and ash?

-- 
Claus Tondering
Dansk Data Elektronik A/S, Herlev, Denmark
E-mail: ct@dde.dk
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 16 Apr 92 22:39:57 GMT

In article <1992Apr16.171827.34787@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <68@steiny.UUCP> steiny@steiny.UUCP (Don Steiny) writes:
>>	I wonder though.   I have many friends whose first language was
>>Spanish that seem to have a hard time with the English prepositional system.
>>Searching through dictionaries it seems to me that there are less ways
>>to make case distinctions in Spanish.
>
>English-speakers often have a hard time with Spanish prepositions, too.
>(When to use _por_ and _para_ is a stumbling block for many.

It's not ever adequately explained.  I find that a nice mnemonic is to
recall that "por" has to do with passage through, or the means by which
something is completed, or "via" in some sense.  "Para" is more similar
to just "for" or "in order to," denoting an "aimed" action or intent of
some sort.

>Or, in French, which preposition to use before geographic names.)

Now, *this* one on the other hand, is just nuts.  And I studied French
for about 16 times as long as Spanish! 

>Perhaps it's just that prepositions just don't match up very well between
>languages.

This might be a neat thing to investigate, seeing as how I'm looking for
a paper topic.  Hmm . . .

Regards,
Janis C.
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 13 Apr 92 21:23:42 GMT

In article <204861@unix.cis.pitt.edu> djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum) writes:
>In article <1992Apr13.172155.34811@spss.com> markrose@spss.com 
>(Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>
>>All language are spoken. 
>
>ASL is not spoken. 
>
>>You learn a spoken language before learning a written one.
>
>Monolingual ASL users do not learn a spoken language at all.
>

I think you are missing the point.  ASL certainly is spoken, just with
the hands, and heard with the eyes.  "Speech" is a way of talking about
real-time interactive communications, and ASL certainly qualifies.  ASL
also doesn't have a writing system.  Are you saying that ASL speakers
don't learn a spoken OR written language?  (Most deaf people have at
least crappy reading skills, and don't learn to read until they are well
into adulthood; rarely a family will be able to marshall the resources
necessary to send a deaf kid to a special school which can teach reading
to deaf kids.)

You are adhering to the "letter of the definition" on this one.  As far
as I'm concerned, ASL is as much a spoken language as any mouth-ear
language is.  It is real-time, interactive, and immediate.

Regards,
Janis C.
From: bon6@quads.uchicago.edu (rahul  bonner)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Devanagari: Syllabary or Alphabet?
Date: 14 Apr 92 18:36:19 GMT
Reply-To: bon6@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations

In article <8948@scott.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>>In article <1992Apr9.192400.1837@midway.uchicago.edu> bon6@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
 
>Why does old Rahul lose patience so quickly?
 
Ah, the second man on the tag team!  Welcome to the tussle.

>>The fact is that Devanagari is neither purely syllabic nor purely
>>alphabetic.
>
>Not all alphabets in the real world are purely alphabetic.
>Devana^gari^ is one of those that aren't.
 
That's what I said.

>>It is not a pure alphabet because the basic unit of
>>representation is the syllable, usually one or more consonants
>>with a vowel sign above, below, to the right or to the left.
>
>No.  The syllable is not the basic unit of representation.  It has
>something (but not everything) to do with the arrangement of the
>actual basic units of representation, which are alphabetic.

You must accord some status to the syllabic graph in Devanagari,
as you would to the components of that graph.  I will not argue
which of these is basic.  Remember, my position is that Devanagari
is mid way between a syllabary and an alphabet.

>>But Devanagari differs from a pure syllabary in that it does not
>>present a completely unique symbol for each syllable.
>
>Right, and that's why I say that it is not a syllabary.
 
I agree.

>>But the <e>-component
>>of <ke> can not occur independently, unattached to a consonant sign.
>
>Yes, but this doesn't mean that it is not a letter.  (The initial
>shapes of the Arabic letters can't occur independently either.)

Most can't.  Some can (_re_, _dal_, _vav_).  But this is determined
by the shape of the letter.  If you make a similar claim for 
Devanagari you are missing a significant generalization about the
script.  (By the way, I am only familiar with the Arabic script
as it is used to write Urdu, so please forgive any sub-continental
bias I may display.)

>On the other hand, if we assume that it is not a letter, then
>Devana^gari^ turns out to be a consonantal alphabetic script with
>mandatory vocalisation.
 
This description has some historical validity.  The major innovation
of the Brahmi script over the Semitic script that inspired it was
the mandatory inclusion of vowel signs.

>>(Question: Have the
>>Southeast Asian scripts derived from Brahmi, such as Burmese,
>>Khmer, Thai, etc. retained this feature?)
>
>Yes.

Thanks for the information.

                         -- Rahul
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 14 Apr 92 04:53:25 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.1992Apr14.045325.21707
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University

In article <1992Apr13.193823.14562@athena.cs.uga.edu>, mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
<
<G and J are no problem.  G before i or e is the same sound as J elsewhere.

But `j' can occur before `e' and `i'.

<B and V are a genuine problem -- not phonemically distinct in any major
<dialect as far as I know.

They're referred to as _`b' de `burro'_ and _`v' de `vaca'_--`"b" as in
"burro"' and `"v" as in "vaca"'.

					--Scott

-- 
Scott Horne                               ...!{harvard,cmcl2,decvax}!yale!horne
horne@cs.Yale.edu      SnailMail:  Box 7196 Yale Station, New Haven, CT   06520
203 436-1848                Residence:  Rm 1848 Silliman College, New Haven, CT
Shao2shan1 sheng1 de tai4yang2 yong3 bu2 luo4!
From: alderson@elaine36.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: -ze and -the in Attic Greek
Date: 8 Apr 92 19:10:52 GMT
Article-I.D.: leland.1992Apr8.191052.6526
Reply-To: alderson@elaine36.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University LOTS Computer Facility
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU

In article <167C11205E.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, JAREA@UKCC writes:
>The distinction between case ending is not in all languages so clear cut
>as is implied by Alderson in reply to a question asking for the difference.
>One thinks of, on the one hand, say, some Finno-Ugric languages which have
>as paradigmatic noun cases which correspond to adverbs and prepositional
>phrases "used adverbially" in other languages.    (I've even felt that
>'latine' in 'loquitur latine' is quite case like, and not too far off from
>so called ablatives of means used with deponents that won't permit accusative,
>'vescetur carne' he lived on meat -- but this is more spinal that rational.
>It also accounts for why 'franc,ais' is an 'adverb' in 'Je parle franc,ais."

My response was to a query as to these were reflexes of Indo-European cases or
not.  They certainly can be considered case-like in their use in Greek, *but*
they are not reconstructible as case endings for the proto-language.

Your Latin examples are probably confusing to those who have not studied the
language:  The final <e> in "latine" represents a long vowel /e:/, the morpheme
which derives adverbs from first (a-stem) and second (o-stem) declension
adjectives.

The final <e> in "carne" represents a short vowel /e/ or /E/, the third-
declension (consonant-stem) ablative case ending, unrelated to the preceding.

To sum up, I wasn't disputing the *use* of the Greek particles in question, I
was discussing their provenance.
-- 
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: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 14 Apr 92 17:46:41 GMT

In article <ARILD.92Apr14164413@milan.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de> arild@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de writes:
>
>   I wrote:
>   >Therefore, most linguists don't find it
>   >helpful to study animal "language" if they want to find out about human
>   >language. (Although there may be other parallels between human and and
>   >animal language development, such as the "critical period" of language
>   >acquisition).
>
>In article <8961@scott.ed.ac.uk> sharder@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Soren Harder) writes:
>
>   Animals don't usually aquire their communication system in the same
>   sense as humans do, it is usually innate reflexes.
>
>   Soren Harder
>

I don't know if this is across the board, for any species.  Certainly, it
would not affect the ability of my dog to exist in the wild for him to
understand what I meant when I say, "Mommy's in the kitchen."  My dog
was a little poodle (cutest thing in the world, with brass balls) and
had been bred for years to be a little version of a hunting dog, a dog
that would have to take cues from his/her environment, and would have to
be able to interact with his/her people.  

Of course, I understand that dogs aren't capable of speech!  Not
anywhere near it.  But I think that animals are maybe a bit smarter,
less utterly reliant on instinct, and more able to learn from their
environment than we think.

No, I'm not saying that animals are "just like people."  But I think
that simply saying, "They're just parroting" or something like that, as
if they are simple little (or big) machines, is an incredible
oversimplification. 

Regards,
Janis C.
 


Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: dacosta@prl.philips.nl (Paulo da Costa)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Date: 17 Apr 92 09:07:45 GMT
Organization: none

In article <1992Apr16.173336.28470@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <5321@prles2.prl.philips.nl> dacosta@prl.philips.nl (Paulo da Costa) writes:
>>In Portuguese you can make a perfect with the auxiliary "ter":
>>
>>_Tenho trabalhado muito_, I've been working a lot.
>
>Looks like a perfect, not a progressive perfect, to me, since it uses a
>past participle.  Does it mean the same as the Spanish _He trabajado mucho_?

No, it doesn't. That's the whole point: Portuguese has no equivalent to
_He trabajado mucho_ (_trabalhei muito_ is used instead) and the
auxiliary _ter_ (which is equivalent to _haver_ in other tenses, e.g.
_tinha/havia trabalhado muito_) is used to make a progressive perfect.
I've never met a Spanish speaker who didn't find it strange that we use 
a past participle with a progressive meaning, but that's what we do.

(_Ter_ is more informal than _haver_ where both are allowed. Portuguese
also has a simple pluperfect, which is more formal than both. So we
have _tinha trabalhado muito_, _havia trabalhado muito_, _trabalhara
muito_, all with the same meaning but in ascending order of formality.
The simple pluperfect looks like a Spanish subjunctive, but it isn't. A
real subjunctive form of _trabalhar_ is _trabalhasse_.)
--
-- Paulo da Costa           /\/\   Minha terra tem palmeiras   /\/\
-- dacosta@prl.philips.nl   \/\/   Onde canta o sabia'...      \/\/
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 15 Apr 92 18:52:15 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <1992Apr15.160332.12017@cbnewsi.cb.att.com> hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (hua.t.lin) writes:
>The written Chinese, in common use today is based on a dialect of nothern
>china which is commonly called mandarin. The writing system developed from
>pictographic representation of objects, and the classical chinese took off
>from there without much dependence on spoken chinese of any time.

This makes it sound like written Chinese was developed in a vaccum, as a
purely abstract system (like some 18th-century artificial languages).
This is not true at all.  The characters of classical Chinese correspond
to words of spoken Chinese of some early period (~600 BC?); the syntax
derived from the spoken language; the vast majority of characters contain
a phonetic component.  In its historical development there has been plenty
of influence from the spoken language.  And the classical language was
by no means exclusively written.

The analogy with Latin should be clear.  The major difference is due to
the nature of the writing system, which nicely obscures the pronunciation
of archaic Chinese.
Newsgroups: sci.lang