HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: What Language Is It?
Date: 14 Apr 92 16:38:37 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Apr14.024658.11401@mlacus.oz.au> brent@mlacus.oz.au (Brent Davies) writes:
<ISTDRW@ASUACAD.BITNET writes:
<>  "Gwn, Arglwyd, nad eiddo dyn ei iiord; nid ar law gwr a rodio~y
<>   nae llywodraethu ei gerddediad." Jer.x.23
<
<It's certainly Welsh.  And for a translation <...>
<see chapter ten, verse 23 of the book of Jeremiah in the Bible.

Oh, no!!!  Why did you reveal this secret?  :-)
-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
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: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Linguistics TV Schedule
Keywords: Dixie
Date: 15 Apr 92 13:42:13 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <1992Apr15.071136.9262@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
><>
><>       "I wish I was in the land of cotton . . ."?
><
>No, that's the "correct" way to sing the song.  Actually, `wuz' is probably
>correct.
>
>You can't expect good English from rednecks who wrap themselves in the
>Confederate flag.

Do I hear a bit of regional bigotry coming through here???

-- 
==========================================================================
Michael A. Covington, Ph.D. |  mcovingt@uga.cc.uga.edu  |  ham radio N4TMI
Artificial Intelligence Programs | U of Georgia | Athens, GA 30602  U.S.A.
==========================================================================
From: daj@reef.cis.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet
Date: 16 Apr 92 11:40:21 GMT
Organization: Univ. of Florida CIS Dept.

In article <1992Apr11.012911.10650@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

# <I'm not being sarcastic, I just want some hard facts about this.
# <Japanese is VERY ill-suited to Chinese characters; kanji just doesn't
# <fit it.
#
# I strongly agree.  In fact, I've long said that Japanese has one of
# the most awkward writing systems in the world.

I'm not so sure.

What Japanese ends up with is a two-tiered writing system, with
"content words" written in one system and "function words" in the
other (I realize this is not a precise categorization -- save your
fuel).  This reveals more of the structure of the sentence to the
reader than a purely phonological orthography does.  It's analogous to
our use of ordinal numbers like "2nd" and "10th", which are probably
easier to parse than "second" and "tenth".

My understanding is that there is a trade-off in the Chinese and
Japanese writing systems.  They're harder to learn and maintain, and
they're slower to write, but they're faster to read.  Since most of us
read far more than we write, such a system may well be advantageous.

David Johns
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: 15 Apr 92 20:20:01 GMT

In article <1992Apr15.060004.23678@news.Hawaii.Edu> jmu@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (James M. Unger) writes:
>In article <204875@unix.cis.pitt.edu> djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum) writes:
>>In article <29E9FBDD.26027@noiro.acs.uci.edu> cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu 
>>(Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>>
>>>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.
>>
>>Fair enough.  I was concentrating on "spoken" as depending on phonation,
>>but the real-time, interactive, and immediate aspects certainly connect
>>ASL more with spoken than with written languages.
>>
>But this is not a stand-off:  ASL and other forms of sign are not
>counterexamples to the proposition that speech is primary even if one
>allows that sign and speech are distinct varieties of language.  The key point
>is that the problem of reducing sign to writing is entirely analogous to
>the problem of reducing speech to writing.  See Oliver Sacks, _Seeing
>Voices_ and John DeFrancis _Visible Speech_, both 1989.
>

Complete agreement.  Has there been any REAL progress toward coding ASL
or any other sign language in writing?  I know that there have  been
several attempts, but none have been successful; most have had so many
odd little problem with them as to be intractable.

Anyone out there think that we should NOT make a written ASL that even
slightly resembles the signed stuff?  I mean, there's nothing in the
shape of an "n" that says to ME, "Put the tip of your tongue up behind
your teeth and lower your velum.  Now hum."  Why the hell does everybody
try to manhandle ASL into a written form that even slightly resembles
it?  (I know that having the signs and the symbols look too little like
one another could be a problem, since deaf people are really visually
cued in, but it would be better than nothing.)  Perhaps the written
language and the signed one could develop from one another.

This seems to hit on the latest thread about how much spoken junk and
written junk influence one another, but I think that there is a crucial
difference.  For spoken speech, you are taking an auditory stimulus and
coding it into a visual one.  For ASL, you are taking one visual
stimulus and coding it into yet another visual stimulus.  

Have fun with it,
Janis C.


Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: dabg7181@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (HE-DAN Master of the Universe)
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 14:33:33 GMT

In article <1992Apr5.190053.12271@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> ritley@uiucmrl.bitnet () writes:
>
>It has always perplexed me that the
>infinitives in English are referred to with the word 'to',
>such as 'to be', 'to make', etc., but that the infinitives
>in some other languages are often referred to as single words
>(sein, machen; ser, hacer; etc.).
>
>Might anyone know why this is so, or whether there are
>other languages which refer to their infinitives as English does?

In (south slavic) Bulgarian (probably Macedonian) there is no infinitive 
form as in the other slavic languages.  They use "da" plus a form of the 
verb which corresponds to the subject.  In Serbo-Croatian there is an 
infinitive form but most likely the "da" construction will be used.

B: Iskam da pitam...  (I want to ask....)
   Toj iska da pita... (He wants to ask...)

SCr: Hocu da znam... (I want to know...)


Where in most other slavic languages, the infinitive form is used and "da" 
has other meanings ("indeed", "and", etc.)

Russ: Ja xochu sprocit'... (I want to ask....)
Polish: Ja poszedl pitac... (I lwent to ask...)


later,
Dan Brown
dabg7181@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu.us
Dept of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of Illinois
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Linguistics TV Schedule
Keywords: Dixie
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 17:53:41 GMT

In article <1992Apr15.134213.2188@athena.cs.uga.edu>, mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
<In article <1992Apr15.071136.9262@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
<>
<>You can't expect good English from rednecks who wrap themselves in the
<>Confederate flag.
<
<Do I hear a bit of regional bigotry coming through here???

Yes.

					--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: arild@milan.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de (Arild Hestvik)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Date: 13 Apr 92 12:16:19 GMT
	<ARILD.92Apr10170640@milan.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de>
	<1992Apr11.070415.15089@cs.yale.edu>
Reply-To: arild@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de
Organization: IMS, University of Stuttgart, Germany

In article <1992Apr11.070415.15089@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

   <Clearly. And what about cricket song, too? And some gorillas even speak
   <English. You could actually ask your own Institute professor, N. Chomsky.
   <Please post answer. 

   Dear Arild, if you were being serious, please forgive me, as I found your
   article absolutely hilarious.  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  It's quite a funny
   joke against the Establishment.

					   --Scott (and did you hear that
					     Chomsky's pet chimpanzee is
					     fluent in Hebrew?)

I'm sorry I can't say the same about your attempt at humor.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Devanagari: Syllabary or Alphabet?
From: johnnyb@ims.com (Johnny Battle)
Date: 14 Apr 92 18:46:52 GMT
 <1992Apr12.225857.21555@midway.uchicago.edu> <1992Apr13.012514.4510@cs.yale.edu>
Organization: Integrated Measurement Systems, Inc.

In article <1992Apr13.012514.4510@cs.yale.edu>, horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
|> 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.
|> 
|> Devana^gari^ is an alphabet, period.  Each letter represents a sound.  The

It's just not that cut and dried.  Many of the letters appear as logical
combinations of a set of basic characters. 

|> It can also be regarded as a syllabary--a very large one--but what is the
|> point of that?

You might also regard it as a very large alphabet, but what's the point
of that?

|> <But the <e>-component
|> <of <ke> can not occur independently, unattached to a consonant
|> <sign.
|> 
|> Yes, it can.  It just has a slightly different form.

It's not a different form of a character, its a different character.  The
character for <e> by itself looks nothing like the mark used to indicate <e>
following a consonant. 

I think Rahul is right; devanagari has characteristics of both a syllabary
and an alphabet.  The confusion may be that in English "letter" refers to a
written character and "syllable" to a spoken sound.  To write a syllabary 
in English, you have to add special symbols, not appearing in ordinary
writting, to some letters (umlaut, for example).  Devanagari doesn't have 
this requirement; the logical system of symbols is part and parcel of the
system of writting.  It doesn't really make sense to break out a separate
"alphabet" of individual letters except as a starting point for study.  
Certainly devanagari has a set of basic characters, which is often called
its "alphabet," but these characters are combined (often in obscure ways,
i.e. the character for <ksha>) to form new unique characters.  Should 
these separate letters be part of the "alphabet?"  If you leave out these
combined-form letters when learning the "alphabet," you will be very con-
fused when you try to read devanagari.

My point is that devanagari is a set of round pegs that don't fit into 
the square holes created by the terms, "alphabet" and "syllabary."

Johnny Battle
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: inventing a writing system?
Date: 8 Apr 92 23:56:05 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Apr8.050324.9598@leland.Stanford.EDU> richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter) writes:
>In article <1992Apr2.171953.4945@Csli.Stanford.EDU>, scobbie@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Jim Scobbie) writes:
>|> 
>|> Absolutely the worst thing about the writing system I am using at
>|> the moment is that it provides 6 symbols people are comfortable
>|> using as vowel sound representers aeiouy.

Yes, with "w" coming closest of the rest.  It is already a vowel
letter in Welsh.

>|> If we could incorporate a few more from the ipa chart
>|> like epsilon, small I, schwa then maybe life would be easier. <...>
>
>I agree, we need more vowel symbols.  However, I'd ask for something
>other than a small 'I'.  This is already used in lowercase numbers
>for the numeral '1' in a number of fonts, and in cursive it is hard
>to distinguish large and small characters that have the same form.

This being said, in Turkish the distinction between dotless and dotted
"i" seems to work more or less well.

I would probably vote against the schwa.  It is kind of difficult to
distinguish from "a".  I like the IPA open "o" (reverse "c"), the
Danish slashed "o", the Russian reversed "e" and the ligature "ae".

>In this regard, I would criticize the current roman letterforms for the
>following ambiguities: {'1', 'l', 'I'}, {'O','0'}, {'2','Z'}, {'8','B'}
>(already noted elsewhere), {'5','S'} (noted elsewhere)

Actually, one should criticise the current Arabic digits, for they
are a relatively new addition to the Roman writing.

>and {'1','7'}.

Well, this one can't be the fault of the Roman letterforms!  :-)

-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
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: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 10 Apr 92 23:46:34 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <1g4Wxp#10dOG45hmk4L54Wwlr4cZR8c=cowan@snark.thyrsus.com> cowan@snark.thyrsus.com (John Cowan) writes:
>Scott Horne asks why "S" is not a glyphic variant of "s".  I don't have
>access to the Unicode documentation, but its predecessor-in-spirit,
>the (internal) Xerox Character Code Standard, states that it would be
>very reasonable for a text processing system to treat "S" and "s" as just
>such glyphic ("looks" in Xerox jargon) variants.  The XCCS, however,
>provides separate codes for "S" and "s" primarily for backward compatibility.
>There is no requirement that actual text processing systems use both codes.
>
>Likewise, the XCCS has separate codes for katakana and hiragana because
>JIS does, but similarly suggests that the difference is really one of
>"looks".

Yes, but there's also an important question of when the two looks are
interchangable.  In English, long-s and short-s were (and are) almost
always interchangable.  The only exception I know of is a doubled s, in
which case a long-s should (but not must) be followed by a short-s.

The same is not true of `s' and `S'.  As the first letter of the first word
of a sentence, `S' is required.  Even worse, it is absolutely not permissible
to jumble together katakana and hiragana within the same word.  These are far
better described as different fonts of the same alphabet, rather than a set of
letterforms with variant looks.

If there is a *systematic* alternation between two different "looks", you 
want to have a character set that treats them as different letters, and not
merely different "looks" of a different letter, so that (for example) spelling
checkers (and their ilk) can spot inconsistent and improper choices.


-- 
          David M. Tate            |"The man who hath no music in himself
     dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu       | Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sound
  A poem should be dumb, / As old  | Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils
 medallions to the thumb.-MacLeish | 	Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice", A.V
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Optative and Admirative
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 11 Apr 92 00:35:57 GMT

In article <1992Apr4.193333.5837@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
>In article <ARA.92Apr4120555@camelot.ai.mit.edu>, ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler) writes:
><
><Scott Horne says Albanian has moods other than subjunctive, optative and 
><admirative. I omitted in my posting the obvious indicative and imperative.
><What other obsure little moods does it have ?
>
>Albanian has no "obs[c]ure little moods" at all, let alone "other obs[c]ure
>little moods".  It's high time that the readers of this group show some respect
>for languages other than English, French, and Latin.
>

Oh, come on, Scott.  The whole case-marking thing is really neat and
unfamiliar to a native English speaker.  I confess to curiosity and
confusion when I'm faced with some words describing moods of verbs that
I've never heard of and, especially, cases of nouns that I probably use
daily but don't realize it.

Come to think of it, I probably use all the "obscure" verb moods as
well, but they all have the same form as indicative, so I just don't
know it.

What different kinds of moods and cases ARE there in this world, anyway?
English has almost NONE of this kind of junk, and I'm curious as hell
about it.

Regards,
Janis C.
  
Janis Cortese           ||   "The United States is the only country to  
U. C. Irvine            ||    have gone from barbarism to decadence  
cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu ||    without passing through civilization."            
========================||                 -- H. L. Mencken
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Spelling bees (Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?))
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 13 Apr 92 18:03:31 GMT

In article <1992Apr11.014140.10793@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
>In article <29E63A12.8419@noiro.acs.uci.edu>, cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
><
><English doesn't have genders,
>
>On nouns.  Anymore.  (Old English had three genders.)

People who learn the language don't learn old English, they learn what I
speak daily.  And what the hell do we have genders on that should have
it, like people and animals?  We don't even have a gender specific third
person plural. 

><or that many irregular verbs (at last count, I heard it was a
><mere 144),
>
>I think I can produce a list of 310.  Anyway, most languages don't have *any*
>irregular verbs.  I can't think of a modern Indo-European language with more
>irregular verbs than English.

Try just about any Latinate language. 

><All this makes it too easy, so we HAD to have a
><screwed up system of writing it just to make the furriners go nuts
><learning it.
>
>BZZZZZZZZT.  There's a hyphen in `screwed-up', and you misspelled
>`foreigners'.  :-)  (Well, you said you were a good speller.  :-))

There are almost no fixed rules on where to put hyphens, and my
misspelling was intentional. 

>[About English:]
><It tends to invent words a bit too often
><instead of exploring metaphor, but then that's a personal taste.
>
>One I happen to share.
>
><ANYway, don't flame me on this.
>
>Too late.  :-)
>
><I LIKE English, but I'm also damned
><glad I learned how to write and speak it natively, or else I'd go nuts.
>
>Why?  Our very own Ivan Derzhanski isn't a native speaker of English,
>but he spells better than the great majority of natives.
>
>					--Scott

Scott, you are intelligent, but too damned literal.  I have this feeling
that you haven't gotten a joke first time in years.  

Regards,
Janis C.
From: sharder@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Soren Harder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Date: 15 Apr 92 14:20:50 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:

>>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."  

Certainly not, especially not if your kitchen is as wild as mine :-)

> 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.

Dogs are not capable of _language_ in the normal sense of the word.
(see f.x. Hockett(1958) 'A course in Modern Linguistics'). A lot of
dogs are definitely able to pick up cues in the form of words, but
this is only (?) an ability to react to a (somewhat limited) lexicon
and has nothing to do with the symbolic structure that language is.

What I am trying to say, is that dogs can process language -- but so
can computers. (Taking this comparison further would be unjust both to
dogs and computers)

>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. 

But they _are_ machines. Just like people :-) :-)

>Regards,
>Janis C.
> 

Soren Harder

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Soren Harder, (MSc student)
Centre for Cognitive Science, 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh
E-mail: sharder@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
From: lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cases vs. Adverbs (was: -ze and -the in Attic Greek)
Date: 8 Apr 92 01:36:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: lynx.5kqjr9p
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <ARA.92Apr7145506@camelot.ai.mit.edu> ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler) writes:
>I find the direction of the present discussion interesting, particularly
>the generalization of the context to non-IE languages. However, at the
>same time it is not clear to me that there is any basis for a unified 
>discussion of IE and non-IE languages.
>
> [some material omitted] How do we know that one can identify
>the constructions of non-IE languages with the constructions of IE 
>languages or with constructions of other non-IE languages ? For example,
>reference has been made to the Inessive case of the Yuman languages and
>is this really identifiable with the Inessive case of Finnish ?

If by "identifiable", you mean is it identical in meaning and grammatical
usage, then the answer is "of course not".  In fact, to save a bit of
space in my post, I abbreviated "Illative" -- the case marks either location
inside (some space or container) or motion into. But this shouldn't be
too disturbing: the same thing (i.e. non-exact correspondence) is the 
RULE when comparing the vast majority of the words and morphemes of
languages generally, even fairly closely related ones. The glosses of 
lexical items cited in a text of a different language are just approximations
(almost mnemonics, really) adopted for convenience. To take a simple
example, the prepositions of French and Spanish don't (at least for
the majority, maybe all) correspond -- i.e. those of French do not have
exact translations (i.e. valid in all instances, even so far as mere
truth value) in Spanish.

BTW, I'm not a generative grammarian or even a structuralist, so poor Chomsky
can't be blamed here...
Newsgroups: sci.lang