HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: au462@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Robert Drake)
Subject: NEEDED: IPA font, mac format
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 92 15:08:30 GMT


	Does anybody have, or know where I can get, a font that
contains the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols?  I am 
working on a Macintosh/HyperCard application that will drill
students in phonetic transcription.  Bit-mapped fonts would be
sufficient, since they will only be used on-screen.  I do not
have access to FTP, alas...    any help would be GREATLY 
appreciated.  Please respond direct to me:

Luigi-Bob Drake
MultiMedia Development
Cleveland State Univerity
au462@cleveland.freenet.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: matt@unidata.ucar.edu (Matt Hicks)
Subject: Re: ethymology of foobar
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR Boulder, CO
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 23:17:09 GMT

>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?

>Stefan

The only "foobar" that I know of was spelled "fubard." It is actually
an acronym for "Fucked Up Beyond All Reasonable Doubt." This was used
at MIT along with the term "weft" for "Wrong Every Fucking Time." I
suppose that "foobar" could be the phonetic spelling of the verbal 
term and that you could just drop the "doubt" and make the term
"...Beyond All Reason." Of course, this could just be a coincidence, in
which case you've just learned something you didn't need to know.:-)
--
_________________________________________________  /\_/\  _________________
Matthew  B.  Hicks     | Unidata Program Center | ((ovo))  The spotted owl:
matt@unidata.ucar.edu  | UCAR, PO Box 3000      | ():::()  the other "other
303/497-8676	       | Boulder, CO 80307-3000 |   VVV    white meat."
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Date: 16 Aug 92 13:21:25 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Aug14.162847.42358@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
>
>The fact is that the words languages use, and the way they are 
>formed, often have little to do with meaning.

True, although this fact is not exactly welcome in a language such as
Esperanto.

>As for affixes, Esperanto 'patrino' no more means 'female father'
>than English 'princess' means 'female prince.'
>Female fathers and female princes do not exist.

Actually, it seems that Hatshepsut (life, health, prosperity!) was a
female prince (and a female crown prince at that) before she became a
female pharaoh.

>Notice further that if they did exist,
>these words COULD NOT be used to refer to them; we would have to 
>find new words or paraphrases.

Maybe the same words could be used after all.  Why, the word "queen"
can mean a (male) king's wife or a female king (although I suppose it
only had the first meaning initially).

>Esperanto is not an a priori constructed language; it inherits the
>histories of its sources.  It could not have been otherwise.

This makes me wonder why it has inherited the root "patr" without also
inheriting the fact that it means `_male_ parent' in all Indo-European
languages.

-- 
 `If ye hiv ears oan yer heid - then use them tae lissen.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism
Date: 18 Aug 92 09:01:39 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Aug18.003231.3058@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>In article <10397@spark.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>> In article <1992Aug16.002920.3039@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>>>
>>>The point is that _patrino_, like (most? all?)
>>>nouns referring to females, is *formed* in exactly the way
>>>that a word for 'female father' would be.

What does `female father' mean?  Is it `female male parent'?

What you say is true if {meaning ("Xin") = `female' + meaning ("X")}.
What I suggest is {meaning ("Xin") = `female' + meaning ("X") - `male'},
and in this case "patrin" can't have the meaning `female father'.

>> The semantic component `male' is expressed by a zero morpheme, just as the
>> component `singular' is expressed by a zero morpheme if the plural
>> ending "j" is not present.
>
>I don't think this argument is legitimate.  Many languages have zero
>*allomorphs* of some morpheme or other which also has non-zero realiza-
>tions.  (English does; Esperanto probably doesn't.)

Right.  In Esperanto, as in many other agglutinative languages, a
morpheme can either have only zero or only non-zero realisations, and
this applies equally to derivational and inflexional morphemes.

>I maintain that morphemes may be posited only if they
>have some nonzero realizations; <...>

None the less, "patr-o" has the meaning `parent + male + singular'
rather than `parent + unspecified_sex + unspecified_number', and as
such it is parallel to "patr-in-o-j" `parent + female + plural';
therefore it seems fair to me to analyse it as "patr-0-o-0".

Note that this account is different from the one I outlined above,
under which "patr-o" (no null morpheme) is `father', and "patr-in-o" is
`father + (female - male)'.  (There is no way to express `father + female'.)

-- 
 `If ye hiv ears oan yer heid - then use them tae lissen.' (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
From: rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: English IS easy to learn
Date: 18 Aug 92 16:38:17 GMT
Reply-To: rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Organization: Brandeis University

In article <Aug.16.15.24.44.1992.27079@pilot.njin.net>, hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>
>Sure!
>
>I can't wait until the day in America when no one knows how to spell
>correctly. Then either everyone will fake it to the best of their
>abilities in which case the outcome will probably be better than
>what exists now or the President will appoint a blue-red-gold-white-
>xxx  ribbon commission to study the problem and suggest 
>remedies.  There doesn't seem to be any other way in which any
>spelling reform can be taken.

Actually, this is how the spelling of today came about, to some degree.
Spelling was an individual creative art with many options until the
mid-eighteenth century.  The watershed to modern spelling was
Johnson's dictionary, which, who knows, might have been a reslt of a 
*-ribbon royal commission.  Johnson was certainly considered an expert.
As for the spelling in the seventreenth century, I have commonly encountered
documents which spell the same word several different ways, sometimes 
within a line or two of each other.  As for presidential commissions, 
one enlightened head of the US government in the early eighteenth century
was reputed to have said something to the effect of "Never
trust a man who can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew
Jackson.  Spelling reform assumes that standard spelling
is the only useful thing about the way English is spelled.  Often
spellings reflect etymology and archaic pronunciations (e.g.
"reservoir," <wud a rezevor be a creetyur wich onlee eets rezens?--no, 
no, tha wurd iz rezevwa, or it least that iz hou sum spelt it in 1992... >
or "laughter/daughter").  Should "about" be spelled as pronounced in
"about tigers" or as in "about dogs" or maybe there should bew prescriptive
pronunciations to go along with spelling reform...
Actually, the estate of George Bernard Shaw has a trust fund set up for 
spelling reform.  If you think you have a better system, you can
get funded for setting it up (there might be a stipulation that au
be spelled "aw" as in "Shaw";)).  I don't think anyone has claimed the 
prize recently...
	Rich Rath
>
>To speed it up, in fact, it might be possible to consider a time
>period during which free-form spelling is encouraged. Just a joke!
>It might be a nice game to try on sci.lang, though. 
>
>In either case we'll wind up with a much more consistent
>set of spelling algorithms.
>-- 
>
>	mark	
>
>
>   hubey@pilot.njin.net                   hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
> ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey                  hubey@logos.montclair.edu
From: pjt@newton.cs.jhu.edu (Paul Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: English Orthography (was "easy to learn?")
Date: 12 Aug 92 14:10:30 GMT
Organization: Johns Hopkins Computer Science Department, Baltimore, MD

In article <2A885C3B.10024@noiro.acs.uci.edu> Janis Cortese writes:
>All natural languages have irregularities; English isn't so bad on this.
>It's worst characteristic is monumentally stupid spelling.

     I presume your complaint against English orthography is that it does not
provide a particularly elegant encoding of pronunciation.  This lament is
heard frequently, and I grant that a bijection between pronunciation and
spelling is a nice feature in any alphabetic writing system.  But on further
consideration we find that such a bijection is problematic even in theory.
The typical model of your idealized situation is

		    +--------+      +------------+
		    | Speech | ---> | Strings of |
		    | sounds | <--- | characters |
		    +--------+      +------------+

where the spelling system represents the interface.  But this model is
unrealistically simple:  A more precise one is

		    +------------------------------+
    +--------+      | +----------+     +---------+ |      +------------+
    | Speech | ---> | | Speakers |  X  | Lexicon | | ---> | Strings of |
    | sounds | <--- | +----------+     +---------+ | <--- | characters |
    +--------+      +------------------------------+      +------------+

In a nutshell, whose pronunciation should our orthography encode?  QE2's?
Walter Cronkite's?  Nelson Mandela's?  (Mandar, don't answer that question!)
     A second, more basic issue is that we can't have it both ways.  While
the sound of a word is a good thing for its written form to capture, it is
not the only feature of the word worth capturing.  Another very valuable
thing to be ascertained from the spelling of a word is the word's origins
and meaning.  Here we must choose, and the tension between these two valuable
types of information pretty well explains the current state of English
spelling.
     Now if you require that pronunciation be paramount, then I hope for your
sake that you never find yourself on a drawbridge while laborers are debating
whether to "raise" or "raze" it.  And I fear that many adults will conclude,
as I did in sixth grade, that "democracy" and "hypocrisy" must have similar
meanings, since they sound so similarly (Out of the mouths of babes...).
     +++paul
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Subject: Re: English IS easy to learn
Reply-To: rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Organization: Brandeis University
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 1992 14:23:06 GMT

In article <Aug19.020250.18491@yuma.ACNS.ColoState.EDU>, komives@lamar.ColoState.EDU (Robert Komives) writes:
>In article <1992Aug18.163817.16916@news.cs.brandeis.edu> rath@binah.cc.brandeis.edu writes:
>>... I have commonly encountered
>>documents which spell the same word several different ways, sometimes 
>>within a line or two of each other.  ...
>
>Bad spellers still do that. I do that. Good spellers just do not seem to
>understand that bad spellers do not make mistakes on purpose nor always. Why
>look up a word in the dictionary if you know you spelled it correctly last
>week? Its nice to know from all these posts that there is something natural
>about this.

I thought I would post an example of what I meant, not for any specific reason
other than it moves the concept of spelling out of the realm of "bad" and 
"good".....
From v2 of _The Winthrop Papers_,  from Sam Borrowes to John Winthrop
concerning passage to the New England colony in 1630
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Colchestere this. 6, of Junarie 1629[/30]
LOUENGE AND DEERE SURE,
	may yet plese you to vnderstand the Case if my righting to youre
worship at this time is that thare is a frend of mine wich is willing 
to go this voyadg for newe ingland he hath beine in Clind to that voyadg 
a gret wile but he cam not to me with a resolushon for to go tele this
morning aftere my fatheres letere was rite and he desired me to right to 
you for to entere his name and his wifes and if it plese you to oundertake 
for theme in there passadg oufere and send word I pray withere you will 
ondertake for theme or no and for the halefe of the money for there 
Chard going ofer and for half the money for Careng ouer goodes
he mento careye I pray send word when and to home it shod be paid
and he will send it to you desireng you to send and anesuere in
my fatheres letere this wecke Craving pardene for this my boldness at 
this time youer sarvante to comand

			Samwell Borrowes
	(His name is James Boosye and alleso his wife)
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
the four maladyes of the ponchuashon, pronownsiateshun, and
gramar seme for to have changd at least on the sourface ov things
aleso and word Junk chewr too.
Best, 
Rich Rath
--BTW someone graciously corrected my assertion about the Shaw estate--
the spelling reform  award has been 
disbursed...I thought about posting the reply,
but I don't think that's kosher
From: gwb@crosfield.co.uk (George Battrick)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are you still *axeing* questions?
Date: 19 Aug 92 17:28:33 GMT
Organization: Crosfield Electronics, Hemel Hempstead, United Kingdom.

In article <1992Aug18.183620.17556@hplabsz.hpl.hp.com> evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum) writes:
"In article <1992Aug17.210041.42411@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:
">As I pointed out (14940 Aug 17), "axe" is the *original* form.  It is
"
"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

Hmm. The (very English, but south-western?) sailor brother of the
baronet in "Ruddigore" (Gilbert and Sullivan, about 1880?) "axes".

By the way, do American "axers" do this consistently?  Do task, bask,
mask become tacks, backs, macs?

"initial unstressed /sp/: all the kids I know went through a phase of
"pronouncing "spaghetti" /pIs'kEdi/).  So it would hardly be surprising

Dunno about spaghetti, but this reminds me that a surprisingly high
number of reasonably educated English people pronounce "specific"
as "pacific".
From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Can I axe you a question?
Date: 18 Aug 92 17:48:45 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <R3653FJ@mailgzrz.tu-berlin.de> bzfstoer@ZIB-Berlin.DE writes:
>apropos ask <--> axe:
>
>Same phenomenon in German:
>Some people say: "Wepse" instead of "Wespe" ("wasp" in English).
>They knows it's wrong, but it sounds nicer.
>But I don't know of other examples.

I think 'wasp' and 'waps' have been competing since proto-Germanic times.



-- 
+ 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.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: knappen@obelix.kph.uni-mainz.de (Joerg Knappen)
Subject: Zero morphem (was: Re: Esperanto's embedded sexism)
Keywords: Zero morphem
Reply-To: knappen@obelix.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE
Organization: Institute for Nuclear Physics, Uni Mainz, FRG
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 13:31:22 GMT

Zero mophems can in fact appear, even without having allomorphs. All examples
I know are from inflecting languages (czech, latin, german).

Consider the situation, that there is a paradigma of forms, and there is one
_obviously marked_ form, marked by the absence of a specific ending, whereas
other forms are having some ending. The notion of markedness is crucial in this
argument, it makes no sense to speak about zero morphemes in an unmarked
context.

J"org Knappen.
Xref: sparky sci.lang:6501 soc.culture.esperanto:1464
From: djohns@elm.circa.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.esperanto
Subject: Re: [Anglolingvo/English] easy to learn English?
Date: 18 Aug 92 12:24:22 GMT
Followup-To: sci.lang
Distribution: usa
Organization: University of Florida, Gainesville

In article <1992Aug15.071008.22450@leland.Stanford.EDU> richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter) writes:

# As a language with few irregularities, I'd like to recommend
# Japanese.  There's a lot to be said for a language where the verb
# 'to be' is regular.

Maybe so, but you can't say that about Japanese.

Assuming you're talking about the copula, it doesn't have an "(r)u"
form; the polite "desu" is not a regular formation from "da"; based on
the past "datta", the continuative should be "datte", not "de"; the
negative should be "danai", not "de wa nai"; and it doesn't occur as
the main verb of attributive phrases, being replaced by "na" or "no".

In fact, I can't think of any two forms that show a regular
morphological correspondence.  Can you?

David Johns
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: English Orthography (was "easy to learn?")
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 12 Aug 92 18:29:14 GMT

In article <1992Aug12.141030.11222@blaze.cs.jhu.edu> pjt@newton.cs.jhu.edu (Paul Tanenbaum) writes:
>In article <2A885C3B.10024@noiro.acs.uci.edu> Janis Cortese writes:
>>All natural languages have irregularities; English isn't so bad on this.
>>It's worst characteristic is monumentally stupid spelling.
>
>     I presume your complaint against English orthography is that it does not
>provide a particularly elegant encoding of pronunciation.  This lament is
>heard frequently, and I grant that a bijection between pronunciation and
>spelling is a nice feature in any alphabetic writing system.  But on further
>consideration we find that such a bijection is problematic even in theory.

I KNOW it is problematic; I am not in favor of any kind of spelling
reform WHATSOEVER.  English has stupid spelling, but ioffers wonderful
clu as to the origin of the word and other etymological stuff.  I often
wonderf what languages that wipe the slate clean and revamp spelling
periodically end up losing.

English has boneheaded spelling; so what?  Lots of languages have stupid
little idiosyncrasies.  While Spanish is fair phonetic it has two verbs
"to be" and a subjunctive that people actually expect you to USE.  To an
English speaker, THIS is difficult.

Again, I AM NOT IN FAVOR OF ANY KIND OF SPELLING REFORM WHATSOEVER.  I
UNDERSTAND HOW DIFFICULT IT WOULD BE TO IMPLEMENT, AND THAT YOU WOULD
LOSE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN WORDS, SUCH AS "DIVINE" vs. "DIVINITY" OR
"SAGE" vs. "SAGACIOUS."	 

Please stop lecturing me.

Regards,
Janis C.


Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: markh@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Hunk)
Subject: English has one (was: Re: Gender neutral pronouns)
Organization: Computing Services Division, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1992 17:38:11 GMT

We do too have a gender neutral pronoun: they and sometimes you.  It's not
only current usage but (in the case of they) has been in use for the entire
history of Modern English by the most reknowned writers, including Skakespeare
himself.
From: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Karandash/Caran d'Ache
Date: 20 Aug 92 15:51:47 GMT
Reply-To: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: COMANDOS Project, Glesga Yoonie

iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) sez:
> the cooperativity element inherent to the suffix _-da,s_ ... is 
> present in all of your examples above, and also in other words such as
> _karde,s_ < _kar1nda,s_ `sibling' (`co-womber').

I recall from somewhere that this word comes from applying the _da,s suffix
to Old Turkish "kar" (womb), not the modern form "kar1n" (which accounts
for the missing syllable).

But it raises another issue: why did the vowel harmony disappear?  There are
a few other words in Turkish where pre-existing vowel harmony has been lost;
one is "merhaba" (hello), from the Arabic "marhaba" - the Arabic form has
vowel harmony but the Turkish one doesn't, exactly the opposite of what you'd
expect.

-- 
--  Jack Campin    room G092, Computing Science Department, Glasgow University,
17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8RZ, Scotland   TEL: 041 339 8855 x6854 (work)
INTERNET: jack@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk or via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk    FAX: 041 330 4913
BANG!net: via mcsun and uknet     BITNET: via UKACRL    UUCP: jack@glasgow.uucp
From: richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter)
Subject: Re: English Orthography (was "easy to learn?")
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 92 08:18:20 GMT

In article <1992Aug13.221041.7548@midway.uchicago.edu>, hau4@ellis.uchicago.edu (sven  hauptfeld) writes:
|> But there is a bigger problem. English has a very different set of sounds.
           1  2 3          4      5                6     7          8
|> Anyway, what is really so wrong with English spelling? Apart from rare 
       9   10                11                           12
|> exceptions, like "yacht" or "aisle", I don't see any problems.
    13                                  14
|> Sven
    15

1  silent 'e'
2  's' pronounced like 'z'
3  'a' represents a diphthong
4  'o' really pronounced like 'ah'
5  'Eng' pronounced like 'ing'
6  'y' pronounced like 'ee', or is this the normal pronunciation of 'y'?
7  another silent 'e'
8  'f' pronounced like 'v'
9  'y' added to make 'a' long
10  'wh' pronounced like 'hw'
11  'w' silent
12  'a' pronounced like 'uh'
13  'x' pronounced like 'g' or 'k'
14  'I' pronounced like the letter's name, as a special case
15  'v' how is this pronounced???


There are just a lot of minor inconsistencies.


--Rich Wingerter
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: affixes in Esperanto
Date: 14 Aug 92 16:10:00 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <1992Aug13.115242.19031@news.columbia.edu> pcj1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu 
(Pierre Jelenc) writes:
>Esperanto does not have "suffixes" and "prefixes". Those words refer to 
>languages such as those of the hindo-european family, and have no meaning
>in Esperanto. "patr" is a root, and so is "in". They are absolutely on the 
>same footing. Do not get confused by misguided attempts to make Esperanto
>grammar "more like what you're used to" in beginners' courses.

This is an amazing claim.  Allow me to quote an opposing view, from the
original (1887) work by L.L. Zamenhof:

  "Mi kreis regulojn por _vortofarado_ kaj per tio chi mi enportis 
  grandegan ekonomion rilate la nombron de la vortoj ellernotaj, ne sole
  ne deprenante per tio chi de la lingvo ghian richecon, sed kontraue,
  farante la lingvon-- dank' al la eblo krei el unu vorto multajn aliajn
  kaj esprimi chiujn eblajn nuancojn de la penso-- pli richa ol le plej
  richaj naturaj lingvoj.  Tion chi mi atingis per la enkonduko de diversaj
  *prefiksoj kaj sufiksoj*, per kies helpo chiu povas el uni vorto formi
  diversajn aliajn vortojn, ne bezonante ilin lerni."

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.
Newsgroups: sci.lang