HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Snow White etc.
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 92 20:54:03 GMT

In article <1992Dec9.233630.13677@spss.com>, markrose@spss (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <1992Dec9.152119.4487@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
>(Leo Connolly) writes:
>>>>I don't think they're abstract nouns at all.  _Snow White_ is merely an
>>>>attempt to translate _Schneewittchen_, which is sort of a hybrid High German
>>>>(-chen) - Low German (-witt-) name in Grimms' famous tale.  _Snow White_ is
>>>>simply words flung around into a name without syntactic structure, so that
>>>>it doesn't make sense to claim that _White_ is an adjective here.
>>> 
>[Rich Alderson:]
>>> The fact that these are translations of names in Grimm doesn't affect 
>>> their morphosyntactic structure in English.
>>
>>True enough, per se -- but some funny English comes out of bad translations
>>in other instances too.  The trouble is, there *is* no obvious morphosyntac-
>>tic structure that I can find, so I'm blaming the translator.
>
>Thanks to decorators and marketeers, we now have a whole range of such
>expressions: Lime green, navy blue, desert white, lemon yellow, gunmetal grey,
>fire engine red, etc.  Synchronically, would not "Snow White" and "Rose Red",
>whatever their historical origin, simply be interpreted as instances of
>this common and productive syntactic pattern?

The pattern was productive before the advent of decorators and marketeers, or
they wouldn't have been able to use it so easily.  :-)
-- 
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: maricasa@dgp.utoronto.edu (Maria Casas)
Subject: accents in Hungarian
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: University of Toronto
Date: 14 Dec 92 23:37:07 GMT

Can anybody tell me what the accents are on the name Laszlo
in Hungarian?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY)
Subject: Re: myself
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 16:46:47 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Distribution: sci

In article <29384@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>Oddly enough, very few people have problems with "he" and "him", quite a
>few have problems with "me" and "I", and most people have problems with
>"who" and "whom", yet the rules in each case are identical.

This is true only if by "rules" you mean "'objective' descriptions of
distribution"---and then only if you ignore speaker-internal variation and
if you are in certain varieties of English which are not spoken often by
most English speakers.  If, on the other hand, "rule" refers to the
principle in the speaker's head which characterizes their language, then
the troubles to which this thread has been devoted are prima facie evidence
that the rules are *not* the same.
From: LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Christmas linguistics
Date: 17 Dec 1992 06:03:00 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

My wife and I have an annual disagreement on the pronounciation 
of a Latin word.  She sings in a choir.  At this time of the  
year, they sing Christmas carols, mostly English.  Several of 
them include the Latin phrase "Gloria in excelsis Deo".  Our 
disagreement concerns the "c".  The choir pronounces it as an 
Englishman pronounces "ch" in "china".  I have told them that 
they sing Latin in Italian; that is how an Italian would
pronounce "excelsis".  It is also awkward to sing.  In Latin, 
I claim, the "c" should simply be pronounced "s".  A counter-
claim from somebody in the choir is that the "ch" pronounciation 
is correct if you are singing Latin from a certain century (the 
17th?), to which I reply that the phrase must have been used in 
church at least a thousand years before that.   

Comments, anyone?

Bengt
From: mikulska@crux.Princeton.EDU (Margaret Mikulska)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: If I ever get to speak to Cyril and Metodius...
Date: 14 Dec 92 18:11:28 GMT
Reply-To: mikulska@astro.princeton.edu (Margaret Mikulska)
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@nimaster

In article <Dec.13.13.16.15.1992.17879@pilot.njin.net> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>In article <11907@hogg.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
>
>> It is not clear to me now.  I much prefer distinct letter shapes. [...]
>
>This must be tongue-in-cheek! The way to get rid of diacritics and
>digraphs is easy. Just connect them them to the 'letter-symbol' :-)..
>
>That would make it a 'distinct' symbol which is related to its
>neighbor symbol :-)..
>
>Surely you'd prefer 'adjacent' (i.e. similar) letters to resemble
>one another. It's easier to learn since you can learn incrementally
>and by making analogies. Otherwise you can wind up with a thousand
>symbols or more (Chinese) all of which have to wind up resembling
>one another anyway. And how do we define distinct anyway?

This is not linguistics, this is psychology. :-)  "Similar" and
"distinct" are subjective notions, depending on familiarity and 
experience with the objects in question.  True, there are thousands of
Chinese characters, but they do not appear similar if you are familiar
with them.  Actually, it'a amazing how distinct they can appear.

I must agree with Ivan that distinct letter shapes are preferable.  None
of the languages using _alphabets_ would have an overwhelmingly large
number of letters.  (Chinese is another matter, it doesn't use an
alphabet.)  Digraphs aren't such a good idea.

(BTW, how do you call a 5-char representation of a sound?  Pentagraph?)

-Margaret
mikulska@astro.princeton.edu
From: urcat@mcl.ucsb.edu (Eilidh Swan)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: ASCII IPA
Date: 11 Dec 92 20:09:44 GMT

In a ListServ discussion recently, a standard ASCII IPA (ha!) was
suggested to help with pronunciation descriptions.  One gentleman
informed me a a discussion on sci.lang lately about developing such
an IPA....

If anyone has the latest complilation of this discussion, please
e-mail me at either of the addresses below.  

Thank you very much.
Christine (Cat) McGlothlin

Eilidh Swan
************************************************************************
Cat McGlothlin    urcat@mcl.mcl.ucsb.edu   'urcat'='you-are-cat'   "Oh!"
                  eilidh@cs.ucsb.edu       -- Eilidh is Celtic for Ellen
 The University never has, and never will, pay for or fund my opinions.
From: simon@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de (Julia Simon)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Christmas linguistics
Date: 17 Dec 1992 13:52:03 GMT
Organization: Fachschaft Computerlinguistik, U of Saarland, FRG
NNTP-Posting-Host: fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de

LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden) writes:
> phrase "Gloria in excelsis Deo".  Our 
> disagreement concerns the "c".  The choir pronounces it as an 
> Englishman pronounces "ch" in "china".  I have told them that 
> they sing Latin in Italian; that is how an Italian would
> pronounce "excelsis".  It is also awkward to sing.  In Latin, 
> I claim, the "c" should simply be pronounced "s".  A counter-
> claim from somebody in the choir is that the "ch" pronounciation 
> is correct if you are singing Latin from a certain century (the 
> 17th?), to which I reply that the phrase must have been used in 
> church at least a thousand years before that.   

Yes, they're singing it in Italian - there's something called the "Italian
pronunciation of Latin" or so, which must be the one this choir is using
(I heard it's used fairly often by church choirs!). There "c" before "e" and
"i" is pronounced "ch".

As an Indo-European linguist I've learned that at some time (looooong ago) the
Romans pronounced it "k". Later it became a fricative or affricate before "e"
and "i" (as it still is in the modern Romance languages - "s" in French, "ch"
in Italian and (I think) Rhaeto-Romanic, "th" in Spanish, ...).

But now everybody pronounces Latin words (and words from other "dead"
languages, like Greek, Sanskrit etc., as well) as they please, i.e. as if
these words came from their mother tongue. So for me there's nothing to
quarrel about, since for us linguists all those "s" and "ch" and so on are
wrong, wrong, wrong!

That is, they're wrong if you want to speak Classical Latin. If you want to
speak a more colloquial variant of Latin (you know, the Romance languages come
from colloquial Latin, not from Classical Latin! If they had developed from
Classical Latin maybe Caesar wouldn't be pronounced "Seesar" but "Keesar" :)
or what we call "Kirchenlatein" in German (Church Latin!? - it's some sort of
mediaeval Latin) then it's perfectly correct!

			Julia 8-)

 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
				Julia Simon

 Fachschaftsrat Computerlinguistik	DIaLOGIKa GmbH
 Fachbereich 8.7, Bau 17, Zi. 201
 Universit"at des Saarlandes		Albertstr., Pascalschacht
 D-W-6600 Saarbr"ucken, Germany		D-W-6602 Dudweiler, Germany

			email: simon@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de
			       sileas@coli.uni-sb.de
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY)
Subject: Re: myself
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 15:49:20 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Distribution: sci

In article <1992Dec16.000733.4635@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>_Who_ and _whom_ follow a different pattern: they *cannot* be cojoined
>to anything except _what?_ and _which_, and then only rarely.  So the
>forced accusative seen in _Me and him don't like her_ is not paralelled
>by a *Whom and him did that? (= Who(m) did he do that with?)

By traditional accounts, the problem with *_Whom and him did that_ is that 
it violates the Conjoined Structure Constraint.  That is on the non-echo
question reading, of course.  With echo questions, all bets are off---see
a (CLS?) paper by Rich Janda entitled something like "Echo Questions are
Evidence for What?"
From: salley@niktow.canisius.edu (David Salley)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Need help with Mongolian (Urdu)
Keywords: SCA, Urdu, Mongolian, Mongol
Date: 19 Dec 92 02:54:01 GMT
Organization: Canisius College, Buffalo NY. 14208

Greetings!  I am looking for someone who can answer a few questions on Urdu,
the language of the Mongols.  I am a member of the Society for Creative
Anachronism where everybody pretends to be someone who might have lived in
the middle ages and researches their persona.

We have a woman in our local group who wants to be a Mongol.  She has chosen
the name Cori Ghora.  She says that "cor" means thief, "-i" is a feminine
ending, and "ghora" means horse.  She has no documentation for the name other
than a primer of the Urdu language.  We need answers to a few questions.

1.) Is Urdu the language of the Mongols?
2.) Do the words translate what she says they do?
3.) Is the grammatical construction correct?
4.) Is this the type of name Mongols would use?

Documentation, or a pointer towards it, would be greatly appreciated.  Please
send e-mail as I normally don't read this group.  adTHANKSvance.

                                                       - David   

Disclaimer  : A society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.
Internet    : salley@niktow.cs.canisius.edu
USnail-net  : David P. Salley, 136 Shepard Street, Buffalo, New York 14212-2029
From: aeb@wsinfo01.win.tue.nl (A.E. Brouwer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Date: 13 Dec 92 00:26:01 GMT
Reply-To: aeb@win.tue.nl

Rich Alderson writes:
> The citation from the Webster program in question follows, to provide data
> for the discussion:

> Word: wight
follow two satisfactory etymologies

> Word: victor
follows a satisfactory etymology

> Word: week
>         _
> week \'wek\ n [ME weke, fr. OE wicu, wucu; akin to OHG wehha week, L vicis 
>                            _
>   change, alternation, OE wir wire -- more at WIRE]
I fail completely to see the connection between "week" and "wire".
(But see below.)

Rich Alderson says:
> I'm not overly impressed with the posited relationship among week, weak, and
> wire, but until I can get to an OED or something else turstworthy, I can't
> argue more than "I don't like a Latin /k/ matching up with an OE /k/."
Yes, unless the OE word was borrowed. Hence, I am almost sure
that the idea of a week, the names of the days and the word for week
are loans (loan translations in the case of the names for the days)
from Latin.
The same IE root *veik- yielded words like German "wechseln" with the
expected /h/.

> Word: wire
>           _                                   _
> 1 wire \'wi(*)r\ n, [ME, fr. OE wir; akin to OHG wiara fine gold,
>       _
>   L viere to plait, Gk iris rainbow]
One might add Swedish "vira" (to wind), Latin "viriae", "viriola" (bracelet).
On the other hand, Latin "viere" hardly belongs here. The others
are all from an IE root *vei-ro-, an extension of *vei- from which
Latin "vieo" is derived. This latter root has many extensions,
one of which is *veik-; probably this is the reason for the reference
under "week". Another extension is *veig- from which "weak" is derived.

> Word: weak
>         _                                            _
> weak \'wek\ adj [ME weike, fr. ON veikr; akin to OE wican to yield, L vicis 
>   change -- more at WEEK]  1 : lacking strength
Again, the Latin word is from *veik-, not *veig-.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Organization: Enea Data AB
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 11:47:39 GMT

aeb@win.tue.nl writes:
)On the other hand, the Swedish "kuslig" is related to Norw. & Sw.
)"kuse" (bogey; boss), Danish "kuske" (domineer).
)In Dutch we have "koest!" (to a dog: lie down! hush!), which no doubt
)is a loan from French "couche-toi!", and similar words occur in the
)Scandinavian languages - maybe some contamination has taken place.
)There might also be a relation with Danish "kusse" (cunt).
)[I expect Norw. and/or Sw. "kusa" or "kuse" with same meaning,
)but my dictionaries are too prudish to confirm this. Maybe some
)native speakers can tell us what words they use?]

I don't think I followed the discourse completely, but anyway
Swedish has "kuse" which is slang for "horse". We also have "kusk"
who is the guy on the carriage behind the horse(es). We also have
"kuska" which a colloquial expression for "travel around".
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: help needed!
From: richard@technology.com (Richard Murphy)
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992 18:12:15 GMT
Organization: Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas


I am trying to locate recent research or publications in the
area of language-task analysis. The purpose is to determine

1) whether an exportable oral proficiency test can be divised
   for foreign ESL students
2) what procedures or methods exist to measure how language skills
   relate to the ability to perform various tasks.

If you know anything at all about this or know someone who might,
please e-mail me directly at:  richard@technology.com

Many thanks!
R. Murphy
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Date: 15 Dec 92 13:12:39 GMT

connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

(answering a post that I cancelled because I noticed a typing mistake,
and also because I wanted to add some more details - maybe the
cancelling failed to work)

>Doesn't this pose chronological problems?  Monasticism was not well
>established in the West in the third century, and the Germanic peoples
>did not have the sort of contact with the Roman world that developed later.
>(Of course, a later date would not be impossible.)
Well, yes. In my report I changed `third' into `third or fourth'
and `monk' into `priest' just for this reason.

>True.  But I cannot resist pointing out that neither means 'week'
My suggestion was not that the word borrowed meant `week', but that it
was the Latin word "vicis", and hence meant just what Latin "vicis" meant
(something like `turn', for example). In my repost I show a Bible fragment
where the Greek text with Latin translation containing "vicis"
has Gothic translation containing "wikon" - showing that in that
context at least the Latin and Germanic words have the same meaning.

>> [Not that it matters, but Kluge supports the idea "borrowed from Latin".
> 
>Are we looking at the same edition of Kluge?  Mine -- the 21st edition
>of 1975 -- says "Dieser Begriff [not: "Dieses Wort"!] ist in vorschrist-
>licher Zeit von den Roemern zu allen Germanen gelangt."  True, he calls
>the etymon 'week' "gemeingermanisch" rather than "urgermanisch", but
>he says nothing about borrowing.
> 
My edition is older.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: Christmas linguistics
    <1gs62kINNmmo@majestix.informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de>
Organization: University of Kentucky
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 02:22:32 GMT

In article <1gs62kINNmmo@majestix.informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de>
ma@informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de (Martin Ameskamp) writes:
 
>
>Other differences occur in words such as 'magnam' - is it mag-nam with a
>hard 'g' or is it 'manyam'?
>
 
The classical pronunciation was 'mang-nam'
 
> In my opinion, the main thing is that everyone pronounces
>the words in the same way.
 
If you have been following the discussion, at the very least you know that
this statement is counterfactual!
 
>
From: LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Date: 14 Dec 1992 08:16:07 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

In a previous article, aeb@wsinfo01.win.tue.nl (A.E. Brouwer) wrote:
>>>There might also be a relation with Danish "kusse" (cunt).
>>>[I expect Norw. and/or Sw. "kusa" or "kuse" with same meaning,
>>>but my dictionaries are too prudish to confirm this. Maybe some
>>>native speakers can tell us what words they use?]

I wrote:
>>I won't even try to tell you all those words.  There was a whole book
>>printed a few years ago with various terms for reproductive organs. 

>>But the Swedish cognate to the Danish "kusse" is probably "kutta".

Rich Alderson asked for a citation of that book.  I hadn't expected to
be called on that one!  I hadn't seen the book, just heard of it.  
All I wanted to say was that there are many such words!  Anyway, I have 
now made some research at our City library.  The book I had in mind is 
probably "Fula ordboken" (Dictionary of bad words) by Bengt Dagrin, 
BW Stockholm 1987, ISBN 91-32-42684-2.  I found it in the library's 
database, but not on the shelf.  When I asked about it, the girl smiled 
apologetically and said that certain books seem to grow little feet and 
run away.  Popular book, that one!  So, I still haven't seen it.

I have seen a followup book "O-ordboken: om ord som kallas fula" (The
non-word dictionary: about words that are called ugly) by the same
author and publisher in 1989, ISBN 91-32-42771-9.  That book deals with
bad words that are not directly related to sex (although homosexuality
is found in the second volume).

On the subject of cognates to the Danish "kusse", it occurs to me that
there is another Swedish cognate "kussimurra", which is more affectionate
than most others.  It could probably be used even by ladies in certain
situations.

Bengt 
-- 
Forwarded-By:
Bengt Gallmo                        e-mail: lmebgo@kiera.ericsson.se
Telefonaktiebolaget L M Ericsson    phone:  +46 8 719 1940
S-126 25 STOCKHOLM                  fax:    +46 8 719 3988
SWEDEN

The bad thing about good things is that they usually come to an end.
The good thing about bad things is that they, also, usually come to an end.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: s0gwb@exnet.co.uk (George Battrick)
Subject: Re: Christmas linguistics
Organization: ExNet Systems Ltd Public Access News, London, UK
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 00:03:33 GMT

In article <1gq0m3INNp2l@coli-gate.coli.uni-sb.de> simon@fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de (Julia Simon) writes:
>from colloquial Latin, not from Classical Latin! If they had developed from
>Classical Latin maybe Caesar wouldn't be pronounced "Seesar" but "Keesar" :)

... or even "Kaiser", na, Frau Simon?

>			Julia 8-)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>				Julia Simon
>
> Fachschaftsrat Computerlinguistik	DIaLOGIKa GmbH
> Fachbereich 8.7, Bau 17, Zi. 201
> Universit"at des Saarlandes		Albertstr., Pascalschacht
> D-W-6600 Saarbr"ucken, Germany		D-W-6602 Dudweiler, Germany
>
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: myself
Date: 18 Dec 92 12:14:52 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <kh-rv7a@lynx.unm.edu> lgorbet@carina.unm.edu (Larry P Gorbet ANTHROPOLOGY) writes:
<In article <29384@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
<>Oddly enough, very few people have problems with "he" and "him", quite a
<>few have problems with "me" and "I", and most people have problems with
<>"who" and "whom", yet the rules in each case are identical.
<
<This is true only if by "rules" you mean "'objective' descriptions of
<distribution" [...].  If, on the other hand, "rule" refers to the
<principle in the speaker's head which characterizes their language, then
<the troubles to which this thread has been devoted are prima facie evidence
<that the rules are *not* the same.

Which is where one begins to wonder why the rules are not the same.
Technically speaking, "he"/"him" and "I"/"me" only differ in person,
and there is no correlation between person and case in sight.
Why should the distribution of the individual case forms be different?

-- 
 `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