HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet
Date: 9 Apr 92 04:41:35 GMT
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University

In article <167C313728.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU>, JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
<
<   Scott asked, correctly (I regret to admit since he flames me when I am
<trying to be cute,

Sorry.  I saw an opportunity and exploited it.  :-)

<'wht does geography have to do with writing systems," citing
<Bulgarian, Mongolian and Yugoslavian using Cyrillic even though they have
<never been part of the Soviet Union.  (I could quibble about "Yugoslavian"
<(all of it?  what is "Yugoslavian"?, but I won't)).

Excuse me, but I said, "Bulgaria, Mongolia, and Yugoslavia".  I don't use
the word `Yugoslavian'.

<(many of us distinguish between "alphabets" like those used for
<Greek, Russian, English, etc., from "syllabaries" such as devanagari
<(substiture your favorite spelling) Cherokee, kana, etc.)

Someone claimed in e-mail that Devana^gari^ is not an alphabet.  Is there
need to refute this statement on the net, or should I just handle it in
e-mail?

<     Thus many "Orthodox" countries chose, say, the Greek based Cyrillic,
<while their "Roman Catholic" counterparts chose the "Roman" alphabet, and
<Muslim ones Arabic script.

Actually, this has more to do with imperialism than with religion (though
you may not notice, since the latter was often behind the former).

(Albanian, the topic of much recent discussion, was written in Roman
characters long after the population was Muslimised.  The Zhuang, Vietnamese,
and Hawai`ians aren't Christian [let alone Catholic] but use the Roman
script.)

<Thus Farsi uses Arabic script, Burmese uses
<nagari (I may err here),

The Burmese writing system is loosely *based* on Devana^gari^ but is clearly
*not* Devana^gari^.

[In response to my statement that Old French had a reasonable orthography:]
<I keep wishing that
<the scribe of Digby 23 had at least had the courtesy to use diacritics
<in order to distinguish the three different accented vowels symbolized
<with the letter "e" but contrasting with each other, and hopefully a different
<one for "schwa", which at least the manuscripts written in Hebrew characters
<in Old French distinguished from the "e" vowels, if I may use the term.

My statement stands.  The orthography (yes, I know it varied; pipe down for
a minute :-)) was fine for the people (scribes and readers) for whom it was
intended.  It may not be fine for *your* purposes; that's a different matter.

(How many English-speaking students complain about the "difficulties" of
the orthography of Russian--or even that of Spanish?)

					--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
ZANG4 HAN4 YI4 JIA1 / GONG4 JIAN4 ZHONG1HUA2!
From: pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky)
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 16:27:09 GMT

In article <204689@unix.cis.pitt.edu> djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum) writes:
>
>Last week, in a discussion of Chinese trees and forests, a contributor
>was mercilessly flamed for confusing orthography and morphology. Several
>other contributors announced in no uncertain terms that speech is
>primary and that writing is not a proper object for linguistic study.
>
>The reference to written Chinese as a written "language," rather than as
>the writing system used to record a spoken language, leads me to wonder
>whether the emphasis on the primacy of spoken language is appropriate.
>I realize that this emphasis has been an article of faith in linguistics
>for a good long time, but if spoken and written Chinese can be compared
>to a linguistic culture that combined spoken Italian, French, &c. with
>written Latin, the relationship between spoken and written Chinese does
>not seem obviously comparable to the relationship between, say, written
>and spoken modern Italian, French, &c.  If we can speak of morphology
>in medieval Latin (synchronically), why can we not speak of morphology
>in written Chinese?

Indeed.  The work on sign languages of the deaf suggests, surprisingly
perhaps, that the vocal tract and ear are not the only
articulatory/perceptual systems that human linguistic capacities can
access.  This leads one to ask if writing/reading isn't simply another
form of language, one which in many cases piggybacks on spoken language,
but not always, and which may deviate from spoken language in ways that
are culturally determined or determined by the medium.  We know that
brain damage may differentially affect spoken and written language
(including the famous kanji/kana differences among Japanese agraphics),
and I gather that the agraphias mirror the aphasias quite significantly.
All this suggests that command of a written language is a form of
bilingualism or bidialectalism, a phenomenon that is more the rule than
the exception in the spoken world (or so I've been told).

The counterargument is the age difference between acquisition of spoken
or sign languages and acquisition of written systems.  Maybe this is a
genuine problem for my conjecture, but alternatively one might blame
this on facts about the written medium, e.g. greater perceptual
similarity among written signs (is "glyph" the word?) than among phones
or among visual signs for the deaf, the need to generate the directional
property of language internal to the perceiver/writer (e.g. reading
left-to-right, top-down, boustrophon or or whatever) rather than relying
on the natural flow of time, etc.

The literature on reading is huge, and I have read close to none of it,
so these ideas might be any combination of old/new,
credible/ridiculous/discredited, but they strike me as interesting
nonetheless.

-David Pesetsky
From: matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Summary: Present progressive tense in Spanish
Keywords: No. 9
Date: 15 Apr 92 13:23:22 GMT
Organization: U.S. ARMY MATERIEL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS ACTIVITY (AMSAA), APG, MD.

In article <1069@csinn.capsogeti.fr> grossi@capsogeti.fr (Thomas Grossi) 
writes:

>In article <1992Apr13.165644.31274@spss.com>, markrose@spss.com 
(Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>|> Spanish is a nice example of a language with a rich system of conjugation
>|> *and* a rich system of auxiliary verbs.  I wonder if you could suggest
>|> a distinction made with English verbs which is not made in Spanish?
>|> [Mark Rosenfelder]

>Spanish and the other Romance languages have no equivalent of the progessive
>tenses, except in the past (the imperfect).  . . .  [Thomas Grossi]

I seem to remember a song that Joan Baez used to sing, "El Prese Numero 9,"
which started out something like this:

    "Al preso numero nueve
     Ya lo van a confesar.
     Esta rezando en la celda
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^
     Con el curo del penal."

If that's not a present progressive tense, what is it?

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
					(matt@amsaa.brl.mil)
Xref: sparky sci.lang:3847 alt.usage.english:2899
From: gtoal@robobar.co.uk (Graham Toal)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Subject: Re: Proposed revisions to IPA in ASCII
Date: 7 Apr 92 22:56:59 GMT
Organization: Robobar Ltd., Perivale, Middx., ENGLAND.

In article <1992Apr4.051822.14164@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca> userisra@mts.ucs.ualberta.ca (Mark Israel) writes:
>@r  as in 'murmur'

If this is different from '@' followed by 'r' then you should use a
different symbol to avoid the ambiguity.  (Did you intend this to
be a rhotic /r/ or should the two together be taken as the RP pronunciation?)

Graham
PS I *presume* you meant the _second_ 'ur' in murmur :-)
-- 
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: dunl@ellis.uchicago.edu (john  dunlevy)
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Reply-To: dunl@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 05:36:47 GMT

Note the English infinitive which does not have *to* tagged onto it:
as in "You should *go*."
This is simply the verb base; for some reason most European languages add
something to the ends of their verb bases to form infinitives.
English uses what in German are "zu-clauses" (the preposition *to* plus an 
infinitive) more than most other IE languages seem to.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 06:26:01 GMT

In article <ARA.92Apr9210542@camelot.ai.mit.edu>, ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler) writes:
<
<In view of the interest in this newsgroup in comparative linguistics, I
<am surprised that almost nothing has been posted on the subject of 
<comparative animal linguistics.

You have to have some animal languages before you start talking about
animal linguistics.

<In the face of this, isn't it a little arbitrary to concentrate on 
<defining merely human languages ?

Conflating non-human animal "languages" and human languages is not useful.

(Say, a thought occurred to me:  Do we speak Proto-_Australopithecus_?  :-))

					--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
ZANG4 HAN4 YI4 JIA1 / GONG4 JIAN4 ZHONG1HUA2!
From: e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: NegV vs. NegQ
Date: 14 Apr 92 22:20:55 GMT

In article <1992Apr14.083507.1844@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

>Wasn't it you who were claiming in earlier postings that negV was the only
>legitimate interpretation?

The only semantically available interpretation, not the only pragmatically
possible reading.  There is a difference.

>And if people nevertheless obstinately insist on the negQ interpretation, 
>shouldn't an adequate theory of semantic interpretation and/or grammatical-
>ity somehow account for this, which your theory doesn't?

It bears repeating: my theory *does* explain it, but differently than yours.

>You seemed to be using p-interpretation as an out: any interpretation 
>which went against your rules could be shoved aside as merely pragmatic
>and hence could not be used as fodder against your s-rules.

This is fine method, as long as the shoving is well-motivated rather
than ad hoc.  Mine is well motivated.

>Now you say that *any* interpretation that people actually have is a p-
>interpretation.  If so, what do s-interpretations have to do with
>anything?

Not all p-interpretations are s-interpretations.  Some are.

>And why should I (or anyone else) be concerned with them?

'Cause they're interesting.

>It's the most powerful objection of all: that a theory whose only
>prediction (at least, the only one posted here) is entirely false
>(no native speaker actually assigns the proposed negV interpretation to
>the sentence in question) isn't worth the paper or phosphorous
>compounds it's written on.  Logical refutation isn't necessary.

It bears repeating: my theory is compatible with precisely the same
data as yours.  Same predictions about scope interactions.  In particular,
my theory doesn't predict the false claim you suggest.  (By the
way, some native speakers do assign negV exclusively, though fewer 
than the other two groups: some assign both but prefer negQ, some
assign only negQ.  Are you down with the data yet?)

>Your preceding remark about not being a linguist puzzles me most of
>all.  Why then do you bother with such theories?

'Cause they're interesting.
B-o} Michael
From: matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Linguistics TV Schedule
Summary: CSA & USSR -- gone, but not forgotten.
Keywords: Dixie
Date: 17 Apr 92 13:44:12 GMT
Organization: U.S. ARMY MATERIEL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS ACTIVITY (AMSAA), APG, MD.

In article <8988@spark.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) 
writes:

>In article <7041@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil> matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil 
>(Matt Rosenblatt) writes:

><In article <1992Apr14.085443.25062@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU 
><(Scott Horne) writes:

><>In article <!nxj98_.samson@netcom.com>, samson@netcom.com (Peter Samson) 
><>writes:
><
><><    The National Anthem is sung fluently in 17 languages. [Peter Samson]
><
><>	Allons, enfants de la patrie....
><>	Qi3lai2, bu2 yuan4 zuo4 nu2li4 de ren2 men!...
><>	Kimi ga yo^ wa....
><>	Soyuz nerushimij respublik svobodnik....   [Scott Horne]

><Wait a minute!  If this last still counts as a national anthem,
><[Matt Rosenblatt]

>It is a national anthem, only not a current one.  It is the national
>anthem of a state which doesn't exist anymore, but this doesn't make
>it any less of a national anthem.   [Ivan Derzhanski]

><why did Mr. Horne leave out
><
><       "I wish I was in the land of cotton . . ."?  [Matt Rosenblatt]

>What is that?  [Ivan Derzhanski]

It is a national anthem, only not a current one.  It is "Dixie,"
the national anthem of a state which does not exist anymore, but
that doesn't make it any less of a national anthem.

Dixie is the national anthem of the Confederate States of America 
(1861-1865) -- which does not exist anymore because it was not
_nerushimyj_ enough.  The anthem begins as above, and concludes,

    "In Dixie Land I'll take my stand,
     To live and die in Dixie.
     Away!  Away!  
     Away down South in Dixie."

There are still plenty of Southerners who rise to their feet
whenever the band plays "Dixie."  Some of them even give the
"Rebel Yell," which is impossible to reproduce in ASCII.

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
					(matt@amsaa.brl.mil)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus"
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: feminine as the generic case
Date: 10 Apr 92 21:29:15 GMT
Organization: Enea Data AB

(Reposted, since it seems nothing I posted last weekend got anywhere.
Apologies if you see this twice.)

Claus Tondering (ct@dde.dk) writes:
>Swedish comes close to this, because the Swedish word "maenniska" (sp?),
>meaning "human being", is feminine. So an English statement such
>as "A man [meaning a human being] does what he likes to do" in
>Swedish becomes "A human being does what she likes to do".

But "m{nniska" ("{" = dotted "a") is a special case. A sentence like
"The stduent must be sure that he doesn't make any mistakes", would
use "han" (= "he").

By the way, is not "m{nniska" not feminine in Danish?
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
From: steiny@steiny.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Date: 11 Apr 92 17:30:51 GMT


	Verbs have qualities of tense, mood, and aspect.   Tense is 
future/present/past; mood has to do with how probable the event was, how the 
speaker heard about it, (should, ought to, must, might, . . .).    Aspect is 
how long the action continued, if it is repeated, (-ing, kept).   The
infinitive form is uninflected telling us that the tense/mood/aspect
information is somewhere else in the sentence.   For example:

	She wanted to talk.

It is not "talk" that conveys the tense/mood/aspect, but "wanted."

	English is a relatively isolating language.    It is extremely
rich in its ability to make distinctions of mood and aspect (there are
only two tenses).  That is because the verbal information is not conveyed 
in verb inflections, but rather by morphemes in the sentence.    For instance, 
in English we can say "she should have", "she might have", "she ought to have,"
and more to describe different moods about an event that did not take
place.   In Spanish/French/Portugese they only have two moods, the
regular one and the "subjunctive mood" which is conveyed by verb
inflection.     Likewise in most other Indo-European langauges 
tense/mood and aspect are conveyed by inflections instead of 
morphemes in the sentence.    In other words "should have kept being
honest" is a single verb that is expressed in 5 words.   In German
or Spanish the tense/mood/aspect information would tend to be bound to the
verb in the form of inflections.

	English also expresses case relationships with sentential
morphemes.      That is why there are so many prepositions.  

	Therefore is not surprising that the infinitive is also 
expressed by the addition of a sentential morpheme.  

Don Steiny
-- 
Don Steiny
Don Steiny Software
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(408) 425-0382
From: brandon@husc10.harvard.edu (joshua 'yaz' brandon)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Date: 6 Apr 92 16:22:56 GMT
Organization: Harvard University Science Center

In article <peeters.702524205@tasman> peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au 
	(bert peeters) writes:
>I guess the answer is obvious: in English the infinitive without *to* is
>identical in form (except in some highly irregular but also highly frequent
>verbs) to most forms of the simple present. *To* is added to make sure
>the infinitive rather than the present is referred to.
>Note I said "I guess". The answer may be different.

Hmmm.  I don't have a definitive answer, but I do know that in Old English,
the infinitive was marked with an "-an" ending BUT was commonly used
following the preposition "to", e.g. "to specian", meaning to speak.  The
preposition probably made some semantic difference, but I'm not certain
what, right now.....


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
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Devanagari: Syllabary or Alphabet?
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 08:02:29 GMT

In article <1992Apr15.021008.103@midway.uchicago.edu>, bon6@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
<
<1.  Scott says that Devanagari can be either an alphabet or a
<    syllabary.  I say it's a little bit of both.

I say it's definitely both.  You seem to agree (whether you'll say so or not).

					--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: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Date: 16 Apr 92 17:18:27 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

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.
Or, in French, which preposition to use before geographic names.)
Perhaps it's just that prepositions just don't match up very well between
languages.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 01:03:30 GMT

In article <44971@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
<
<There are also languages which are primarily written.  The Hindu-Arabic
<numeral representation are one of them, and I do not believe that the 
<spoken words in any of the languages involved had much to do with the
<characters.

Actually, the Hindu-Arabic numerals are derived from the initial letters of
the names of the numerals in Sanskrit.

<The Greek representation of numerals used their alphabet,
<augmented to 27 characters, because they needed 27 symbols,

Actually, it wasn't augmented; the Greeks just kept for numeric use letters
which wound up dying out in the alphabet.

					--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
ZANG4 HAN4 YI4 JIA1 / GONG4 JIAN4 ZHONG1HUA2!
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: samson@netcom.com (Peter Samson)
Subject: Linguistics TV Schedule
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 92 03:22:43 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services
Summary: satire
Distribution: na
Keywords: :-)

For those with really good cable systems, here is tonight's lineup
on the Linguistry Channel.

 6:00  VESPERE NUNTIUS--News
       E Finlandia semper aliquid novi.

 7:00  WHEEL OF JEOPARDY--Game
       Junior academics pick Unicode characters to solve mystery
       quotation in unknown script.  Winner may post unbridled
       sarcasm to sci.lang; losers' linguistics departments are
       abolished.

 7:30  THIS OLD WRITING SYSTEM--Comedy
       Misunderstandings abound as zany handymen argue whether
       Latin alphabet can be salvaged for new uses.  (Warning:
       non-PC language.)

 8:00  BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE--Drama
       Butterflies are free, but are their components bound?
       (Rerun.)

10:00  DEBATE--Public Affairs
       Invitational team from alt.sex.bondage debates Prof. Noam
       Chomsky about Government-Binding Theory.  A.S.B speaks in
       favor of bindings; Chomsky speaks against the government.

10:30  SPELLING BEE--Cartoon
       Superhero demonstrates animal grammar as well as orthoepy.

11:00  NEWS IN E-PRIME--News
       This program separates objective fact from subjective
       opinion, leaving nothing of value.

12:00  LATE SHOW--Movie
       Genial host Scott Horne, whose existence is not in doubt,
       introduces tonight's classic: "The Fatal Glass of Chugdush."

 2:00  SIGN OFF
       The National Anthem is sung fluently in 17 languages.  Time
       to turn off the TV and start posting to Usenet.

--Peter Samson (samson@netcom.com)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: krogers@javelin.sim.es.com (K. Rogers)
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Reply-To: krogers@javelin.sim.es.com
Organization: Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp., Salt Lake City, Utah
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 15:34:43 GMT

djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum) writes:

>Last week, in a discussion of Chinese trees and forests, a contributor
>was mercilessly flamed for confusing orthography and morphology. Several
>other contributors announced in no uncertain terms that speech is
>primary and that writing is not a proper object for linguistic study.

The obvious reason why spoken language is to be considered the chicken
with writing the egg is to look at what humans do naturally vs. have
to be formally instructed in.  Writing is definitely an invention to
fit spoken language where as speaking is hardwired in the brain.

Whether or not writing is a proper area of linguistic research even
though it's not as fundamental as speech is another question.
-- 
Keith Rogers
Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp.
krogers@javelin.sim.es.com