HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: "Nominative" absolute?
Date: 20 Dec 92 23:30:22 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Dec18.211826.45778@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>, miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu writes:

[Much learned stuff omitted]

> BTW in Ecclesiatical Latin, e.g., in the Vulgate, we
> even have genitive absolutes, in immitation of Greek:
> 
> 	Qui ostendunt opus legis scriptum in cordibus suis,
> 	testimonium reddente illis conscientia ipsorum, et inter
> 	se invicem cogitationum accusantium, aut etiam defendentium.
> 
> 	Who show the work of the law written in their hearts,
> 	their own conscience bearing testimony to them, and
> 	their thoughts accusing them, or even defending them
> 	to themselves.
> 
> 			- Rom. ii, 15.
> 
> Nunn gives this one and cites also Acts i, 8 and II Cor. x, 15.

I've checked these, and I think Nunn is simply wrong on the latter two.
The genitive NP + participle in Acts 1:8 seems to be a normal genitive
attached to the NP _virtutem_, though that is *not* the construction
in the Greek, which seems to have an absolute.  Perhaps Jerome misunder-
stood.  Anyway, it reads:

	sed accipietis virtutem supervenientis Spiritus sancti in vos...
	'but you will accept the power of the Holy Spirit coming over you...'

2 Cor 10:15 plainly has an adnominal genitive construction in Latin and,
I think, in Greek, but variant Latin readings with ablative absolute do
exist.  The key part of the verse reads:

	...spem autem habentes crescentis fuidei vestrae...
	'having hope in your growing faith'

Rom 2:15 is less certain.  My edition emends to an ablative absolute,
against all the manuscripts (at least, the respectable ones).  The
Greek seems ambiguous: kai metaxy alle:l:on to:n logismo:n kate:go-
rounto:n could be a new absolute, or it could depend on the NP in the
preceding genitive absolute.  Jerome seems to have taken the second
interpretation, so that the Vulgate passage could be translated:

	the awareness of themselves and of the thoughts that accuse
	or defend them (all) testifying against them ...

Still, the case for a genitive absolute can be made here, but it is
not ironclad.

--Leo Connolly
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 92 20:42:39 GMT

In article <01GS70XS7ZDSGPVGC0@kiera.ericsson.se>, LMEBGO@kiera (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden) writes:

>aeb@wsinfo01.win.tue.nl (A.E. Brouwer) writes:
>>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 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".
>It is not one of the more common words in Sweden.  It may be more 
>common in the Swedish that is spoken in Finland.

First, a citation for the book would be of interest, please.

Second, "kutta" looks like a perfect cognate for English "cunt"--I know that
PGmc. *-nt- becomes -tt- in Old Norse, and I think it's a general characteris-
tic of the North Germanic branch of the family.

Does Danish have an assibilization that Swedish doesn't?  Anyone?
-- 
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: malouf@leland.stanford.edu (Rob  Malouf)
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Reply-To: malouf@csli.stanford.edu
Organization: DSO, Stanford University
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 92 01:53:19 GMT

A.E. Brouwer writes:
>Rich Alderson writes:
>> 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'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.

Yes, the idea of a week was borrowed from the Romans, but not the word.  The  
OED gives the Old Teutonic form *wikon-, meaning `succession, series', as the  
source of the word week (and its cousins in the other Germanic languages).  
--
Rob Malouf
malouf@csli.stanford.edu
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Date: 14 Dec 92 09:22:07 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <4801@svin09.info.win.tue.nl>, aeb@wsinfo01.win.tue.nl (Andries E. Brouwer) writes:
> ::Rich Alderson writes:
> ::: 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]
> [stuff omitted]
> :A.E. Brouwer writes:
> ::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.
> 
> Rob Malouf writes:
> :Yes, the idea of a week was borrowed from the Romans, but not the word.  The  
> :OED gives the Old Teutonic form *wikon-, meaning `succession, series', as the
> :source of the word week (and its cousins in the other Germanic languages).  
> 
> But since Latin has the same word ("vicis", etc.) with the same meaning,
> and OHG has "wehsal" (change; modern German "Wechsel") with the expected
> /h/ from the same IE root *veik-, it is most likely that your Old Teutonic
> word is derived from Latin.

Whoa! Who said the idea of the week was borrowed from the Romans?  As
far as I know, they didn't have the darned things, and my Latin dictionary
does not give 'week' as a meaning for _vicis_.  As far as I know, weeks
are of Semitic origin, and hence Jewish and/or Christian -- this despite
the obvious pagan names of the days in postclassical Latin.

Anyway: *no* Romance language uses a reflex of _vicis_ for 'week' --
small wonder, since _vicis_ is a defective noun: the citation form is,
in fact, genitive singular, since there was no nominative singular!
                                                            
In another post today I went into the question of the root in detail.
Scholars have long assumed that the velar is an extension, and this seems
correct, so the presence of /k/ in both Latin and Germanic is no problem,
since the latter would reflect a /g/ extension which must be posited in
any event.  So sorry, there's no way I, or the big guns in Indo-European
studies, would support the idea that _week_ etc. are borrowed from Latin.

--Leo Connolly
From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Organization: Enea Data AB
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992 11:22:42 GMT

Ivan Derzhanski (iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu) writes:
>In article <1992Dec6.185935.2538@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>>"V}lla" in Swedish can only mean "to cause" in a negative sense.
>>(You can "v}lla" an accident,
>>but you cannot "v}lla" that a man and a women meet so they fall in love.)
>
>Why is this particular type of accident singled out?

Of course, if you think the event indeed was an accident you can
use "v}lla" to tell that the one who caused was guilty of something
negative.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
From: tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Hamid)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Need help with Urdu, too
Date: 20 Dec 92 17:10:05 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London

In <ONEIL.92Dec19163322@husc10.harvard.edu> oneil@husc10.harvard.edu (John O'Neil) writes:

>In article <1992Dec19.172133.18284@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Hamid) writes:

>   This difference is due to the nationalistic
>   tendencies of the rulers of India and Pakistan. After independence, from the
>   British in 1947, the Indians decided to write the language known as
>   "Hindustani" in the Devanagri script, the ancient script in which Sanskrit 
>   is written.

>Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that Hindi had been a
>written language -- written in Devanagari -- since the 12th century.

>Hindi and Urdu are closely related, I know, the first being influenced
>by Sanskrit and the latter by Farsi and Arabic.  Hindustani is
>supposed to be a language which is neutral between them, but its
>linguistic status (rather than its political status) is unclear to me.
>--
>John O'Neil
>"Occasionally I believed I had thoughts of my own --  who does not now
> and then become the victim of such delusions?"
>						-- Paul Feyerabend


It all depends on how history is interpreted. Hindi and Urdu
are both directly based upon a dialect of indo-european that was spoken in
Lucknow (circa 1700 A.D.).

And yes I do agree that Urdu is this language with Farsi etc tacked on,
and Hindi is this language with Sanskrit tacked on. Unfortunately the
distinction between Urdu and Hindi is not so clear cut, since there are a large
number of Farsi (, etc) words that appear in Hindi, and a very large number of 
Sanskriti words that appear in Urdu. As to what this base dialect is to be 
called is a matter of debate. I admit that to call it "Hindustani" is too much
of a generalization as this is a later development.

Now for the good bit. Many of my friends who have learnt Hindi at school
in India are baffled by many Hindi texts with big Sanskrit words in them. And I
am talking about highly educated people here. Similarly some words in Urdu
are difficult to interpret (since they have been artificially introduced from
Farsi (, etc)).

Nevertheless after 1947, there has been a concerted attempt to exaggerate these
differences. This is ironic because a lot of "Hindi" literature is based on and
in "Urdu" literature.

We can end up getting caught up in a debate similar to that raging in
alt.usage.english, where there is this pretentious nutter going out of his
way to state that the language the Americans speak is not English.

(Remember that a counter argument can be supported by the language spoken 
in "Hindi" movies, and also by the language spoken by Hindu/Urdu speakers).

C'est la vie,

                                        tariq
--

Tariq Hamid	                 	Internet:  tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk
 Department of Computer Science  	JANET:     tariqh@uk.ac.qmw.dcs
  Queen Mary & Westfield College  
   Mile End Road                   	  Telephone:  +44 71-975 5245
    LONDON, E1 4NS, UK             	  Fax:        +44 81-980 6533
From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: If I ever get to speak to Cyril and Metodius...
Date: 13 Dec 92 18:16:15 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

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.  The
> Romans spoke an utterly idiotic language which didn't even have any
> palatoalveolar consonants, let alone palatalised ones.  Consequently,
> their alphabet was an awkward choice for Slavic, which is why Polish,
> Czech and friends are so overloaded with diacritics and digraphs.

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?


BTW, I seem to remember reading on article on Computer which
seemed to indicated that the eye-brain may make heavy use of
serifs. There was an example of a 'T' (sans-serif). Its two
dimensional Fourier Transform had serifs.
-- 

	mark	


   hubey@pilot.njin.net                   hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
 ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey                  hubey@logos.montclair.edu
From: aeb@wsinfo01.win.tue.nl (A.E. Brouwer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Date: 11 Dec 92 23:44:11 GMT
Reply-To: aeb@win.tue.nl

I (Andries Brouwer) wrote:
A> The family of the Russian word you quote contains for example the
A> following words:
A>   Russian "vek" (century, age, lifetime, time),
...
A>   Latin "victor" (winner),
A>   Dutch "wijgen" (to fight); "weigeren" (to refuse),
A>   Icelandic "v'ig" (slaughter, fight),
A>   English "wight".

Rich Alderson wrote:
R> You have to leave out the English word; according to my Webster program,
R> "wight" in the meaning "valiant, skilled in fighting" is borrowed from one
R> of the Scandinavian languages, and therefore does not count as a cognate.

To Rich Alderson: I agree with your (Webster's) etymology for "wight" in
this sense. But why "have to leave out"? I call two words cognate when
they are derived from the same IE root, e.g., "shirt" and "skirt" in English,
or "king" and the Finnish "kuningas", regardless of the intermediate path
(which sometimes is very difficult to determine).

Leo Connolly wrote:
L> This is strange if true: Germanic /ht/ regularly went to /tt/ in Old Norse,
L> apparently at a rather early date.  The English spelling -ght is normally
L> found only where earlier English had [xt], which in Old English was spelled
L> <ht>.  It is true that there are some aberrations and outright errors,
L> so that French "deliter" < Latin "delectare", when borrowed into English
L> was ultimately respelled "delight" for no very good reason.  Barring some
L> such foul-up, the spelling of "wight" indicates native English origin
L> rather than borrowing from Norse.

L> I gather that someone's dictionary and your "Webster program" disagree.
L> Orthography is on the other guy's side.  I myself have no opinion in
L> the matter.

Thank you for your friendly support. It is true that ht > tt in Old Norse
(like "vaettr", where OE has "wiht" (wight, creature)), but maybe the
date was not so very early - in an inscription [Tune] "{th}ohtriR" is found,
where Old Icelandic has "d'ottir" (daughter).
The Norse loanwords in English (from maybe 1000-1200) reflect an older
stage of the language than the Old Icelandic of mainly thirteenth century
literary tradition. In ME one finds both "aghtle" and "attle"/"ettle"
where OI has "aetla". OE has "eahtian" (German "achten"). Maybe the
"aghtle" of ME is a Norse loan, or maybe it is a contamination.
[One might compare "bank", a Scandinavian loan, where ON has "bakk'i"
so that the word was borrowed before the assimilation. The OE "benc"
yielded "bench".]

Be that as it may, for the adjective "v'igr" this is no problem.
And if the neuter form "v'igt" is borrowed, the occurrence of "wight"
is no surprise.

P.S. I edited the history a bit, abbreviating, and polishing the format
of quoted words, so the above is not a true reproduction of what was
said earlier.
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: postpositive articles in English
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 92 20:51:51 GMT

In article <1992Dec9.152119.4487@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1 writes:

<deleted long cited material to which his post was a reply in a series>

>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.

<deleted material questioning the status of colour words as abstract nouns>

>At times they are.  More often they're adjectives.  And many times, in many
>languages, they have become names.  I don't see any evidence that _White_
>in _Snow White_ is an abstract noun.  Do you?  If so, you might want to tell
>that famous opera composer Joe Green (you know, Giuseppe Verdi) about it,
>or perhaps his idiot son Gnocchi about whom I once posted a note that was
>shamelessly (or shamefully) ignored.

I think we're confusing orthographic representation of the name with its
structure:  The *name* is the entire string "Snow White."  I want to claim that
this name is made up of a noun "white" and a delimiting denominative adjective
(or alternatively, an endingless genitive) "snow," rather than the analysis
that was originally offered of a noun "snow" followed by an adjective "white."

I am not of a mind to believe that names which are homophonous with colour
words, or other abstract nouns, are somehow not those abstracts.  But then, I
was never one much for philosophy-of-language.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
From: linnan@lk-hp-19.hut.fi (Matti J Linnanvuori)
Subject: Re: If I ever get to speak to Cyril and Metodius...
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Date: 13 Dec 92 15:42:36 GMT

  Before 1918, the Russian alphabet included a letter resembling the
Latin i. It was replaced with the more common, current variant of i.
Because there were plans to move to Latin alphabet, I would have thought
the Latin looking letter would have been preserved. Why not?
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Surprising cognates
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 01:56:45 GMT

In article <4798@svin09.info.win.tue.nl>, aeb@wsinfo01 (A.E. Brouwer) writes:

>Rich Alderson wrote:
>R> You have to leave out the English word; according to my Webster program,
>R> "wight" in the meaning "valiant, skilled in fighting" is borrowed from one
>R> of the Scandinavian languages, and therefore does not count as a cognate.
>
>To Rich Alderson: I agree with your (Webster's) etymology for "wight" in
>this sense. But why "have to leave out"? I call two words cognate when
>they are derived from the same IE root, e.g., "shirt" and "skirt" in English,
>or "king" and the Finnish "kuningas", regardless of the intermediate path
>(which sometimes is very difficult to determine).

You may call two words cognate even if one is a borrowing of the other, but the
technical definition excludes borrowing as antithetical to cognate status.

The whole idea of excluding borrowings from lists of cognates is so that the
correct relationships among the residual vocabularies can be determined.
-- 
Rich Alderson   'I wish life was not so short,' he thought.  'Languages take
                such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'
                                                        --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@leland.stanford.edu                              _The Lost Road_
From: glen@slate.cs.wisc.edu (Glen Ecklund)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: myself
Date: 16 Dec 92 15:28:42 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: U of Wisconsin Madison - Computer Sciences

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?)

I disagree.  "He and WHO did that?" sounds correct to me, and I would say it.
Likewise, "You saw her and WHOM?", although I'm not very good about using
"whom" when appropriate.


-- 
Every child shall be treated with complete respect.

Glen Ecklund     glen@cs.wisc.edu   (608) 262-1318 Office, 262-1204 Dept. Sec'y
Department of Computer Sciences        1210 W. Dayton St., Room 3355
University of Wisconsin, Madison       Madison, Wis. 53706  U.S.A.
From: ma@informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de (Martin Ameskamp)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Christmas linguistics
Date: 18 Dec 1992 09:36:20 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Kiel, Germany
NNTP-Posting-Host: sirius.informatik.uni-kiel.dbp.de

In <01GSF2YTY5Q8I7IMKE@kiera.ericsson.se> LMEBGO@kiera.ericsson.se (Bengt G{llmo, L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden) writes:

>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?

Comments, yes. Solutions - no.

Anyway. I sing in a choir myself and since we quite frequently sing music
with latin words (this is a church choir), the problem regularly comes up.
We tend to distinguish between two pronounciations: the 'German' one 
and the 'Italian' one (these are just labels, no more).
They differ mostly in the pronounciation of 'c' before 'slender' vowels
(i.e. 'i', 'e', 'ae', 'oe'): 
German: c = 'ts' (German 'z')
Italian: c = 'ch'
Other differences occur in words such as 'magnam' - is it mag-nam with a
hard 'g' or is it 'manyam'? Also there are slight differences in 'e' and
'o' - closed or open pron. and some other details.
From time to time someone also proposes what they call 'Latin' pronounciation -
pronouncing every c as 'k', regardless of position, things like that.

We normally decide these matters without too much discussion - sometimes
on 'historical' or 'personal' reasons: we tend to pronounce something
by one of the Bachs the German way whereas Rossini would get the Italian
treatment. In my opinion, the main thing is that everyone pronounces
the words in the same way.

Merry Christmas and keep on singing!

Martin