HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: English/American
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 18:33:00 +0000


TITLE: Re: English/American

> In article <1h5nflINNeog@pith.uoregon.edu>, delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott C 
DeLancey) writes:
> |> In article <1992Dec21.171713.13930@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Ha
mid) writes:
> |> >The world media system. For instance the English spoken in the U.S.A would
> |> >have split in various sub-languages if it were not for televison and radio 
> |> 
> |> In only 300+ years?  That would be a pretty amazing rate of divergence,
> |> for dialects that are, after all, still spoken in a geogrphically
> |> contiguous area.
> 
> Not really - considering that that is about how long it took for the major dialects
> of Anglo-Saxon to diverge, and they were more divergent than the *major* dialects
> of modern English.

I agree that 300 years is on the short side for such a divergence,
but there are other factors than simply time.
1) The physical separation of different speech communities is
potentially much greater. (We're a bit short on deserts in England,
and our mountains are on the small side, too!)
2) With a lot of mixing with native and non-Anglophone immigrant
populations, there's the potential in the early stages for the
devlopment of regional diversity much more quickly than in the much
simpler mixing which related from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of
Britain.
3) It only needs a couple of radical sound changes to cause
communication problems regardless of contiguity. If this is
compounded by some sort of creolization, the effect would be even
stonger.
4) A central government imposing particular language choices will
counteract *any* divergence, regardless of the media, as long as the
central authority is either powerful enough or sufficiently respected
not to be ignored. If Charlemagne could enforce standards in the 9th
Century (albeit in Latin), the influence of the media is not
necessarily the critical factor in the 20th.
5) The presence of writing is crucial, too. But it need not prevent
divergence. Swiss departed phonologically from Central and Southern German
dialects about 500 years ago and is now *completely* incomprehensible
to most German Speakers (it's subtitled on TV) in spite of the fact
that the Swiss read and write the same German (more or less) as
everyone else. Whether this could happen now with groups with a much
higher level of literacy and an obviously common literary culture is
of course much more debatable.
So I'm not sure I agree that 300 years is necessarily that amazing in
principle, though of course given the *actual* history of the US it
would be rather implausible in this instance.

Peter

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian               peter@gold.ac.uk
                              petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: knappen@obelix.kph.uni-mainz.de (Joerg Knappen)
Subject: Bavarian dazs of week (was: Re: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Reply-To: knappen@obelix.kph.Uni-Mainz.DE
Organization: ONO (Organisation der Nicht-Organisierten)
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 13:09:02 GMT

There is another one: "Aftermontag" (Dienstag) , which is confined to 
Augsburg and its surroundings. 

J"org Knappen.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: bongalon@tcad05.intel.com (Ben Bongalon)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Naming Convention for Part of Speech Subclasses
Date: 11 Jan 93 19:49:29 GMT
Reply-To: bongalon@tcad05.intel.com (Ben Bongalon)
Organization: Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA USA


In article <memo.851485@cix.compulink.co.uk>, petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
(Peter Christian) writes:
|> In-Reply-To: <C0IEnu.Ew4@inews.Intel.COM> bongalon@tcad05.intel.com
(Ben Bongalon)
|> 
|> > 
|> > Where can I find references for the names of part-of-speech
|> > subclasses.  For example,
|> > 
|> > for Nouns,
|> >    (subject,object)     ???
|> >    (common,proper)      ???
|> >    (singular,plural)    case(?)
|> > 
|> >    Verbs,
|> >    (past,present,future)        tense(?)
|> >    (singular,plural)            case(?)
|> > 
|> >    ...etc.
|> 
|> If this is a not a language-specific question, I'm not sure there is
|> an answer (well, there might be some really abstract stuff in the
|> literature on linguistic universals).

English-specific.

|> If it's a question about English, you might look at Geoffrey Leach,
|> S. Greenbaum & Jan Svartik (I think that's right) _A Grammar of
|> Contemporary English_ (*very* detailed, lots of tables for
|> clarification) or something similar.

Thanks for the reference... May be a bit voluminous for my purposes
but I'll look into it. (pls see below)


|> But there are really three different things implied by your examples:
|> 1.  common/proper noun divides nouns into two *categories* on the basis of
|>     their syntactic behaviour, whereas
|> 2.  singular/plural distinguishes between different *forms* of the
|>     same word, while
|> 3.  subject/object distinguishes between different syntactical
|>     *functions*.
|> I think most linguists would understand `sub-classes' to refer to
|> only the first of these, since only in that case are the sub-classes
|> mutually exclusive. You'll need to look at a reasonably anlytical
|> grammar for that sort of thing (see above!), and it should also have
|> all the other stuff, too.
|> Perhaps if you could explain what you need the terms for, it would be
|> possible to be more helpful.

I plan to use the different "attributes" to classify words during the
parsing phase of a program that I have been developing (natural language
processor).  For example, the sentence: "John is tall" will be parsed
as follows:

John:	part of speech = noun 
	??? = singular 
	??? = proper

is:     part of speech = verb
	??? = singular
	tense = present

tall:	part of speech = adj

Obviously I can label the attributes to whatever I want but it would
be nice if my terminologies are consistent with that of the linguistic
community.

Thanks again for the help.

Ben Bongalon
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Bavarian dazs of week (was: Re: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Date: 5 Jan 93 08:01:17 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <YQG04MJ@minnie.zdv.uni-mainz.de>, knappen@obelix.kph.uni-mainz.de (Joerg Knappen) writes:
> There is another one: "Aftermontag" (Dienstag) , which is confined to 
> Augsburg and its surroundings. 

But even though Augsburg is in the _Land_ of Bavaria, it doesn't speak
Bavarian dialact, but rather Swabian -- or so say the experts, of which I
am not one.  Aber immerhin, das Beispiel ist hochinteressant.

--Leo Connolly
From: koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Origin of English?
Keywords: clobbered; zillions; cut-plug
Date: 8 Jan 93 17:13:28 GMT
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD

In article <10182@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil> matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt) writes:
|> >English wound up with an easy-to-speak, easy-to-understand 
|> >isolated SVO structure.  That's one of its special virtues.

For a speaker of another Western European language it's not too bad, but the
belief that it's wonderfully simple for everyone is one of the pieces of 
jingoistic folklore that we English-speakers pick up.  Anyone who has heard
the sort of telegraphic English that first-language speakers of Chinese
sometimes use has direct evidence that English has plenty of arbitrary fluff
that it could easily get by without.  Our copious supply of irregular and
regular strong verbs (sing, sang, sung, etc.) are present difficulties, too.

|> >In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.
|> >That's another of the special virtues that English has.  

This is another point in which English is fairly difficult to learn.  Proper
usage requires the user to select the proper word from a large set of near
synonmyms, based on minute contextual and semantic cues that must be very
difficult to pick up.  I know that a lot of native speakers do very badly
at this, especially when attempting a high literary style.

Another aspect of Engoish grammar that is seldom or never taught, but
difficult to learn is intonation, which is heavily used to mark structure,
and contrast/emphasis.

----
John E. Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)

Disclaimer:  Views and recommendations, express or implied, are my own, and
do not reflect the opinion or policy of my employers.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 18:33:00 +0000


> he wonders how it is that they
> emerged from the Anglo-Saxon-Jute invasions of Romano-Celtic
> Britain with 6 Teutonic gods and 1 Roman god.

Good question. Perhaps there wasn't an obvious Germanic equivalent to
Saturnus - certainly the other equivalences seem very obvious.

But don't the weekday names predate the Anglo-Saxon settlement, i.e.
didn't the Anglo-Saxons import a full set, so that it really has
nothing to do with the earlier British population? This means
Saturday is reintroduced by rather than surviving the invasions.

Peter

Peter
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian               peter@gold.ac.uk
                              petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: w0318@desire.wright.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Morphological development of the genitive case in German
Date: 8 Jan 93 15:13:34 EST
Organization:  Wright State University 

Can anyone out there give me a brief history of the evolution of the genitive
morphology of German throughout its history of a language, including any
explanative points from Proto-Germanic, etc...

One question seems to be as follows:

If masculine and neuter nouns change their ending in the genitive as -es, as in
die Mutter meines Vaters, and feminine nouns don't have the -es ending, as in
der Vater meiner Mutter, why when making compound nouns with feminine nouns is
there sometimes something like die VergangenheitSbewaeltigung?  Notice the
genitive 's' there, I would conjecture that it follows from a pronunciation
rule, but I know another example that blows that conjecture out of the water,
but it's not in my declarative stores right now. Basically, was there a common
genitive ending sometime in the morphological development of the language or
are these exceptions?  And if so, why exceptions?

Thanks,
Andrew Livingston

Also, can someone give me the 14 tenses of English, and maybe some comparative
information with other languages?  

Also, for you Latin buffs, what are the general differences between Classical
Latin (of Cicero, say) and the Vulgate?

Hope I didn't overload anyone's minds with requests.  Please don't flame me, I
know not what I do.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: labio-velars to labials, but reverse?
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 23:33:00 +0000


 
> There is (may be) more at work in Germanic than assimilations.  There are a few
> lexical items which do not show the expected development *k<w> > *x<w>, but
> rather *k<w> > *f.  Whether *k<w> > **p in some environment prior to Grimm's
> law, or afterwards *x<w> -> *f, is indeterminate.  But besides the evidence of
> "5," we have other words such as "wolf," Gothic Wulfila "Little Wolf" <
> *wlk<w>o-.

Also Latin lupus, though the Oxford Etymological Dictionary says
this is a dialect form. (I thought they *all* were!)

Peter

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 20:06:00 +0000


> The phonology of *all* of these, and of their
> German analogues, points to borrowing during the period of the Roman
> conquest.

Quite. And I don't suppose there were many Latin speakers left in
Britain by the time the Anglo-Saxons got there. Though I suppose
there's no reason in principle why some Latins loans into Celtic
couldn't have been taken over by the Anglo-Saxons - but it doesn't
seem very likely.

>  A later borrowing of _vinum_ would have yielded *_vine_,
> _strata_ > *_strate_, etc.

I didn't understand the phonology here, Leo. Do you mean they would
have been borrowed from some late Latin forms with reduced vowels?

Peter
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Is there order ?
Keywords: What's fundamental ?
Date: 6 Jan 93 14:13:06 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


	TAXONOMY AND HIERARCHICAL SYSTEMS
		-------------------
	What's a Fundamental Principle ?
	----------------------------


I throw a bunch of objects on a table and ask the subject  to
classify/categorize them according to how he/she sees them to
be related. Subject X does it one way, Y another way, etc.


I examine them:

X. Objects are collected according to shape. Spherical objects
are in one pile, cubical in another pile, cylindrical types
in another pile, etc etc. There maybe subdivisions..

 
Y. Objects are divided up into sets according to size. Large ones
in one corner, smaller ones in another, smallest in.......
There may be subdivisions..

W. Objects are divided up into sets according to color. White, black,
red, blue etc. There might be further subdivisions using one
of the other criteria.


Z. Objects are divided up into clasess according to the type of
material; metal, plastic, wood. There may be subdivisions..


Which one of these specifications captures the concept of
relatedness (which was the original questions)  better than the
others ?  You are required to give a number (say from 0 to
100) each subject depending on the structure that the subject
can impose on the objects. There may be several answers from
each subject.

How do we give a consistent rating to the subjects based
on their performance.

More to follow in  a few days. I have other things to do.

Moral of the Story: What is more fundamental when we are 
trying to impose a hierarchical structure on objects--say just for
fun that these objects are languages :-)...



-----------
Humanity sometimes does things wrong for years, decades, centuries
and even millenia....
		Anonymous
	-----------------------
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
   hubey@pilot.njin.net               ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey
From: swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: English/American
Keywords: English, dialects
Date: 4 Jan 93 20:24:32 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1h5nflINNeog@pith.uoregon.edu>, delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott C DeLancey) writes:
|> In article <1992Dec21.171713.13930@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Hamid) writes:
|> >The world media system. For instance the English spoken in the U.S.A would
|> >have split in various sub-languages if it were not for televison and radio 
|> 
|> In only 300+ years?  That would be a pretty amazing rate of divergence,
|> for dialects that are, after all, still spoken in a geogrphically
|> contiguous area.

Not really - considering that that is about how long it took for the major dialects
of Anglo-Saxon to diverge, and they were more divergent than the *major* dialects
of modern English.

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
From: koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finn...
Date: 4 Jan 93 16:04:37 GMT
Organization: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD

In article <1993Jan4.032130.12753@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
|> ... That change seems
|> natural enough: from lateral to lateral fricative, then
|> devoiced. Z to r is also strange; once again, it's usually
|> the other way around as far as I know, e.g. French chaire
|> --> chaise, and, if memory serves, Latin r --> s.
|> Off-hand, I can't think of cases of a regular change of
|> sh into l, or of z into r. Could it be that it is Chuvash
|> that has been the conservative one, phonologically?
I know of several other instances of l or r to s or sh (or voiced equivalents),
and I'd tend to agree with Guy that it seems more likely that the Chuvash
phonology was original.  However, I don't recall how Altaicists treat this
correspondence.
-- 
----
John E. Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)

Disclaimer:  Views and recommendations, express or implied, are my own, and
do not reflect the opinion or policy of my employers.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: Origin of English?
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 23:23:00 +0000


> 
> In article <1ie5i1INNlgr@bHARs12c.bnr.co.uk>, sizex@bnr.co.uk (Eric Barber) writes:
> |> one of the striking features of English is its lack of conjugations
> |> and declensions. 
> 
> Actually, English still contains conjugations, though the personal inflection
> of most verbs is very simplified....

> My point is, a language doesn't have to have an elaborate system of 
> tense/aspect varying personal inflections to have conjugational and 
> declensional classes.  

I don't think Eric meant absolute lack, but relative lack,
considering its origins in a highly inflected language, and compared
with its nearest cognates. I mean, it's almost as bad as Chinese!

Peter
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: Proto-languages: what are the rules?
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 13:23:00 +0000


>         As a linguistics undergrad at the University of Chicago, I learned
> that the principle balancing out "majority rules" is "phonetic plausibility."  
                        .
                        .
>         Now, the downside:  if this argument seems circular, it's because
> (as faras this example goes), it is.

The phonetic plausibility argument is circular, but there are two
other sorts of plausibility argument which are not phonetic and are
therefore independent support for a hypothesis.
Firstly, a statistical argument. In fact the IE p > Gmc f is on one
of a whole series of differences between Gmc consonants and IE one.
It seems statistically unlikely that all the other consonant system
would change in more or less the same way leaving Gmc with the
original system. (Unless it could be shown that Gmc had broken away
and had missed out on innovations in all the other dialects.
Secondly, there's the question of the geographical distribution of
innovation. Say you have a range of dialects like this
(geographically)

                    X X X X X X A X X X
                     X X X X X X X X X X
                    X B X X X X X X X X
                     X X X X X X X C X X

What are the chances that a feature common to A,B & C but not found in
all the X dialects is an innovation? Well, it's possible, but clearly
much less likely than that they have simply not taken on an
innovation in the X dialects. In IE, the k is found in all the
Western dialects *and* the single most easterly, Tocharian. This
actually supports the k>s hypothesis without relying on majority vote
or phonetic plausibility and thus improves the credibility of the
whole hypothesis.

Peter

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Classical Latin and Vulgate (was Re: Morphological ...)
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Stanford University Academic Information Resources
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 01:59:41 GMT

In article <1993Jan8.151334.6482@desire.wright.edu>, w0318@desire writes:

>Also, for you Latin buffs, what are the general differences between Classical
>Latin (of Cicero, say) and the Vulgate?

Subject matter.
-- 
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: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finn...
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Cisco Systems (MIS)
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 93 00:20:34 GMT

In article <Jan.3.19.08.23.1993.201@pilot.njin.net>, hubey@pilot (Hubey) writes:
>As far as I know the Bulghar/Bolghar language (not Bulgarian which is a Slavic
>language) has been accepted to be Turkic for a while.  The word itself
>apparently comes from the Turkic word 'bulgha' which means to mix. The history
>book that I remember reading said that the Bulghars were a mixed
>Altaic-Iranian group with the Altaic group predominating.
>
>The Chuvash language is known as a 'lir' Turkish vs almost all the rest which
>are 'shaz' languages. The 'sh', 'a' and 'z' in most Turkic languages become
>'l','i','r' in this group.
>
>I can't understand how the 'sh' became an 'l', though. Is there any occurances
>of this in other languages?

Why must the changes all be in one direction?  Why not *L > Chuvash l, other
Turkic sh?
-- 
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: claird@NeoSoft.com (Cameron Laird)
Subject: Re: Need some Latin translated
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 20:55:32 GMT

In article <1993Jan3.222710.4839@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>rdippold@cancun.qualcomm.com (Ron Dippold) writes:
> 
>>I've got about 60 short Latin phrases that I need translated...
> 
>Too bad no one *learns* this stuff any more.  Well, anyway:
			.
			.
			.
Also, there was a time one expected to find an
appendix in any good English dictionary labeled
something like, "Common foreign-language phrases".
-- 

Cameron Laird
claird@Neosoft.com (claird%Neosoft.com@uunet.uu.net)	+1 713 267 7966
claird@litwin.com (claird%litwin.com@uunet.uu.net)  	+1 713 996 8546
Newsgroups: sci.lang