HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (hua.t.lin)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: What is a dialect?
Date: 10 Apr 92 20:48:23 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: AT&T

In article <1992Apr10.200823.9953@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca> userisra@mts.ucs.ualberta.ca (Mark Israel) writes:
>
>   Written Mandarin and written Cantonese are virtually identical.  
>That seems to imply that there is a one-to-one mapping between Mandarin
>words and Cantonese words.

Yes, there is a one-to-one mapping. However, when spoken they tend to use
different vocabulary which are still meaningful when literally translated.

>This would make Mandarin and Cantonese more
>closely related to each other than English is to any language (there
>is no one-to-one mapping between English words and French words, or
>even between standard English words and Pidgin English words).

Absolutely. Actually, a texan in the middle of an english village would have
as much a language problem as a cantonese visiting northern china. Of course,
they can both resort to writing since there is a one-to-one correspondence
between what they mutually speak and understand (wait a minute, actually
some spellings are going to be different).

- Lin
PS: WILL BE BACK IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS.
From: miles@minster.york.ac.uk
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: GB Parser?
Date: 15 Apr 92 09:25:15 GMT
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of York, England


 (I recently posted this to comp.ai, to no avail.)

 Hello all,
 
 I'm currently looking at the problem of parsing unrestricted texts
 using formal, explicit grammars (ie. not stochastic).  One idea
 that I have is to compensate for undergeneration by using "Principles"
 of grammar: the principles can infer the missing rule(s) from the
 grammar.  To this end, I'd like to play around with a GB parser.
 Anyone know where I can get hold of such a beast?
 
 Yours in hope,
 
 
 Miles
 miles@minster.york.ac.uk	"All is vanity".
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: citroen@binoc.bih.harvard.edu (Micky Citroen)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Numbers and language
Date: 15 Apr 92 21:32:41 GMT
Reply-To: citroen@binoc.bih.harvard.edu (Micky Citroen)
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston Mass., USA

[..]

There is probably a mixture of two things involved here: one is that you
are likely to be fastest in adding numbers or reading dates in the
language you were tought math in. The other issue is, that you are
more likely to remember a number in the language you learnt it in. For
instance, I can immediately give you my phonenumber here in English, or
my Dutch number in Dutch; but if I have to give you my English number in
Dutch or my Dutch number in English, I have to think and convert them.
Probably 'cause after pronouncing them in one language for a certain
period, it becomes a word rather then a number. 

Maybe a good area for some linguistic research?

Micky.
-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                     All standard disclaimers apply.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: steinar@faust.solan.unit.no (Cindy Kandolf)
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Organization: Flodnak, Inc., Trondheim, Norway
Date: 6 Apr 92 19:14:51

>Might anyone know why this is so, or whether there are
>other languages which refer to their infinitives as English does?

Norwegian does, using the infinitive marker "}".  (You probably have a curly
brace on your screen.  The letter is an 'a' with a ring over it, the same
as the symbol for "angstrom" from chemistry class.)  

As far as i know, Swedish and Danish also have this type of infinitive,
with an infinitive marker and then the verb for a total of two words.
However, most of my knowledge of Swedish and Danish is through late-night
television, so this may not be accurate 8-)

-Cindy Kandolf
 cindy@solan.unit.no
 Trondheim, Norway

(If the address in the header is not the same as the address in the signature,
please use the one in the signature for e-mail.  Thanks.)
From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Chomsky and languages
Date: 6 Apr 92 19:53:51 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <1992Apr5.071616.12183@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
>Someone informed me that Chomsky does in fact speak Hebrew.  If this is true,
>I'll retract my earlier remark.

Considering that his father (William Chomsky) is (was?) a leading authority
on the Hebrew language, it would be surprising if he didn't.

-- 
==========================================================================
Michael A. Covington, Ph.D. |  mcovingt@uga.cc.uga.edu  |  ham radio N4TMI
Artificial Intelligence Programs | U of Georgia | Athens, GA 30602  U.S.A.
==========================================================================
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter)
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Organization: DSG, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 92 06:07:38 GMT

In article <JKORPELA.92Apr2113217@vipunen.hut.fi>, jkorpela@vipunen.hut.fi (Jukka Korpela) writes:
...
|> Essentially correct. But let me remind that what people usually
|> call "Latin alphabet" is the English alphabet.

NB: I used "Latin" so as to include all of the alphabets derived from it and to
avoid (to the extent possible) getting bogged down in the politics that might
come from calling it by the name of a modern language.


--Rich Wingerter
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet
Date: 8 Apr 92 21:02:57 GMT
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Apr8.070639.12532@leland.Stanford.EDU>, richwing@leland.Stanford.EDU (Rich Wingerter) writes:
> In article <1992Apr3.213258.1731@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
> ...
> |> You guys are missing the point.  The topic began with discussion of an
> |> appropriate orthography for a hitherto unwritten language of Taiwan.  
> |> Cyrillic is simply not an option: it has no status there.  The choices are 
> |> (1) Traditional Chinese characters, (2) Latin letters, (3) a character set
> |> created from scratch.  The third option seems unrealistic: why bother? 
> |> Chinese characters would have a certain tradition, but why use a system that
> |> would ignore pronunciation entirely and make computer input more complicated?
> |> Furthermore, typewriters don't usually come with multiple chartacter sets. 
> |> (I know, I've seen a Brother Japanese typewriter, but it's a beast to use,
> |> and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.)
> 
> Option 4: IPA.  IPA has all of the lowercase roman characters plus others. 
> Without any evidence that this particular language has exactly, let us say, 26
> phoneme, it is more likely (statistically) that the sounds will match the 80 or
> so characters in IPA.  Where they match characters from the latin alphabet, you
> would get the equivalent character.  Where they didn't, there would probably be
> a character in IPA already, obviating the need to invent one or add a
> diacritical mark.

I dunno -- do you think it would be accepted?  Would the literati think
it was condescending to use "funny" letters and no upper case instead of
"real" letters like English?

> Would it be impolitic to bring up China?    1 billion :-)s

Not at all.  But languages such as Vietnamese have tried Chinese characters
and found them wanting.  Even China has flirted with Romanization, though
that's more than a little problematic.

--Leo Connolly
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: mathias@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Gerald B. Mathias)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: 8I8
Date: 8 Apr 92 17:17:13 GMT
Organization: University of Hawaii

In article <1992Apr06.180434.30685@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>  |     |    +--+    For those who might be interested, the hu2 in hu2die2
>+-+-+  -+-   |__|    looks something like this.  Like most Chinese characters,
>| | |   |    |  |    it's composed of a "meaning" radical (chong2, "insect",
>+-+-+ +-+-+  |--|    the first of the 3 graphemes) and a "phonetic" (hu2,
>  |   |   |  |  |    "foreign", the second two graphemes).  (The phonetic of
>--+-I +---+ /   /    a character may have the same sound, or may rhyme, or
>                     may rhyme only in Ancient Chinese.)

>Now, can anyone tell me where the graphic elements of hu2 "foreign" come from?
>If I'm operating my dictionary correctly it's composed of gu3 "ancient" and
>yue4 "moon".  Is that right?  

Half right.

>Is this also a radical/phonetic pair?

Sure.  It's a combination of (what may have begun as a respresentation of a
skull) a phonetic representing a family of words in the 'old/dried-up/hard'
range and a classifier originally intended to invoke 'flesh,' not 'moon.'
I believe the original meaning of the word (or one of the words?) so
written was 'dewlap (of an ox).'

Bart Mathias
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1992 08:37:33 GMT

In article <8940@scott.ed.ac.uk>, iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski) writes:
<In article <29E63A12.8419@noiro.acs.uci.edu> cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
<>>In article <1992Apr3.202342.24493@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
<
<My first exposure to English was more than
<twenty years ago,

That long, eh?  Interesting.

<and at that time I didn't even think of it as a real
<language - it was more like a new kind of game.

Charles Berlitz (please don't buy, read, or [God forbid] promote his
cocktail-party-linguist books) claims to have been taught three or four
languages as a child, one by each member of his family--and consequently not
realising that he was learning different languages!  

<>All this makes it too easy, so we HAD to have a
<>screwed up system of writing it just to make the furriners go nuts
<>learning it.
<
<I thought you had to have it just to please this furriner here,
                                                  ^^^^^^^^

Please stop this, guys.  My eyes are picking up `furrier'.  :-)

<who
<considers it one of the great joys in his life to watch the natives go
<nuts struggling with the orthography of their own language.  <fiendish grin>

Watch me, and you'll lead a joyless life.  :-)

<I'm bloody glad I didn't have to learn to write it natively.

I wish I hadn't learned to write it natively.  Had English been my second
language, I could've impressed native speakers with my perfect spelling.  :-)
But as it is, I have to put up with infinite streams of questions of the
"How do you spell `separate'?" variety.

<Bulgarian kids take it for granted that once they have learned all the
<letters, they can read and (albeit not always correctly) write any
<word they may come across.

Indeed, not always correctly.  

<(I know this from
<observations, not from my own experience, for I was taught to read and
<write at home long before I went to school.)

Same here.  Actually, I was surprised (and sort of hurt) to see that none of
the other children took books to school on the first day of kindergarten.

<I've always wondered how
<English-speaking kids manage without this kind of feeling <of being able
<to read any word at all after a few weeks of school>.

Interesting question.  Can anyone answer?  (I don't remember *not* being
able to read words, with the sole exception of the name of Sioux Falls
[a city in South Dakota], which I found on a map some years before starting
school.  The `-ioux' was enchanting.  :-))

<Since my English comes chiefly from reading<....>

So does mine, even though I'm a native speaker.  :-)

					--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: matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Linguistics TV Schedule
Summary: Old times in Leningrad are being forgotten already.
Keywords: Dixie
Date: 14 Apr 92 21:00:37 GMT
Article-I.D.: amsaa-cl.7041
Organization: U.S. ARMY MATERIEL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS ACTIVITY (AMSAA), APG, MD.

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:

>< 2:00  SIGN OFF
><       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....

Wait a minute!  If this last still counts as a national anthem, why did
Mr. Horne leave out

       "I wish I was in the land of cotton . . ."?

_Nerushimij_, fiddlestick!

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
					(matt@amsaa.brl.mil)
From: mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 13 Apr 92 19:38:23 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <1992Apr13.174423.5447@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>Spanish has an undeserved reputation for orthographic regularity.
>In Latin America, at least, you have to worry about s, z, and c; g and j
>(and occasionally x); ll and y; h; b and v; and you'll have worse problems
>if you're one of those speakers who likes to leave out s's and d's.

In Spain, ll/y and c/z/s are perfectly predictable.  (C and Z are the same
sound; C is used before e and i, Z elsewhere, if memory serves me right.)

G and J are no problem.  G before i or e is the same sound as J elsewhere.

X is quite rare and formerly denoted a 'sh' sound (Don Quixote is known in
French as Don Quichotte; Mexico used to be called Meshico and our word
'chicano' is probably short for 'meshicano' -- here I use 'sh' to denote
the sound that is written in English with those letters, since Spanish has
no way to write it.)

B and V are a genuine problem -- not phonemically distinct in any major
dialect as far as I know.



-- 
==========================================================================
Michael A. Covington, Ph.D. |  mcovingt@uga.cc.uga.edu  |  ham radio N4TMI
Artificial Intelligence Programs | U of Georgia | Athens, GA 30602  U.S.A.
==========================================================================
From: stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu (Stephen P Spackman)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: A new pronoun?
Date: 5 Apr 92 10:26:24 GMT
	<JON.92Apr3203749@frnk403.franklin.COM> <204409@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
	<peeters.702445451@tasman>
Organization: University of Chicago CILS

In article <peeters.702445451@tasman> peeters@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (bert peeters) writes:

|In article <1992Apr2.134358.2936> salter_duke@darwin.ntu.edu.au writes:
|
|>   I've just discovered a new English pronoun: "its" corresponding 
|>   to "mine", "yours" etc., which isn't supposed to exist. 
|
|dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) writes:
|
|>I don't get it.  What's *new* about its?  I learned this one in first grade.
|
|>How old is the proverb "Every dog has its day." ?  Certainly a lot older
|>than I am...
|
|What is new about "its"?  ITS novelty is that the "its" discussed here is a
|PRONOUN, and not a possessive adjective as in David's example and in my
|own prose.

It's still not new. Did you never play with your friends' pets as a
kid?

"Don't eat that, it's its!"

"Its is bigger than mine!"

(In fact, "Its is bigger than ours's!"!)

Are you telling me this "isn't standard"? Come to think of it, I know
for a fact that we used it at school, because we had this
robot-building contest in third grade (in northumberland, england) and
we couldn't have got by without it.... I wonder if I still have my
notebooks? :-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: wuzhibia@iscs.nus.sg
Subject: Two trends as generative and structuralist
Reply-To: WUZHIBIA@NUSDISCS.BITNET
Organization: Dept. of Information Systems and Computer Science, National University of Singapore
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 03:16:31 GMT


Hello, everyone, I am new to this group. I am from computer science
and working on the natural language processing on Chinese. Recently
I read the paper "The Meeting of Esat and West: Confrontation and
Convergence in Contemporary Linguistcs" written by Jonanna Nichols.
This paper talked about the current two mainstreams about the
natural language grammar, the generative grammar such as Chomosky's
GPSG and the structure grammar such as Meaning-text theory. This
paper was written in 1979. I would like to know whether there 
is any new papers or progress on this issue. What is the view
of the current linguists? Have they make an agreement on this
issue?

Please email me via: wuzhibia@iscs.nus.sg



best
zhibiao
From: cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 13 Apr 92 23:56:20 GMT

In article <1992Apr13.223049.38271@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <204861@unix.cis.pitt.edu> djbpitt@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David J Birnbaum) 
>writes (quoting me):

[much of a neat argument in which I agree with Mark deleted]

> 
>>>Writing is more prestigious so speech needs a little theoretical
>>>boost.
>>
>>I have no idea what the second clause here is supposed to mean.
>
>For centuries linguists, back when they were called grammarians, concentrated
>on the written language, which was considered more important and more
>worthy of scholarly attention than the spoken (the "vulgar") language.
>Because of this the spoken language was much neglected, and linguistic
>theory distorted as a result.
>
>Remnants of this attitude persist; and the linguist very likely belongs
>to that atypical portion of the population that spends more time with the
>written word.  For both reasons it is unnecessary to remind ourselves
>that written language is important, and necessary to emphasize the
>theoretical primacy of speech.

Actually not.  Linguists seem to have realized how stupid doing this
was, and if anything, they have swung wa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay over onto
the other side in that they almost consider it un-PC to study written
language or proscribed speech in any way.  Frequently, linguists will be
very correct in their writing, but not always.  When I am writing
something formal, I usually pay attention to the rules, as in not
splitting infinitives and not dangling TOO many prepositions, unless
that would require me to use ugly constructions like "from whence."
(Informal writing, as anyone who reads my posts, is something else
					       ^ can attest
entirely.)  I don't think that that stems from my being a linguist (or
more precisely, a linguist-to-be) so much as it stems from my going to
12 years of Catholic school where they shove grammar and spelling and
stuff down your throat.  I must have diagrammed about a gezillion
sentences, starting from 3rd grade and ending in high school.  (Did that
ever help in syntax class!  An awful lot of students were completely
baffled by the concept of a sentence tree.  I've been intimately
familiar with this idea since I was a kid, and breezed through the tree
junk almost effortlessly.)

So.  Yes, linguists tend to be good writers, or at least grammatical
ones (you can still write something turgid and convoluted, the verbal
equivalent of REALLY old viscous motor oil, and be grammatical about
it!).  But, no, they do not rely too heavily on it.  If anything, they
have gone almost too far in the other direction.

Regards,
Janis C.
 
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: shoulson@startide.ctr.columbia.edu (Mark E. Shoulson)
Subject: Re: feminine as the generic case
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 13:24:14 GMT

In article <1070@csinn.capsogeti.fr> grossi@capsogeti.fr (Thomas Grossi) writes:
>In article <1992Apr14.211412.761@leland.Stanford.EDU>, alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>|> (Latin terms were mentula "erect penis" and verpa "flaccid penis."  Doe Spanish
>|> verga ever get used for other than an erect penis?  Does French vierge?)

For the record, Hebrew has its share of infelicitous gender-assignments as
well.  When it comes to parts of the body, there is a very convenient rule
(an unusual one in that it has relatively few exceptions) that if one has
more than one of it, it's feminine, but single organs are masculine.  Thus,
shoulders, arms, hands, feet, kidneys, teeth, breasts, etc. are
feminine, while hearts, heads, tongues, noses, etc. are masculine (faces
are plural, and feminine, I think).

Why do I get the feeling someone's going to flame me to eternity for not
triple-checking all my examples?

~mark
      o o     o   o             o o   o     o        o   o     o o          
              o                       o	o   o  	   o       o   	 o     	     
  o   o     o     o         o     o     o   o      o   	 o     o     N2KOT   
Mark E. Shoulson:  shoulson@ctr.columbia.edu
From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Optative and Admirative
Date: 10 Apr 92 21:43:17 GMT
Distribution: sci
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <8914@scott.ed.ac.uk> iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (yours truly,
obviously two-thirds asleep) writes:
>In article <1992Apr7.161905.15300@88opensi.88open.ORG> sf@88opensi.UUCP (Steven Finney) writes:
>
>>I believe this [_sc._ a renarrated mood] is not uncommon in
>>languages of that geographical region; e.g. Turkish (I think) has it as well.
>
>I don't think it is not too common.

I don't know how this ^ word got in.  Let's pretend I didn't put it
there.  Thanks to the netter who pointed it out to me. - I don't think
the renarrated mood is really a Balkanic feature.

>But Turkish has it, of course,

"Of what course", asks the reader.  Well, it is a phenomenon commonly
found in Turkic languages.  Or so it is reported.  Of the Slavic
languages, on the other hand, only Bulgarian has it.

>and that's the only reason why Bulgarian has it as well.

I've always believed that the Turkish construction has been copied in
Bulgarian.  I don't remember whether this is something I've read or
been told, but the time of the renarrated mood's becoming a feature of
Bulgarian (the 16th century) and its morphology, derived from the
perfect (with a resultative interpretation), seem to point in that
direction.  I've been asked for references.  I'll look for some.

-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK