HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Subject and object confusion (Was: Re: "n'ha"...)
Date: 27 Jan 93 23:11:03 GMT
Organization: Telecom Research Labs, Melbourne, Australia

st891487@pip.cc.brandeis.edu (Schwartzberg, Queen of Spades) writes:

>I'd like to thank the person who posted the explanation of n'ha as a 
>fictional construct by Marion Zimmer Bradley. It doesn't matter anymore,
>but I think it's important for all bigshot linguists out there to tip
>their hats to the Real Answer before getting sidetracked. While this is
>really interesting, I am rolling on floor laughing at all those who 
>had such a wonderfully serious debate about it. I didn't remember the
>answer either. Now say "thank you for unconfusing us" and go on to 
>the other discussion, which looks to me like a desperate attempt to 
>cover for the fact that nobody caught on. Next thing someone will ask 
>about Klingon. Please, please, please someone admit they felt just a wee
>bit silly about the whole thing. It was a good question.

If you had read this thread from the beginning, you would know that
the original poster of the question about "n'ha" had mentioned everything
about Marion Zimmer Bradley and her sources in her (I seem to remember
the poster was a female) first posting. She had asked about the possible
source of Bradley's fabrication and had suggested that it seemed Celtic.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: malouf@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Rob Malouf)
Subject: Re: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 23:36:40 GMT

In article <1775@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen) writes:
>Now you are getting into some very odd prejudices about what 'primitive' people
>were like!  As Rich has said - pronouns seem to be *fundamental* to language!
>[I agree with him here - deixis is a core process - even your example includes
>it - 'this' is a deictic element in "this man"].

In his dissertation (which is soon to be published by John Benjamins),
Revere Perkins correlates "cultural sophistication" with certain
grammatical features found in languages.  He found that if anything
more primitive languages tend to have more elaborate pronominal
systems.  Primitive languages have a different set of problems to
solve than more culturally advanced languages and therefore tend to
have different characteristics, but there is no reason to believe that
primitive languages should be in any way simpler than, for example,
English.  (Of course, I use the terms "primitve" and "advanced" here
in a technical sense as defined by Perkins.  I mean to make any value
judgements about languages or societies).

>|> ... And what if the abstract concept of 'tree' came
>|> at a much later time?
>
>Get real!  The only people that would lack a general word for 'tree' would be
>those living where there *are* no trees! In fact so-called 'primitive' peoples
>often have a *better* vocabulary for describing living things than 'modern'
>languages.

Actually, there is nothing universal about the category `tree'.  We
impose our own organizational system onto the world, and there is no
reason why other languages might not organize things another way.
What I would be surprised to find was a language which had no
superordinate categories but instead view each kind of plant as a
complete unique sort of thing.

>-- 
>sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
>  or
>Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com

Rob Malouf
malouf@csli.stanford.edu

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Subject and object confusion (Was: Re: "n'ha"...)
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Cisco Systems (MIS)
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 93 17:52:47 GMT

In article <1993Jan26.122204.5224@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1 writes:
>In article <1993Jan26.155235.9959@leland.Stanford.EDU>, alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson) writes:

>>Wouldn't it rather be "It was *a cat* that Tom saw" under topicalization of
>>the object?
>
>No.  We are talking about cats, or a cat, or (as in my translation) about
>seing a cat.  This is the given.  The news is that it was Tom who did this.
>So _eine_Katze_ is the topic, or "theme", while _Tom_ is the "rheme", i.e.
>the news.  To make _cat_ the news, as in your proposed translation, one
>precisely does *not* topicalize it, yielding
>
>	Tom sah eine Katze.

OK.  I misunderstood what we were talking about.  I took the example sentence
to be the topicalized response to a question such as

	Tom sah einen Hund, nicht wahr?

or	*Was* sah Tom?

(with sentential stress on the WH-word).
-- 
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: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
Date: 22 Jan 93 02:59:51 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

The idea is that for longer time spans, there are other factors to
consider. The Eskimos and North American Indians did not turn
blond and blue eyed in > 10,000 years, so that something of
a much large scale is happening.  The point was in indicating
that time-scaling and distance-scaling have to be correctly
taken into account. 

We don't have linguistic histories dating back to 10,000 years
ago. 

Inchorence is also in the mind of the beholder.

It will be all clear once you read the whole thing.
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
   hubey@pilot.njin.net               ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey
From: aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: yacc like grammar of natural languages?
Date: 28 Jan 93 01:43:12 GMT

oneil@husc10.harvard.edu (John O'Neil) writes:

>In article <hansg.728031611@risken> hansg@risken.vd.volvo.se (Hans Granqvist) writes:
>>This may be a strange question, but having read in the latest issue of
>>BYTE about Machine Translation, I thought, why not express the source
>>language in yacc to resolve all ambiguities like "the can can be filled"
>>where "can" is noun or verb?

>There are two immediate problems with such a scheme, which have noting
>to do with lexical ambiguity:

>(1) There are phenomena in natural language (including Swedish, I
>believe) which are provably not context free.  Since the syntax used
>in YACC is less than context-free (LALR(1), I believe), one of the
>difficulties would be to change the syntax people used with the
>translator.
I do not think this is really a problem. Most "proofs" I have seen
use arbitrarily deep nesting, or arbitrarily often repeated `respectively',
or some such. But I would hesitate to call a sentence acceptable
when it contains nesting of more than a hundred levels, or more
than 10000 words. And a program that could correctly translate
arbitrary pieces of text of not more than 50 words would be a
miraculous achievement.
[Try to translate from Russian to English and only get the choice
of articles (`a', `the' or none) right. A very detailed knowledge
of the subject matter is required.]
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Subject: Re: what is a phoneme
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 18:35:40 GMT

connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

>> What is a phoneme?
>
>I'll go way out on a limb and make most of the readership mad at me
>with this definition:
>
>	A phoneme is the minimal psychological construct representing
>	certain sounds which occur in a given language.

This is intuitively correct.  In fact, I don't think that Chomsky him-
self is really all that concerned about phonemes.  It was Halle that
got into all the matrices.  I also don't believe that either denied the
existence of systematic units called phonemes.  They just made them far
more abstract, and treated them as bundles of features.  The term for
their kind of phoneme is "systematic phoneme."

Chomsky effectively showed that systematic phonemes were more practical
and general that the so-called "autonomous" ones (i.e. ones treated as
irreducable psychological units defined by distributional contrastive-
ness).  If we use autonomous phonemes in biblical Hebrew, for instance,
we end up with way, way more phonemes than we want or need.  The idea of
a systematic phoneme is one of those units that are left when all of the
ostensibly regular phonological rules are reversed (rules which may cre-
ate superficially minimal pairs, but which in fact are simply reflexes
of a much simpler underlying system).

The only criticism I would level at your definition is that it is
vague.  Can you offer us a discovery procedure like the descriptivists
and structuralists had?  Can you offer us a cognitive model and a for-
malism, like what generative phonologists have?  Simply calling a phoneme
a "psychological construct representing certain sounds" doesn't move us
off of square one.

>Attack if you dare; I'm spoiling for a fight.

Tell you what.  I'll believe that your definition is clear if you can
take a standard data set, and show how your definition of the phoneme
offers us a superior way of describing some synchronic phonological pro-
cess.

I'm not so much spoiling for a fight as I am spoiling for some examples :-).

-- 

   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Esperanto a natural language?
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 19:25:57 GMT

In article <16B5E12A48.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU> JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
>Solely in the interest of "le sport", let's consider first the Latin sentence
>"Loquitur latine."  [...]

>(By the by, I used
>"latine" in the above example as my Latin reference works do not indicate
>to which declension "Esperanto" belongs in Latin.)  

I wonder if the Catholic Church has come up with an official New Latin
translation for "Esperanto."  Failing that, one could perhaps loan-translate--
Sperans, nonne?  Or perhaps lingua Doctoris Sperantis?

My Latin primer, _Latina pro populo_, claims that the word for 'clown' is
_bozo_, borrowed from the Greek; it even supplies a useful illustrative
sentence: "Bozo in insula tres imperatores in Romae sunt pares."  
Or were Humez and Humez just pulling my leg?
From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Vowel systems of ....
Keywords: Tamil Irish Celtic
Date: 22 Jan 93 03:05:32 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


Hello again :-)

Can anyone direct me to a book which might have vowel systems
including dipthongs of all languages (and maybe hopefully of
consonants).

I already have books which give lots of examples but I haven't
found Tamil and Celtic (Irish, Scottish will do).

Thank you..
-- 

	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: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
Date: 28 Jan 93 16:44:18 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1993Jan25.233640.1895@Csli.Stanford.EDU>, malouf@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Rob Malouf) writes:
|> In article <1775@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen) writes:
|> >Get real!  The only people that would lack a general word for 'tree' would be
|> >those living where there *are* no trees! In fact so-called 'primitive' peoples
|> >often have a *better* vocabulary for describing living things than 'modern'
|> >languages.
|> 
|> Actually, there is nothing universal about the category `tree'.  We
|> impose our own organizational system onto the world, and there is no
|> reason why other languages might not organize things another way.

Well, if you want to get *picky* :-)

In more precise language I would be surprised to find any language in which there
was not a word whose semantic field overlaps widely with that of the English
word 'tree', except in regions where there are no objects in the semantic field
of the English word 'tree'.  [In particular, there is usually a fairly clear
distinction between woody and non-woody plants, that is likely to be reflected
in the vocabulary of any language].

|> What I would be surprised to find was a language which had no
|> superordinate categories but instead view each kind of plant as a
|> complete unique sort of thing.

Oh, absolutely - I might even doubt if the speakers of such a language where
human!  Generalization is a major part of the human psyche.

[BTW, that was an interesting point about 'primitive' languages having more
elaborate pronoun systems - not that I really find it surprising, some of
the most involved pronoun systems I know of are in polynesian languages].

-- 
sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Correlation Lengths of Language Changes
Organization: SPSS Inc.
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 21:00:27 GMT

In article <16B5E13097.JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU> JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU writes:
>I am especially sorry that he found it necessary to resort to the device of
>ad hominem slurs and insults, which in the direct form he has used I had
>always regretted on a newslist part of whose label is "sci."

Simply put, I took your original posting to be sarcastic, and responded in
the same way you had once responded to me (in the selfsame sci.lang).

Smile when you use that there third person, pardner.

>I can, of course, provide a few controversial
>notions of my own, especially in things Latinic and Romance to unconstipate
>the too conservative when the mood is on me.  

Would you care to provide an example?  (Metacommunication: no irony here,
only honest curiosity.)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: Bah! to bhaashaa
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 20:32:00 +0000



> I found learning to write Chinese no more difficult than English.
> Perhaps Chinese children are considered to be fluent only when
> in their teens because Chinese teachers insist on decent standards
> of literacy.

I don't think fluency is the issue, it's having learnt to recognize and
reproduce 4000+ different characters. The task of learning to write
correctly (i.e. to form the letters correctly) is fairly soon
accomplished in an alphabetic script, and it's the relation of sound
to spelling that's the problem. In Chinese, learning the inventory of
signs is the whole task essentially. The enormous numbers of
homophones must make it difficult too.

Peter

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: malouf@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Rob Malouf)
Subject: Re: Vowel systems of ....
Keywords: Tamil Irish Celtic
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 18:40:56 GMT

In article <Jan.21.22.05.32.1993.1068@pilot.njin.net> hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:
>Can anyone direct me to a book which might have vowel systems
>including dipthongs of all languages (and maybe hopefully of
>consonants).

You might try Merritt Ruhlen's _A Guide to the Languages of the
World_.  The copy of it that I have was published by the Stanford
Language Universals Project in the '70s, but I think it has been
released by a "real" publisher more recently.  He gives the inventory
of vowel _phonemes_, which may or may not help you.  

Rob Malouf
malouf@csli.stanford.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: rmk4@ellis.uchicago.edu (Robert Knippen)
Subject: Re: what is a phoneme
Reply-To: rmk4@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 23:29:39 GMT

In article <1993Jan27.040154.20592@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>What is a phoneme?  (Not a joke question; I just discovered that
>I honestly don't know, and suspect that nobody else does, either.
>Perhaps this is just sheer arrogance on my part, though, so I ask
>everyone now...).

Maybe it's not a joke, but it's certainly a bit coy.  You wouldn't ask if you
didn't already know what answers you were going to get.

Let's cut to the chase:  Sure, the phoneme isn't the end-all be-all of 
linguistics.  This doesn't mean we don't know what one _is_.  I offer the 
following evidence that I know what a phoneme is:  Give me a reasonable amount
of data about any language, and I'll give you back at least one phoneme of
that language.  Obviously, this isn't a spectacular claim about the 
descriptive power of the concept, but it does show that I know some definition,
even if it's only a procedural definition (how to find one).

Just what's your point?

Bob
r-knippen@uchicago.edu

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: librik@cory.Berkeley.EDU (David Librik)
Subject: Re: Subject and object confusion (Was: Re: "n'ha"...)
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 07:29:22 GMT

jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
>connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:
>>This shortcoming is hardly peculiar.  *Many* languages lose the ability
>>to distinguish subject and object in certain situations.  Here's a
>>German example:
>>	Das ist die Frau, die meine Grossmutter ermordet hat.
>>	'That is the woman who killed my grandmother.'
>>	'That is the woman whom my grandmother killed.'
>Yes, so in Latin (e.g. Catullus: dic mi te me amare), but in the
>Breton case, if memory serves me (I can't find my Breton grammar, 
>koc'h!) that confusion could arise in the simplest sentence, i.e.
>a single, main clause. 

This appears in Welsh (which is related to Breton).  You can emphasize a
certain word in a sentence by putting it first.  So while the normal order
of a sentence is unambiguous:
	Gwelodd Tom ci		`Tom saw a dog'
if you make `dog' emphatic you end up with:
	Ci welodd Tom		`Tom saw a DOG' or `A DOG saw Tom'

This isn't as terrible as it looks, because you wouldn't use such a
construction if there was real confusion about who did what.

- David Librik
librik@cory.Berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: jardar@swix.nvg.unit.no (Jardar Eggesboe Abrahamsen)
Subject: Re: Searcing similar cases
Organization: Nettverksgruppa - UNIT
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 11:42:09 GMT


Or at least SEARCHING...

-- 
Jardar Eggesboe Abrahamsen            "Ili rigardis min kiel sian
studanto pri lingvistiko               moralan chefon."
jardar@swix.nvg.unit.no                                (L.L. Zamenhof)
Organization: Doctoral student, Psychology, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 09:48:09 -0500 
From: James Hoeffner <jh6s+@andrew.cmu.edu>
Subject: test post
From: churchyh@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Henry Churchyard)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Lang.Learn Ad
Date: 23 Jan 1993 01:20:49 GMT
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin TX
Distribution: world
Reply-To: churchyh@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Henry Churchyard)
NNTP-Posting-Host: happy.cc.utexas.edu
Originator: churchyh@happy.cc.utexas.edu

According to an ad in _The_Nation_ this week (2/1/93), you can order
audiocasette courses in Sanskrit, Passamaquoddy, and ``Sign
Language''!  (Call 1-800-243-1234.)
--
         --Henry Churchyard     churchyh@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Subject and object confusion (Was: Re: "n'ha"...)
Date: 25 Jan 93 09:37:51 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1993Jan24.115746.29666@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:

[stuff on Breton omitted]

> Well, again we can add several languages to the list. Swedish and
> German are two. In German you only get an ambiguity when none of
> the words are masculine with articles, so the example above does
> not translate well to German, since "Hund" is masculine, but take
> a cat instead:
> 
>        "Eine Katze sah Tom"
> 
> I leave to Leo Connolly to sort out the fine details for German, but
> in Swedish:
> 
>        "En katt s}g Tom"      ("}" = a-ring)
> 
> You don't really know what this is without context. Normally you put the
> subject first, but then again you are more often talking of what Tom sees
> than what the cat sees.

I wouldn't be surprised if the fine details for German and Swedish were 
the same, though I don't know for sure.  German OVS is limited to sentences
where the object is *topicalized*, i.e. set as the item about which a
comment is made.  Overwhelmingly this means that the topic is given,
already mentioned in the discourse.  This is difficult with the indefinite
_eine_Katze_, though definite _die_Katze_ would be no problem.  Nevertheless,
if 'a cat' is given, it is probably also known that a cat was seen.  So
"Eine Katze sah Tom" would the mean 'The one who saw a cat was Tom', or
less awkwardly: 'It was Tom who saw a cat.'

Strangely, an SVO reading for that example is quite unlikely, in my opinion.
Indefinite subjects can precede the verb, though they are not likely to
do so; but there's a logical problem: SVO would, to me, entail that the
cat then took some action because it had seen Tom: "A cat saw Tom and
reported this to the proper authorities."  However, I wouldn't
find this entailment with a verb such as _beobachten_ 'observe', though
I don't know why not.  The normal way to say 'A cat saw Tom' is:

	Dann hat eine Katze Tom gesehen.

This can only be read as XVSO, not XVOS: word order disambiguates in
this instance (which is not to say that XVOS is not legal with a few
verbs such as _gefallen_ 'be pleasing', provided that O is definite).

--Leo Connolly
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Subject: Re: Subject and object confusion (Was: Re: "n'ha"...)
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 16:56:30 GMT

In article 23376@atc.boeing.com, rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake) writes:
>	Yann a lenn al lizher.
>	Yann (topic) reads the book.
                               ^^^^^
Oops.  I confused 'lizher' with 'levr'.  'lizher' is the word for 'letter', not
'book'.  But the point I was making still holds.

-----
Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@boeing.com)   Seattle, WA
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Another HELP: English word (we think)
Date: 22 Jan 93 22:59:14 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1993Jan22.011029.11686@news.cs.brandeis.edu>, st891487@pip.cc.brandeis.edu writes:
> Does anybody out there know what a "gastine" is? We're sure it's a noun,
> we think it's English, and we're positive it's a real word. We also can't
> find it in any dictionaries. It rhymes with "gasline", that's not a typo.
> Help Help!

Just maybe it's a fancy spa, based on a misspelling of Bad Gastein?

Otherwise it's part of a fork in the road near a filling station?

--Leo Connolly
From: BPHEINTZ@UCSVAX.UCS.UMASS.EDU (BRADLEY P HEINTZ)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Voice
Date: 27 Jan 93 00:03:52 GMT
Organization: B. P. Heintz & Associates
NNTP-Posting-Host: phobos.ucs.umass.edu
X-News-Reader: VMS NEWS 1.24

Anyone know of anyplace I could find C/C++ programs or libraries dealing with:

Natural language understanding and generation
Machine translation
Parsing
Voice/Speech recognition

Thanks ahead of time,

- Brad

*=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=*
I'm not into money.  I'm into freedom.

(413)546-5152
bpheintz@phobos.ucs.umass.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang