HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Hamid)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: English/American
Keywords: SCA, Urdu, Mongolian, Mongol
Date: 21 Dec 92 17:17:13 GMT
Organization: Computer Science Dept, QMW, University of London

In <1992Dec21.162522.8774@infodev.cam.ac.uk> etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:

>|> A similar thing happened in the U.S. during the middle of the last century, 
>|> when the Americans to emphasize the fact that they indeed spoke a separate 
>|> language from the British, decided to introduced American spellings. 
>|> Nevertheless I would say that the two dialects of english are very similar, 
>|> and are becoming more so.

>What evidence is there for the theory that British and American English are
>becoming more similar? I have the impression that the languages are today more
>distinct than they were at the time of Edgar Allan Poe, but obviously I am
>talking about the written languages, not the spoken languages.

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 
[ref: BBC2 Horizon programme about "The Origin of Language", shown about
 8 months ago]. The same applies to media interaction between the U.S. 
and the U.K. e.g. TV Shows, pop-songs (except for Michael Jackson ones :).

Peace,
						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
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: deniz@mandolin.ctr.columbia.edu (Deniz Akkus)
Subject: Re: Need help with Mongolian (Urdu)READ/NEW/FOLLOWUP
Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 04:12:27 GMT
X-Posted-From: mandolin.ctr.columbia.edu
NNTP-Posting-Host: sol.ctr.columbia.edu

In article <1992Dec24.015639.2043@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu> bierbach@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu writes:
>In article <9954@fs3.cam.nist.gov>, koontz@cam.nist.gov (John E. Koontz X5180) writes:
>> In article <1992Dec23.163017.84829@evolving.com>, jww@evolving.com (John W. Woolley) writes:
>> `Mogul' is a variant of `Mongol'.  The Moguls considered themselves
>> to be heirs of the Mongol royal line.  Conceivably the words `Ordos'
>> and `Urdu' are related, too, though I am unable to verify that.  The
>> languages, of course, are completely different in affiliation.  I 
>
> I had always thought that the word `Urdu' was completely 
>Indo-European in origin, since I remember reading that `urdu', meaning 
>`army', was related to the English word `horde' (and now that I think 
>about it, probably to the German word `Heer' as well....)

I don't know whether the word is Turkic or Mongolian but it is hard to
make such distinctions anyway.  The word Urdu and horde both come from
the Turko-Mongolian ordu, meaning army.  

As a kid I did wonder why the state Altin Ordu -- Golden Army was called
Golden Horde...

regards,
Deniz Akkus deniz@ctr.columbia.edu










Xref: sparky sci.lang:8543 soc.culture.german:9555
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.german
Subject: Re: Word (Frequent) Lists
From: axgolinski@ualr.edu
Date: 30 Dec 92 00:34:39 GMT
Organization: University of Arkansas at Little Rock

In article <1992Dec29.080443.1727@samba.oit.unc.edu>, Rick.Horowitz@launchpad.unc.edu (Rick Horowitz) writes:
> Some time back, I read in a book (I've now lost the reference) that 
> about 5000 words in the Spanish language constituted 90% of common
> reading material, or something like that.  
> 
> I'm assuming that other languages will similarly require the learning
> of only a small portion of the language's lexicon for most reading.  
> 
> I'm interested in trying to acquire lists for German, Spanish, and 
> possibly even Hebrew and Yiddish.  I *don't* want just any old list,
> nor do I want lists with seldom-used words; I want lists that will
> give a good return for the study effort.  
> 
> If anyone can help, I would appreciate it.  Please e-mail me at:
> 
> rhorowit@mondrian.csufresno.edu
> 
> Please use that address rather than the UNC address, as it is my
> "normal" account and makes my receipt of mail more timely (because I
> don't check UNC all that often).  
> 
> Thanks very much.
> 
> 
> 
> --
>    The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of
>      North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Campus Office for Information
>         Technology, or the Experimental Bulletin Board Service.
>            internet:  laUNChpad.unc.edu or 152.2.22.80
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Subject: Re: Wanted:'why KILL does not mean CAUSE TO DIE'
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 16:46:36 GMT

In article 1h5012EINN3ei@uni-erlangen.de, geissler@jupiter.linguistik.uni-erlangen.de (Stefan Geissler) writes:
>
>Someone told me about an article (which maybe a couple of years old)
>with the title 'why KILL does not mean CAUSE TO DIE'. 
>That sounds quite interesting for something I have to write right now,
>but I haven't been able to find out where this article was published.

There were quite a few works on this subject, but I think that Vendler may
have come up with the original example of differential behavior with adverbs.
I don't recall his exact examples, but it is not difficult to construct some.
If you compare the sentences:
	The farmer killed the duckling at noon.
	The farmer caused the duckling to die at noon.
you can see right away that the farmer's action had to have occurred at noon
in the first sentence, but not necessarily at noon in the second.  Similarly
with place adverbials:
	The farmer killed the duckling in the barn.
	The farmer caused the duckling to die in the barn.
Again, the second sentence, but not the first, is ambiguous with respect to
the farmer's location

It should be clear that "kill" entails "cause to die", but not vice versa.
The periphrastic construction can express so-called "distant causation", where
the antecedent and consequent may not be contiguous.  How do we represent this
semantically?  Is there a way to paraphrase "kill" with the verb "cause" that
captures the similarity but avoids the difference?  There should be, since
"X kills Y" always entails "X causes Y to die".  For this reason, a number of
us proposed "two-sentence" analyses of lexical causatives in the generative
semantics camp during the early 70's.  But that was just on the "eve of
destruction" for that school, and little ever came of it.

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

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@boeing.com)   Seattle, WA

Xref: sparky sci.lang:8559 misc.writing:4008 sci.logic:2512
From: jas@ISI.EDU (Jeff Sullivan)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,misc.writing,sci.logic
Subject: Re: Rhetorical question
Date: 30 Dec 92 22:40:51 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: USC-ISI
In-reply-to: eric@npri6.npri.com's message of 29 Dec 92 18:08:27 GMT

In article <6819@npri6.npri.com> eric@npri6.npri.com (Eric Williams) writes:

>(I'm surprised there's no group devoted to rhetoric... Maybe we
>don't get it. Maybe *I* don't get it. Oh, well...)
>
>Does anyone out there know of a rhetorical term (or maybe a logical
>one) for a statement that may be interpreted two different ways,
>with the result being the same basic meaning? For instance, a
>sign reads:
>
>      "No smoking section inside."

Not to stray too far from the topic ;-), but the main problem with
this one is that, in my opinion, it's phrased poorly.

"Non-smoking section inside" does *not* mean the same thing as "You
can't smoke in here!"  As any non-smoker can attest, the so-called
non-smoking sections in most restaurants are jokes.  There are often
tables right next to each other, one in the smoking section, and one
in the non-smoking section, that have no appreciable difference in air
quality.  

Why wait(ers/resses) can't understand that I *don't* want to sit there
is beyond me.  Feh.

Bye! ;-)

jas


--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeffrey A. Sullivan             | Research Scientist et al.
jas@isi.edu (Internet)          | Information Sciences Institute
72511,402    (Compuserve)       | University of Southern California
From: aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finnish tribe?
Date: 29 Dec 92 17:35:57 GMT

howeird@hpl.hp.com (Howard Stateman) writes:

|Forgive me if this has already been brought up (I just started reading
|this group), but my Finnish friends are fond of telling me that the
|language of their homeland is most closely related to Hungarian. Not
|Turkish. However, with the long history of fierce wars between Hungary and
|Turkey, I would be surprised if there wasn't considerable overlap in the
|two languages.

But it is not common to call languages closely related when they share
a large part of the vocabulary, but rather when we think that they had
a common ancestor in the not too distant past.
Xref: sparky sci.lang:8538 misc.writing:4000 sci.logic:2490
From: eric@npri6.npri.com (Eric Williams)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,misc.writing,sci.logic
Subject: Rhetorical question
Keywords: rhetoric why-ask-why
Date: 29 Dec 92 18:08:27 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: NPRI, Alexandria VA

(I'm surprised there's no group devoted to rhetoric... Maybe we
don't get it. Maybe *I* don't get it. Oh, well...)

Does anyone out there know of a rhetorical term (or maybe a logical
one) for a statement that may be interpreted two different ways,
with the result being the same basic meaning? For instance, a
sign reads:

	"No smoking section inside."

This can be interpreted as 1) there are multiple seating sections, one
of which is for non-smokers; 2) no smokers allowed at all.
The implied result is that non-smokers will always be accommodated.
I know this is just semantic fuzziness, but I thought it was fun 
enough that someone might have labelled it. Email your thoughts to
me, as my net-days are numbered (under a dozen).

-------- eric@npri.com ---------- or ---------- ...uunet!uupsi!npri6!eric -----
   "We do not fear. We are great. Woldercan does not petition; she ordains."    
Eric C. Williams/ NPRI/ Alexandria, VA/ USA/ (703) 683-9090/ Usual disclaimers.
From: hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Need help with Mongolian (Urdu)
Date: 31 Dec 92 00:20:34 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

In article <1992Dec30.212324.3001@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:

> 
> Were they?  I was under the impression that they were Persian.
> 
> Why would an invasion by a Turkic group lead to the wide-spread borrowing of
> Persian into the local languages?

Persian had a great deal of influence in Central Asia. In addition,
Iran was ruled for various time periods by Turkic peoples who
assimilated into the Iranian population. The first Persian
dynasty to rule Iran for about 700 years was the last Shah's.
Before that the Kachar (Kojars) ruled it. In any case Persian
had become a court language of the Turkic peoples. Even the
Ottoman language consisted of a huge number of Farsi words. The
present day Azeri and Turkmen and Uzbek languages still have them.

One finds a small number of Turkic words in Urdu like hoja (khwaja)
and the names of many Pakistani's (Yahya Khan, TIkka Khan) have
the Turkic word han(khan). The names of many of the Mogul
rulers (like the Mamluks) had Turkish and Farsis-Arabic words.
Names like Kutluk, Baybars, Kilich can be found among both
Mamluks and Moguls. Taj Mahal is probably combination of Turco-Farsi
or Turco-Hindi (taj is probably from tash=(stone)). I don't
have any books with me but many of the Mogul emperors will be
found to have Turkic names, and the original rulers probably
claimed descent from Genghis Khan.
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
   hubey@pilot.njin.net               ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey
From: clary@xdata.cnrm.meteo.fr (Olivier CLARY)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Finnish-Hungarian correspondences (was: Re: Om spr}kenas uppkomst)
Date: 1 Jan 93 14:20:05 GMT

In article <8491@charon.cwi.nl>, aeb@cwi.nl (Andries Brouwer) asks for
confirmation of the correspondances he quotes. All are confirmed by
_A magyar nyelv to~rte'neti-etimolo'giai szo'ta'ra_, Akade'miai Kiado' 1984

> ::Hu. sz'az / Fi. sata (hundred)  [borrowed? cf. satem]

The dictionary says Proto-Finno-Ugrian (finnugor alapnyelv) borrowed it
from Aryan (a'rja) and quotes Sanscrit and Avestic words.

> ::Hu. h'az / Fi. kota (house)  [borrowed? cf. Haus]

It says the relationship with the Proto-Indo-European word should be
further examined (so it is not so sure, it seems).

> ::Hu. v'iz / Fi. vesi (water)

This one too has been compared (egybevetette'k) with Indo-European words.

> ::Hu. l'ud / Fi. lintu (goose)

They give many Finno-Ugrian cognates, including Lappish for instance, but
the Estonian and Finnish words could have different cognates (ma's o~ssze-
fu~gge'sbe is tartozhat).

-- Olivier Clary
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: Need help with Mongolian (Urdu)
Keywords: SCA, Urdu, Mongolian, Mongol
Organization: Telecom Research Labs, Melbourne, Australia
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 01:48:14 GMT


>In <1903@niktow.canisius.edu> salley@niktow.canisius.edu (David Salley) writes:

>>Greetings!  I am looking for someone who can answer a few questions on Urdu,
>>the language of the Mongols.  I am a member of the Society for Creative
>>Anachronism where everybody pretends to be someone who might have lived in
>>the middle ages and researches their persona.

to which Tariq Hamid replies:

>You're 2000 miles wide of the mark, buddy. The Urdu language originates from
>India. 

I think David Salley merely confused "Urdu" and "Ordos". The latter is indeed
dialect of Mongolian. So, Ordos is want you want, David. Actually, I think
that for your purposes, *any* dialect of Mongolian would do just as nicely.
If someone in your Society for Creative Anachronism knows Russian, you're
in luck: there are Mongolian handbooks galore published in Russia. Otherwise,
dig into your local university's library, crossing fingers.
From: nyoung@desire.wright.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finn...
Date: 3 Jan 93 16:49:04 EST
Organization:  Wright State University 

On page 44, figure 1 of Roy Andrew Miller's book
"Japanese and the Other Altaic Languages," the author
presents a chart showing Old Bulgarian and Chuvash as
descendants of "Proto-Western Altaic," which is itself
derived from Proto-Altaic. Although the book, which runs
for over 330 pages of text, presents evidence that Miller
believes shows Japanese to be a descendant language from
Proto-Altaic, I find the Bulgarian/Altaic connection at
least interesting.
Of course, reading through this book makes me, as my
Tamil friend says, "scratch at my brains" to follow the
logic. Maybe Japanese, Bulgarian and some other languages
are related to Altaic. Maybe not. As reading goes, the book
comes close to being as mind-boggling as a trigonometry text.
But I'm sure that my mentioning it will start a flame war
about Bulgarian. (I wouldn't know, personally. I don't have
the foggiest notion about Bulgarian.)

Nils

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finn...
Organization: Telecom Research Labs, Melbourne, Australia
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1993 03:21:30 GMT

hubey@pilot.njin.net (Hubey) writes:


>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 ?

Strange. I know of at least one case of change in the other
direction (l --> sh), and that is in Picard, the French
dialect spoken in the region of Amiens. 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?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Subject: existence of rhetoric group
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 16:02:29 GMT

>>(I'm surprised there's no group devoted to rhetoric... Maybe we
>>don't get it. Maybe *I* don't get it. Oh, well...)
>
>I hereby issue a request for discussion for sci.rhetoric, unmoderated,
>with a self-explicable charter.

I don't know how widely available it is, but there is already a group
devoted to rhetoric: bit.listserv.rhetoric, and it's unmoderated.

	-dp-
From: urcat@mcl.ucsb.edu (Eilidh Swan)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Gaelic-L
Date: 21 Dec 92 22:49:20 GMT

Does anyone on here have information about the Gaelic-L 
ListServ?  Or any other Celtic language resources on-line?

Please e-mail me at:  urcat@mcl.mcl.ucsb.edu

Thanks.

Eilidh Swan
************************************************************************
Cat McGlothlin    urcat@mcl.mcl.ucsb.edu   'urcat'='you-are-cat'   "Oh!"
                  eilidh@cs.ucsb.edu       -- Eilidh is Celtic for Ellen
 The University never has, and never will, pay for or fund my opinions.
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu (Scott C DeLancey)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: English/American
Date: 22 Dec 1992 00:28:37 GMT
Organization: University of Oregon Network Services
NNTP-Posting-Host: darkwing.uoregon.edu
Keywords: English, dialects

In article <1992Dec21.171713.13930@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> tariqh@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Tariq Hamid) writes:
>In <1992Dec21.162522.8774@infodev.cam.ac.uk> etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk (Edmund Grimley-Evans) writes:
>
>>What evidence is there for the theory that British and American English are
>>becoming more similar? I have the impression that the languages are today more
>>distinct than they were at the time of Edgar Allan Poe, but obviously I am
>>talking about the written languages, not the spoken languages.
>
>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.  This suggestion is just not realistic.

> The same applies to media interaction between the U.S. 
>and the U.K. e.g. TV Shows, pop-songs (except for Michael Jackson ones :).
>
It is conceivable that this might have some conservative effect on
divergence with respect to the "standard" dialects of the two countries,
though I don't know of any empirical research supporting the claim.  It
certainly does not have any such effect on the divergence of vernacular
dialects either across the Atlantic or on either side of it.  These
continue to diverge as they always have.
-- 
Scott DeLancey			delancey@darkwing.uoregon.edu
Department of Linguistics
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403, USA
From: jww@evolving.com (John W. Woolley)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Need help with Mongolian (Urdu)
Date: 23 Dec 92 16:30:17 GMT
Organization: Evolving Systems, Inc.
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL4

jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques Guy) writes:
: >In <1903@niktow.canisius.edu> salley@niktow.canisius.edu (David Salley) writes:
: >>Greetings!  I am looking for someone who can answer a few questions on Urdu,
: >>the language of the Mongols.
: 
: I think David Salley merely confused "Urdu" and "Ordos". The latter is indeed
: dialect of Mongolian. So, Ordos is want you want, David.

*I* think he confused "Mongols" and "Moguls".

What's Urdu for flea, anyway?  That should tell us.
-- 
Fr. John Woolley (jww@evolving.com); vastly enthusiastic about Augustine,
Austen, babies, Bach, backgammon, baseball, beer, the Bible, Botticelli, Burke,
Chesterton, Dante, Dixieland, hardboiled, Hitchcock, Dr Johnson, Latin, Mozart,
Shakespeare/de Vere, St Teresa, Tolkien, Trollope, Fats Waller, and Washington
From: oneil@husc10.harvard.edu (John O'Neil)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: indexed grammars
Date: 4 Jan 93 04:27:28 GMT
Organization: Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services, Cambridge, MA
In-reply-to: goer@ellis.uchicago.edu's message of 3 Jan 93 22:58:17 GMT

In article <1993Jan3.225817.2143@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:

>Anyone happen to know where that proverbial best reference is
>that discusses parsers for indexed grammars?  

I don't know for certain that there is a 'best reference', although
you might try the followiong paper and the references therein.

Gazdar, G. (1988) "Applicability of indexed grammars to natural
  language" in U. Reyle and C. Rohrer, eds. "Natural Language Parsing
  and Linguistic Theories."  D. Reidel: Dordrecht.

If there is a 'best' (or even 'good') reference, please tell me -- I
was under the impression that indexed grammars could be parsed at best
in exponential time.  But I have no proof of that.

Good Luck,
John O'Neil

--
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
Newsgroups: sci.lang,soc.culture.german
From: Rick.Horowitz@launchpad.unc.edu (Rick Horowitz)
Subject: Word (Frequent) Lists
Summary: Looking for lists of most frequent words
Keywords: spanish, german, word lists, word frequency
Organization: University of North Carolina Extended Bulletin Board Service
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 08:04:43 GMT

Some time back, I read in a book (I've now lost the reference) that 
about 5000 words in the Spanish language constituted 90% of common
reading material, or something like that.  

I'm assuming that other languages will similarly require the learning
of only a small portion of the language's lexicon for most reading.  

I'm interested in trying to acquire lists for German, Spanish, and 
possibly even Hebrew and Yiddish.  I *don't* want just any old list,
nor do I want lists with seldom-used words; I want lists that will
give a good return for the study effort.  

If anyone can help, I would appreciate it.  Please e-mail me at:

rhorowit@mondrian.csufresno.edu

Please use that address rather than the UNC address, as it is my
"normal" account and makes my receipt of mail more timely (because I
don't check UNC all that often).  

Thanks very much.



--
   The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of
     North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Campus Office for Information
        Technology, or the Experimental Bulletin Board Service.
           internet:  laUNChpad.unc.edu or 152.2.22.80
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alext@cix.compulink.co.uk (Alex Thomas)
Subject: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Reply-To: alext@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 19:45:00 +0000

Did someone explain why 'Wednesday' does not appear in German?
Isn't it because Wotan was tabooed: compare our English 'touch wood'.

Secondly, did anyone derive 'Samstag/Samedi'? I think it's 'Sabbatum Dies'.
Judaeo-Christianity has thus 'annexed' only one German day, as opposed to
two French; while English weekdays have remained stoutly pagan.

Tony Thomas
C/O alext@cix.compulink.co.uk
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: sci.lang