HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
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


> 
> Then why has modern Dutch lost most of their conjugations and declensions, too,
> where there was not such an obvious mix of Germanic languages? Granted, the
> simplification has not gone as far as in English, but when compared to German
> the lack of 'grammar' is striking.

Well, Eric's point about multilingualism is only part of the story.
The complete or partial loss of distinctions between inflectional
categories in the Germanic languages as a whole is largely a result
of the strong stress on the root syllable resulting in a weakening of
unstressed syllables, so that there are fewer distinctions available.
At which point either the whole system beaks down (as in English) or
keeps going in a radically simplified form (as in German). In fact
*real* spoken German is much less inflected than the standard written
language and much more like English and Dutch.
There's a similar effect in French where the stress on the Latin
antepenultimate syllable caused all following ones eventually to be
lost, which is why French has final stress.

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

Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: rmt51@cas.org (Rick Turkel)
Subject: Re: HAPPY NEW YEAR in 100 Languages...
Reply-To: rmt51@cas.org
Organization: S.W.I.G.
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 15:27:53 GMT

Hebrew:		Leshana tova
Russian:	S novym godom
Serbocroatian:	Sretna nova godina
-- 
Rick Turkel         (___  ____  _  _  _  _  _     _  ___   _   _ _  ___
(rmt51@cas.org)         )    |   |  \  )  |/ \     |    |   |   \_)    |
(rmt51@cas.bitnet)     /     |  _| __)/   | __)    | ___|_  |  _( \    |
      Rich or poor, it's good to have money.       |
From: miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Classical Latin and Vulgate (was Re: Morphological ...)
Date: 12 Jan 93 18:09:42 CST
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

In article <1993Jan12.082842.4979@memstvx1.memst.edu>, connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu writes:

[...]

> 	   O'Neill
> 	   (did I get that right?) noted that the Vulgate is much easier
> 	   to read than Cicero.  True, except for the Psalms, which are
> 	   so scrambled as to be quite unintelligible in spots.  (If
> 	   memory serves, the reason is that St. Jerome never touched
> 	   them, retaining the older translations that Christians were
> 	   used to, whether they understood them or not.)  The Psalms are
> 	   so bad that the Vatican actually released a new Latin transla-
> 	   tion of them about 1950, which was intelligible but didn't
> 	   flow.

Pius XII, 24 March 1945 to be exact.  Your statement that the new
translation doesn't flow bugs me, but I can't offer any objective
criteria for flowingness, at least not today <:->

However let me seize this opening for a question I've long pondered.
If you look at Jerome's Psalms, it's the tenses that are screwed up.
Compare the first few lines of Psalm 22 (23), first Jerome's, then the
1945 translation:

Jerome:

	Dominus regit me, et nihil mihi deerit:
	In loco pascuae ibi me collocavit.
	Super acquam reflectionis educavit me,
	Animam meam convertit.

1945:

	Dominus pascit me: nihil mihi deest;
	In pascuis virentibus cubare me facit.
	Ad acquas, ubi quiescam, conducit me;
	Reficit animam meam.

My notion--completely off the top of my head--is that somebody didn't
understand waw consecutive, which (to put it naively) in Hebrew gives
the grammatical imperfect the meaning of the perfect and vice versa,
and just translated the aspect literally verb by verb.  This of course
makes utter gibberish out of the Psalms much of the time.  Since
Jerome wouldn't have done this himself (else it would be in evidence other
than in the Psalms), maybe the folk were using earlier translations
for liturgical purposes, and Jerome didn't want to change, as you
suggest, what they were used to.

Incidentally, recent editions of the Vulgate give both translations of
the Psalms in parallel columns, which enables one to compare them,
check for flowingness, etc. :)

[...]

> -Leo Connolly

-Ken
-- 
miner@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu | Graecis ac barbaris, sapientibus et
opinions are my own      | insipientibus debitor sum
From: dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Date: 4 Jan 93 22:58:24 GMT
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam

In article <1i9q5iINNk14@bHARs12c.bnr.co.uk> sizex@bnr.co.uk (Eric Barber) writes:
 > In article <1993Jan4.152515.16062@zia.aoc.nrao.edu> gvanmoor@nrao.edu writes:
 > >Whether 'Saterdag' is originally Frisian I do not know. I do know that
 > >'Zaterdag' is THE Dutch word for Saturday.
 > >
 > do you know the derivation of Zaterdag?
 > 
The same as Saturday.  BTW the Frisian form I find is Saterdei, although
it is rarely used, the more common name (in Dutch Frisia at least) is
Sneon, for which I do not know the derivation. (Sunday is Snein, the other
names are more or less similar to English and Dutch.)
-- 
dik t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj  amsterdam, nederland
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn  amsterdam, nederland; e-mail: dik@cwi.nl
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Ah, Pazis (was: Re: Chaire -> chaise)
From: robrtsnj@yvax.byu.edu (John S. Robertson)
Date: 11 Jan 93 09:20:32 -0700
Followup-To: sci.lang
Distribution: world
Organization: Brigham Young University

In article <1993Jan10.212739.6837@trl.oz.au>, jbm@hal.trl.OZ.AU (Jacques
Guy) wrote:
> 
> mcovingt@aisun3.ai.uga.edu (Michael Covington) writes:
> 
> 
> >What was the phonetic value of /r/ in French just before the change?

For what it's worth, Spanish has a flap, written with a single r *r*, as
pero 'but' and another written with a double r *rr* perro 'dog'. When I was
breifly in Bolivia some years ago I kept hearing perro [pezo], where the
[z] seemed to be dental, strident (somewhat attenutated, as I recall),
voiced fricative. Indeed, all double r's were realized as fricatives. In
Mayan the r has gone to /t/ (Mamean languages, /y/ Kanjobalan and Cholan
and Yucatecan languages, and sh (alveopalatal fricative, as in English
[sh]oe) in Moche.
John
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: slie@ulrik.uio.no (Svein Lie)
Subject: Re: optional contractions 
Organization: University of Oslo
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 13:06:51 GMT


>Subject: optional contractions 
>From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
>Organization: University of California, Irvine
>Path: nntp.uio.no!nuug!aun.uninett.no!sunic!uunet!usc!news.service.uci.edu!skid.ps.uci.edu!cortese
>Reply-To: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
>Date: 7 Jan 93 23:27:16 GMT
>
>I know that there are languages, like French, that include contractions,
>but I was wondering if there were any around that had OPTIONAL
>contractions, as does English.  "I'm" is just as grammatical as "I am,"
>while "je aime" isn't acceptable.
>
>Please e-mail.
>
>Just wonderin',
>Janis C.
>
You will (you'll) find something related in Serbo-Croatian, where future tense 
like 'I shall work' is either
	Ja cu raditi
or:	(Ja) raditicu 
or:	(Ja) radicu
(the c should have a cirkumflex upside-down (a hacek) above)

'cu' is a short form for 'hocu', meaning 'I want', but is used as an 
auxiliary verb denoting future tense. It may be cliticized (as 'habere'
once was cliticized in Romance languages to denote future tense), but 
also remain a separate word. If cliticized, the infinitive may lose the
ending (variation according to dialect, if I remember correctly). 

Svein Lie
University of Oslo
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: Morphological development of the genitive case in German
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 01:47:00 +0000


> 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...

What? for all the declensions, singular and plural?

> 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,

I don't *know* the answer to this but I can think of two
non-exclusive answers. 1) The point you suggest about pronunciation (not
a rule, though, it's too irregular for that), i.e. to ease the
transition between two consonants. 2) But initially probably the analogy
of the masc. & neuters where people must have come to regard it as a
compounding feature rather than as a reflex of the genitive. It would
certainly be interesting to find the earliest example of this -s-
with a feminine.

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 a number ...... ?
Keywords: how complex is it ?
Date: 6 Jan 93 14:36:07 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.




	IS THERE A NUMBER BIGGER THAN 100 ?


A thief who has stolen a carpet takes it to a bazaar and
loudly hawks his ware by asking for one hundred dollars. 
A customer walks up, pays the money and departs with the
carpet. A man approaches and asks him;

"Why did you sell it for only $100? "

The thief is surprised ;

"Is there a number bigger than 100 ?"

	-------

Humans probably understand and learn by analogy. If the analogy can be
put into one-to-one form, then it becomes an isomorphism. If it can
be formalized via the use of unambiguous symbols (i.e. mathematics) then 
we can derive and make precise and unambiguous statements about the
implications and ramifications of statements.

There's a necessary evolutionary direction when making comparisons
and making up models. Modern chemistry cannot be explained in
terms of the classical Greek one based on the fundamental elements of
water, fire, air, wood etc. It's the other way around.

In order to put a new/different order on things one must of
necessity appeal to new terminology and to already structured
objects -- the present order and present terminology being 
insufficient. That's the reason every new idea seems to 
require its own baggage and seems to attack the old one when
in reality it comes out of the old one and constitutes only
a small change from the old one. In time, it can be clearly seen
but the only way it can be done is if both the new and the old
are seen in the light of a more general construction. That was the
case with generative vs Bloomfieldian.... Numerous examples
can be found in lots of other fields.

And not everything is all-or-nothing and not everything in
life is linear. Some are more complex. And the more complex
things are, more difficult they are to model. Human constructs,
unlike inanimate matter that physics studies, are much
more complicated. That requires more complex and more powerful
methods, not less. It might even require numbers bigger than
100 !
-- 

	mark	

   hubey@amiga.montclair.edu         hubey@apollo.montclair.edu
   hubey@pilot.njin.net               ...!rutgers!pilot!hubey    
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: pautler@ils.nwu.edu (David Pautler)
Subject: Re: Works using WHO,WHEN,HOW...
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 1993 16:31:55 GMT

>>[David] Pautler Says:

>>BTW, your choice of 'slots' seems pretty arbitrary to me -- maintaining
>>a distinction between WHO's and WHAT's at this level seems unimportant
>>compared to the loss of information due to collapsing all actors, recipients,
>>patients, etc. to WHO's and all causes, intentions, etc. to WHY's.

> Paolo Leva says:
>The power of this taxonomy (to be developed, of course) is in its intuitive
>power. There is no problem explaining somebody how to recognize a WHO, a WHAT
>and so on. The biggest problem is to convince people trying to approach the
>language from a perspective (apparently) so down to earth.

But what analytical or generative power does your taxonomy provide over
other solutions?  Do you really want to treat the subjects of 1 and 2 as
more alike than those of 2 and 3?

1) What is John holding?
2) What is the reason for Mary's crying?
3) Why is Mary crying?

>Think about it a little,

What did you think of the work referred to you a few months ago?

	-dp-
Newsgroups: sci.lang,alt.usage.english
Newsgroups: sci.lang

> I'm curious about the middle name "n'ha" in the quote I'm using
> in my signature file. I'm told it means "daughter of" but I can't
> find it in any reference. What language is it? Is there an
> equivalent for "son of" in the same language? Inquiring minds
> want to know!

> Adams Douglas   | Always tell the truth, | You can die like the rest,
> adamsd@         | then you make it the   | or be one of the best.
> crash.cts.com   | other bloke's problem! | - Cyndi n'ha June, 1992
> Chula Vista, CA | - Sean Connery, 1971   |

The "n'ha" usage comes from Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series
of science fiction novels.  I don't know whether she made it up or
got it from some known language.  She has a set of female characters
called Renunciates, or Free Amazons, who have made themselves
independent of the strictures normally imposed on women of Darkover,
and who change their names to show matrilineal descent.

Claudia
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: The Days Of The Week In Latin
Date: 5 Jan 93 08:57:23 -0600
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1ibjtkINN3bb@bHARs12c.bnr.co.uk>, sizex@bnr.co.uk (Eric Barber) writes:
> In article <8519@charon.cwi.nl> dik@cwi.nl (Dik T. Winter) writes:
>>In article <1i9q5iINNk14@bHARs12c.bnr.co.uk> sizex@bnr.co.uk (Eric Barber) writes:
>> > In article <1993Jan4.152515.16062@zia.aoc.nrao.edu> gvanmoor@nrao.edu writes:
>> > >Whether 'Saterdag' is originally Frisian I do not know. I do know that
>> > >'Zaterdag' is THE Dutch word for Saturday.
>> > >
>> > do you know the derivation of Zaterdag?
>> > 
>>The same as Saturday.
> 
> yes, from Saturn. but I have a friend interested in the names
> of the days of the week and 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. apparently
> Saturn would be 1 of about 2 Latin words to have survived
> the invasions.

What does this last mean?  Are you claiming that the _Saturni dies_
survived *in Britain*?  Hardly, if the Frisians have it too.  Rather,
you must be claiming that it's one of only two old borrowings into
Germanic.  But that's wrong.  Examples: wall < vallum, cheese < caseum,
wine < vinum, street < (via) strata, cheap < caupo 'innkeeper', kitchen
< coquina, mile < mille passuum, pepper < piper, pound < pondus, dish
< discus, tile < tegula.  The phonology of *all* of these, and of their
German analogues, points to borrowing during the period of the Roman
conquest.  A later borrowing of _vinum_ would have yielded *_vine_,
_strata_ > *_strate_, etc.

--Leo Connolly

--Leo Connolly
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: rmt51@cas.org (Rick Turkel)
Subject: Re: Naming Convention for Part of Speech Subclasses
Reply-To: rmt51@cas.org
Organization: S.W.I.G.
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 23:04:00 GMT

Singular vs. plural is generally called number.  Incidentally, a number of
languages also have a third subcategory within number - the dual.  Slovenian
and Hebrew are among them.
-- 
Rick Turkel         (___  ____  _  _  _  _  _     _  ___   _   _ _  ___
(rmt51@cas.org)         )    |   |  \  )  |/ \     |    |   |   \_)    |
(rmt51@cas.bitnet)     /     |  _| __)/   | __)    | ___|_  |  _( \    |
      Rich or poor, it's good to have money.       |
From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: labio-velars to labials, but reverse?
Date: 6 Jan 93 10:10:08 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <memo.842322@cix.compulink.co.uk>, petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian) writes:
> In-Reply-To: <robrtsnj-311292101210@peirce.byu.edu> robrtsnj@yvax.byu.edu (John S. Robertson)
> 
> I am right in assuming Latin quinque shows assimilation rather than a
> genuine p > kw?

It shows a genuine p > kw *by* assimilation!

The interesting thing is that Late Latin undid it by dissimilating the new
kw to k: Italian _cinque_ [c^ingkwe], French _cinq_ [sae~k] etc. reflect an
(unattested?) Vulgar Latin *_cinque_ [kingkwe].

--Leo Connolly
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk (Peter Christian)
Subject: Re: Locus of change (was Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finn..).
Reply-To: petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 01:47:00 +0000


> an actual mechanism of language change?  We know of two *demonstrated*
> sources of change--non-native speakers and sociolinguistically motivated
> innovations of the kind studied by Labov.

Slightly off the tack, but still relevant I hope: socially motivated
innovations seem to involve the spread of some variant rather than
accounting for its genesis.

>  For "imperfect learning" to be a factor
> it would have to be a normal thing for child language habits to be
> carried on into adulthood--what evidence is there for this?

I share this scepticism. I do think there's any need to appeal
specifically to language learning. All speakers make errors based on
false analogy (though of course children do it more), particularly
where there is some lack of obvious system (irregular verbs, for
example). And of course adults don't get their errors corrected
(unless they're in education). The only question then is how frequent
do individual errors have to be to become recognized variants?

Peter


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Christian                         
  Dept of European Languages              peter@gold.ac.uk
  Goldsmiths' College, London.            petex@cix.compulink.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: HAC041@DJUKFA11.BITNET (Konrad Hinsen)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Origin of English?
Date: 8 Jan 93 15:38:57 GMT
 <10182@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil>
Organization: Forschungszentrum Juelich

In article <10182@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil>, matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
says:
>
>In article <C0Hr0w.159@NeoSoft.com> claird@NeoSoft.com (Cameron Laird) writes:
>
>English wound up with an easy-to-speak, easy-to-understand
>isolated SVO structure.  That's one of its special virtues.

Easy to speak and understand for those who are used to it, just
like any other structure. That's not a very special virtue.

>And thanks to all those French- and Latin-type Romance words,
>an Englishman often has two or three ways to say something that
>a German, Dutchman, or Afrikaner on the one hand or a Mexican,
>Brazilian or Frenchman on the other hand may have only one way
>to say.  We've got more words than any other Germanic language.
>We've got more words than any other Indo-European language.
>In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.
>That's another of the special virtues that English has.

From an outsider's point of view, that is a clear disadvantage.
English has many synonyms (-> more words to learn without gaining
expressiveness) and, much worse, many almost-synonyms. The correct
use of these words follows no clear pattern and is a nightmare
for anyone who wants to learn English more than superficially.

>All those words from both the Germanic "ice people" and the Romance
>"sun people" demonstrate that Britain was multi-cultural (in the
>best, hierarchical sense of multi-culturalism, as in the British
>India of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen) long before the term "multi-
>culturalism" was coined.  That's yet another special virtue of English.

If this is a virtue at all, then one of the situation centuries back,
and not of any language. Just because this language was used
long ago in a multicultural environment it needn't be ideal for
today's multicultural environments.

>With all its special virtues, it's no wonder that foreigners all
>over the globe are learning English to a far greater extent than
>French, Arabic, German, Italian or Japanese.

The reasons for that have almost nothing to do with inherent virtues
of the English language. The reason is simply that English is the
language of countries with large economic and political influence.
This could change within a short time, and English could become
quite unimportant again.

Konrad Hinsen (hac041@zam001.zam.kfa-juelich.de)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Subject: Re: Bulgarians - descendents of a Finnis tribe?
Originator: alderson@leland.Stanford.EDU
Reply-To: alderson@cisco.com (Rich Alderson)
Organization: Cisco Systems (MIS)
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 93 01:56:02 GMT

In article <1iig56INNcko@sauna.cs.hut.fi>, linnan@batgirl (Matti Linnanvuori) writes:
>In <1993Jan6.193601.9179@leland.Stanford.EDU> alderson@elaine46.Stanford.EDU (Rich Alderson) writes:
>>The next most primitive language is Turkish.  It is agglutinating.
>>Obviously, it must have grown from an isolating language, since those are
>>most primitive, by the process of concatenating isolated words into units
>>which express greater concepts.  It shows more development in the inventory
>>of sounds, as well.

>The Baltic Finnish languages don't just concatenate words. The word roots
>change differently in different cases. In Estonian, the genitive ending -n has
>worn out completely. The genitive is expressed by a root change relative to
>the lexical (nominative) root, if by anything.

Please re-read the *entire* posting *carefully*.  This was an exposition of the
position taken in the mid-19th century by pre-Neogrammarian philologists who
had not yet abandoned certain beliefs based more on prejudice than on fact.  No
modern linguist holds the views expressed in the posting to which you replied.

But taking that view for a moment:  Estonian would be taken as evidence that
agglutinative languages develop into inflectional languages, as they expected.

>Is it still right to say that these languages (Estonian in special) are
>agglunative and not inflecting? Where is the boundary?

*Historically*--remember that we are discussing an *historical* discipline, not
a synchronic one--the Finno-Ugric languages are agglutinative.  This does *not*
mean that for all time every descendent of Proto-Finno-Ugric will be agglutina-
tive.  It only means that in their history, they all were at one time of this
morphological type.

Synchronically, even Finnish shows some motion away from a "pure" agglutinative
morphology, since (some) stem-final consonants are subject to alteration in the
presence of certain case morphemes (for example).
-- 
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_