HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: What is a dialect? (Re: 8I8 (was Re: Chinese question))
Date: 9 Apr 92 23:41:12 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.1992Apr9.234112.21656
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University

In article <1992Apr9.212744.20732@cbnewsi.cb.att.com>, hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (hua.t.lin) writes:
<>In article <1992Apr9.060939.20913@news.Hawaii.Edu>, jmu@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (James M. Unger) writes:
<
<><Slight correction:  the _same_ writing system is not used for the different
<><languages that, mostly for political reasons, are called dialects of
<><Chinese.
<
<What is a dialect??

See the FAQ list.  (Michael Covington?)

<As far as I can tell, most chinese dialects are very much similar.

If you know only Mandarin, you will not be able to speak with people from
Hong Kong, where Cantonese is spoken (unless they also know Mandarin).
This indicates that Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages.  But if
you speak the Beijing dialect of Mandarin, you can still understand people
from Ha'erbin, Taibei, and Kunming, and they can understand you, though
there may be a handful of differences in vocabulary or grammar from region to
region.  Likewise, English-speakers from Glasgow can converse with English-
speakers from Brooklyn and Lagos even though they speak different *dialects*
of the same language.

					--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: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Devanagari: Syllabary or Alphabet?
Date: 13 Apr 92 15:44:02 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <1992Apr13.141158.11253@athena.mit.edu> pesetsk@athena.mit.edu (David M Pesetsky) writes:
>
>It's a very short step from inkless categories in orthography (a.k.a.
>graphiteless graphemes) to phonetically null categories in syntax.
>Caveat Cornu!

Naive question: aren't some glottal stops realized exactly this way, as
phonetic nulls?  Like the /t/ in a Cockney's "bottle"?  It's the stoppage
of sound that's phonetically significant there...


-- 
          David M. Tate            |"The man who hath no music in himself
     dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu       | Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sound
  A poem should be dumb, / As old  | Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils
 medallions to the thumb.-MacLeish | 	Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice", A.V
From: matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil (Matt Rosenblatt)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet
Summary: Pitman vs. Han'gu<l
Date: 13 Apr 92 20:29:08 GMT
Organization: U.S. ARMY MATERIEL SYSTEMS ANALYSIS ACTIVITY (AMSAA), APG, MD.

In article <1992Apr9.062539.6346@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU 
(Scott Horne) writes:

>In article <1992Apr9.135903.2995@darwin.ntu.edu.au>, salter_duke@darwin.ntu.edu.au writes:

><If one's looking at writing as a system, there's something to be said
><for getting away from the arbitrary symbols of the alphabet I'm
><using at the moment, and having one where similar sounds have
><similar symbols.  Two alphabets I can think of which do this are
><Pitman's Shorthand, which has identical curves for pairs of sounds
><like "s" and "z", but differentiate them by making the voiced one
><of the pair a different thickness.  [Linden Salter-Duke]

>I think that is a very bad idea.  Note that Pitman's shorthand (and even
>my favourite Gregg) is much less readily legible than the conventional
>English script.  [Scott Horne]

I must agree with Mr. Horne's conclusion, but for a different reason.
An earlier poster expressed the hope that no nation of people should
be condemned to having to write with ball point pens.  Similarly, no
nation of people should be condemned to having to write with fountain
pens or felt tipped pens, which is what it takes in order to differentiate
the thicker and thinner strokes and curves of Pitman shorthand.

>I never have been able to understand how anyone could write Pitman's 
>shorthand quickly, what with constant differences in pressure on the pen.  
>(Thickness of stroke matters in Pitman.)   [Scott Horne]

It takes but a slight difference in pressure when the writer is using
a fountain pen, which is what Sir Isaac Pitman intended when he designed
his fine system.  Someone used to the system can write fast enough to
keep up even with graduate lecturers at Yale University.

><An even more logical alphabet is the one used for Korean (sorry, can't 
><remember its name).  [Linden Salter-Duke]

>_Han'gu<l_, about which see the flamefest going on over on
>`soc.culture.korean'.   [Scott Horne]

Han-gul looks like a fine writing system for the Taiwanese people
for whose as-yet-unwritten language we are discussing possible scripts,
seeing as how Taiwan is not all that far from Korea and the writers
presumably would not mind an Asian-looking alphabet.  It would be
otherwise if the people in question were inhabitants of some land
far from Asia; in that case, they would be better advised to go
with some version of the "Latin alphabet" -- the "Subject" of this
thread of articles.  We have to bear in mind that perhaps the most
sought-after document in the world, viz., the American dollar bill,
is printed in the Latin alphabet.

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
					(matt@amsaa.brl.mil)
From: dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Written and Spoken Language(s)
Date: 13 Apr 92 18:37:23 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <44971@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>
>There are also languages which are primarily written.  The Hindu-Arabic
>numeral representation are one of them, 

Now I'm *really* confused.  In what way do the Hindu-Arabic numerals comprise
a language, except perhaps in the automota-theoretical sense?  Linguistics
doesn't study that sort of "language", which is simply a set of "well-formed"
symbol strings.  

>and I do not believe that the 
>spoken words in any of the languages involved had much to do with the
>characters.  

Scott Horne has already claimed that the number shapes come from the shapes
of their initial letters in a written version of some language, but I couldn't
say one way or the other.  (I was taught that they are stylized version of
pictograms of n sticks for n=1 through 4, and of a hand for n=5; this may be
the semiotic equivalent of folk etymology...).

At any rate, this is irrelevant, since these are just a set of signs with
conventional meanings, like UPC bar codes or international traffic signs.
Do red, amber, and green traffic lights constitute a "language"?


-- 
          David M. Tate            |"The man who hath no music in himself
     dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu       | Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sound
  A poem should be dumb, / As old  | Is fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils
 medallions to the thumb.-MacLeish | 	Shakespeare, "Merchant of Venice", A.V
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler)
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
	<29E640CC.8634@noiro.acs.uci.edu>
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 05:07:27 GMT

At last, someone takes the idea of animal languages seriously.

I am not suggesting that we try to study animal languages in human terms.
I am saying that whatever methods are adopted to study animal languages be
applied to human languages as well. I believe that is actually done.

Various species have ways of barking, to warn someone away. The waveforms
for barks of birds (certain chirps) and those of prairie dogs and of humans
show striking similarities. Similarly the wave forms of the reassuring
sounds that animals make have striking similarities.

I would say that is a start.

We think animals are dumb because they don't speak human languages. Actually,
some humans apply the same standard to other humans if they happen to speak
a different language. But dogs and other animals have learnd to understand
some human speech, and some chimps and gorillas have learned some sign
language.

Whales seem to have a language that lets them communicate hundreds of miles
away underwater. And dolphins seem to have a language. And bees have a kind
of sign language.

But on the whole, we do not understand animal languages. Instead of concluding
that humans are dumb, we somehow conclude animals are.

Consider this: humans evolved from animals. Since animals had language, 
it seems likely that the animals humans evolved from also had language.
Now, did we have case and tense before we stopped being animals or 
afterwards ?

For that matter, until we learn to speak prairie dog, how do we know it doesn't
have case and tense ?

The choreographed sign language of bees seems enables them to say where
something is and from this information the other bees can find it.
That sounds like it has some kind of adverbs, at least. But our traditional
way of looking at languages, which is based on written and spoken language,
does not even take into account human sign languages and human body languages.
So it is not surprising that these aspects of animal languages are ignored.
But I think they should be part of the study of human languages and studied
in the context of animals in general.

I bet a lot of human kinemes are loan words!

Allan Adler
ara@altdorf.ai.mit.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Numbers and language
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 21:49:20 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <29E9ED82.24577@noiro.acs.uci.edu> cortese@hepxvt.ps.uci.edu 
(Janis Maria Cortese) writes:
>I can't count too well in French.  Even when I was in my eighth
>consecutive year of studying it, I still tripped over the numbers.  I
>had an instructor in Ling 50 (the intro class) who was a speaker of
>about six languages - FLUENTLY.  He learned several natively, the most
>prominenent one being Swiss-German.  He can count easily in English,
>but he has said during class that when he is in the supermarket or
>something and is distracted and has a lot of prices to add up, he just
>chucks it and starts going off in Swiss-German.  I have a friend who
>speaks Spanish fluently after studying it for four years in college and
>getting her degree in it; she also has a harder time "counting fluently"
>than one would expect.
>
>Why is this?  It seems almost like numbers are kept separate from words
>in a brain.  And I'm not talking about not knowing the word for 1,000
>either.  I can say dix-neuf cent blah blah blah, but damn it, when I see
>1992, my brain goes "nineteen ninety two" right off the bat.  When I see
>words, I have no immediate brain response that tries to shoehorn them
>into English.  I have no reflex that starts going off in English AND HAS
>TO BE FORCIBLY SUPPRESSED like I do with numbers, and from what I
>gather, this is similar to many others who are fluent in languages.  

Could be that we simply never learn the numbers well in a foreign language,
because we immediately translate them into our native tongue, while everything
else (at first) has to be decoded.  That is, if you read "42" you think
"forty-two", and the French equivalent isn't reinforced.  If you read
"quarante-deux", it will be, but this doesn't occur as often.

A good test of this notion would be to learn Arabic, where the numerals
are somewhat different, and see if you learn to count fluently in Arabic.
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Spanish orthography
Date: 14 Apr 92 21:58:36 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

Since we were recently talking about Spanish orthography, folks might be
interested in a quotation from Quino's "Mafalda", representing a childish
lisp by orthographic substitutions (s -> z, r -> d):

   [Guille esta sentado en una silla en ropa de ban~o.]
   Mafalda: Que haces ahi sentado esperando, Guille?  Todavia falta
            una semana para que salgamos de veraneo.
   Guille:  Una zemana cuantoz diaz zon?  Azi?  [mostrando dos dedos]
   Mafalda [mostrando 7 dedos]: No, asi.
   Guille:  ?Me traediaz un almohadonzito, pod favod?

(translation:)

   [Mafalda's baby brother Guille is sitting in a chair dressed for the beach.]
   Mafalda: What are you sitting there waiting for, Guille?  We don't leave
            on vacation for a week yet.
   Guille:  How many days is a week?  This much?  [holding up two fingers]
   Mafalda [holding up 7 fingers]: No, this much.
   Guille:  Could you bring me a little pillow, please?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: ttw@beta.lanl.gov (Tony Warnock)
Subject: Spoken English as she is Writ.
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 19:35:56 GMT

   One difficulty in the study of written rather than spoken language
   is the (mistaken) notion that "written language is an imperfect
   attempt to capture the spoken language" or something similar. It is
   certainly true that spoken languages exist where no written language
   dares to tread, but the usage of written language is not the same
   as that of the spoken. (Spoken language existed earlier than group
   theory also, but we study group theory anyway.)
 
   Written language exists for communication where the originator is
   not around to ask questions of. [Note: sentence ended with preposition.]
   In particular when the author is dead. This is why most spelling
   reform fails. A language may undergo a sound-shift after its spelling
   is fixed (English, French, Russian, Persian, Chinese?) rather than
   fixing spelling after the last sound-shift (Spanish, German, Finnish.)
   When the written and spoken languages diverge too much, problems will
   occur. I do not know what will happen to English as the spoken language
   changes.
 
   The "primacy" of the spoken language is not in question. The
   use of this primacy to discourage study of written language is
   the problem.
 
                            Art for Art's sake is as stupid as
                            Chugdush for Chugdush's sake.
 
                                                           Tony
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler)
Subject: Animal Grammar
Organization: M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Distribution: sci
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 02:05:42 GMT


In view of the interest in this newsgroup in comparative linguistics, I
am surprised that almost nothing has been posted on the subject of 
comparative animal linguistics.

I saw a show on TV in which someone taped the sounds that birds, prairie
dogs and other animals make under various conditions and analysed the
wave forms and found that the waveforms were closely correlated in their
shapes.

In the face of this, isn't it a little arbitrary to concentrate on 
defining merely human languages ?

Allan Adler
ara@altdorf.ai.mit.edu
From: steiny@steiny.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Date: 15 Apr 92 03:49:47 GMT

>  I wonder if you could suggest
> a distinction made with English verbs which is not made in Spanish?

	No.    I did not mean to say that Spanish was in any way less
expressive than English.   Just that it is more infelected.   Spanish
expresses the infinitive: "to talk" as "hablar"--it is the inflection
that means "to"--English is just like that.

	I wonder though.   I have many friends whose first language was
Spanish that seem to have a hard time with the English prepositional system.
Searching through dictionaries it seems to me that there are less ways
to make case distinctions in Spanish.

Don Steiny
-- 
Don Steiny
Don Steiny Software
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
(408) 425-0382
From: hlin@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (hua.t.lin)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: What is a dialect? (Re: 8I8 (was Re: Chinese question))
Date: 9 Apr 92 21:27:44 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: AT&T

>In article <1992Apr9.060939.20913@news.Hawaii.Edu>, jmu@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (James M. Unger) writes:
><In article <514@tdatirv.UUCP> sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen) writes:
><>
><>The fact that the same writing system can be used for about 6 or 8 different
><>languages is the great strength of the chinese writing system, and a great
><>source of unity amoung the chinese people.  But is is *not*, and will
><>never be primary.
><>
><Slight correction:  the _same_ writing system is not used for the different
><languages that, mostly for political reasons, are called dialects of
><Chinese.

What is a dialect??
Isn't it a language that vary somewhat from another language ?
As far as I can tell, most chinese dialects are very much similar.
If you know more than 2 of them, it is easy to see how they overlap?
There are of course some languages spoken in china which are totally
non-chinese.
From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Animal Grammar
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 16:46:56 GMT
Organization: SPSS Inc.

In article <1992Apr11.142755.15203@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
>Surely that's not the only reason.  Humans have the ability to respond
>creatively to new situations, and to preserve knowledge of the response for
>future generations, in a way that animals simply never do.  Animals do not
>educate their young.  

Simply not true.  Check out Konrad Lorenz's _King Solomon's Ring_, for one.
Much of animal behavior has to be learned.  Generally this consists of the
adult doing something and the offspring imitating it, but there are 
behaviors that indicate that the adult "knows that it's teaching"-- 
e.g. offering corrections, or simplifying the behavior so it can be
more easily imitated.

Now, if you're thinking of _formal_ education, even fish have schools...

(But I agree that human communication goes beyond anything we see in animals.)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: jmu@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (James M. Unger)
Subject: Re: 8I8
Organization: University of Hawaii
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 04:36:26 GMT

In article <1992Apr8.165110.14160@rlgvax.Reston.ICL.COM> scc@rlgvax.Reston.ICL.COM (Stephen Carlson) writes:
>
>I've researched this using Gao Benhan's _Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and
>Sino-Japanese_, and this description is based on his work.
>
The author's name is Bernhard Karlgren.  Using a pirated Taiwanese edition,
eh?


--
J. M. Unger, Chairman
Department of E. Asian Languages & Literatures
University of Hawaii
From: cortese@skid.ps.uci.edu (Janis Maria Cortese)
Subject: Re: Why are English infinitives so different?
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Organization: University of California, Irvine
Date: 11 Apr 92 01:30:05 GMT

In article <1992Apr10.053647.19960@midway.uchicago.edu> dunl@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>Note the English infinitive which does not have *to* tagged onto it:
>as in "You should *go*."

In that case, it's not the "go" that's canning the "to," it's the
"should."  Should, like must, can, will, shall, could, might, ad nauseum
just don't take infinitives after them.

Regards,
Janis C.


Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: scobbie@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Jim Scobbie)
Subject: Re: What is a dialect? (Re: 8I8 (was Re: Chinese question))
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 1992 02:45:15 GMT

In <1992Apr9.234112.21656@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:

>  Likewise, English-speakers from Glasgow can converse with English-
>speakers from Brooklyn and Lagos even though they speak different *dialects*
>of the same language.

>					--Scott

Oh, you bloody think so?

Jim 

:-)
-- 
James M. Scobbie: Dept of Linguistics, Stanford University, CA 94305-2150, USA
                  scobbie@csli.stanford.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: JAREA@UKCC.UKY.EDU
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 01:42:44 GMT
X-Bytes: 

Indeed, modifications such as the distinction of i versus j and u versus
v, as well as addition of z from Greek and w from elsewhere have added to
the flexibility and utility of our so called 'Roman' alphabet, as have
diacritics (like that lovely Scandinavian bullet hole above the letter a),
all of which your PC, my clone, and any Mac can handle gracefully, were it
not the case that IBM main frames used by so many of us as a communication
link are too brain dead to accommodate anything beyond 128 ASCII (all right,
EBCDIC fr gawds sake!).  Let's hear it for putting the thorn back in English
where it has belonged for over a millenium!
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Latin alphabet (was: Inventing a writing system?)
Date: 8 Apr 92 18:30:08 GMT
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University

In article <204596@unix.cis.pitt.edu>, dtate@unix.cis.pitt.edu (David M Tate) writes:
<In article <1992Apr7.034920.2601@cs.yale.edu> horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne) writes:
<
<>And the long `s' occurring together with our regular `s' in centuries of
<>documents in Latin, English, and many other languages is suddenly a "glyphic
<>variant" of `s'.  To hell with classicists.
<
<You lost me here.  Why isn't 'great s' a glyphic variant?

Why isn't capital `S' a glyphic variant?

					--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!
Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: horne-scott@CS.YALE.EDU (Scott Horne)
Subject: Re: Linguistics TV Schedule
Keywords: : -)
Organization: Computer "Science" Dept, Yale University
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 08:54:43 GMT

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!  We need more articles like this one.

In article <!nxj98_.samson@netcom.com>, samson@netcom.com (Peter Samson) writes:
<
<10:30  SPELLING BEE--Cartoon
<       Superhero demonstrates animal grammar as well as orthoepy.

You mean *orthoe"py*.  (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

< 2:00  SIGN OFF
<       The National Anthem is sung fluently in 17 languages.

	Allons, enfants de la patrie....
	Qi3lai2, bu2 yuan4 zuo4 nu2li4 de ren2 men!...
	Kimi ga yo^ wa....
	Soyuz nerushimij respublik svobodnik....
	Hej, Slaveni!  Srce bije....
	Det er en dygtig land....

Well, you didn't say *which* national anthem....  :-)

					--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
Shao2shan1 sheng1 de tai4yang2 yong3 bu2 luo4!