"funny" language; was Re: No more "Christian name, sir?" in Kent, UK

[Barbara Need]

The UofC linguistics department has what was known as a "funny
language requirement" aka, the non-Indo-European requirement. Except
that I know of one fellow who managed to get Bengali to count, and
Coptic or Middle Egyptian (I forget which), did not.

This lead Jerry Sadock to observe during a paper that for this purpose
(in the context of his paper) and this purpose only, English counts as
a a funny language.

Barbara

On 29 Mar 2010, at 10:58 PM, Judy Prince wrote:

> BTW, why was Chinese a "funny language requirement"?
>
> On 29 March 2010 22:46, Barbara Need <bhneed at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It goes the other way as well. When I studied Chinese for my funny
>> language requirement at UChicago, my teacher named Ni3 Ba4 (I think I
>> have the tones right). I don't remember the character for my personal
>> name, but the family name character has three ears. Other students
>> also had Chinese names that were clearly based on the sounds of their
>> own names.

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