From traugott at csli.Stanford.EDU Sun Aug 4 11:59:51 2002 From: traugott at csli.Stanford.EDU (Elizabeth Traugott) Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 07:59:51 EDT Subject: quantitative studies of lexical change Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Some of my colleagues and I would be interested to know whether there are there quantitative studies of the frequency with which lexical polysemies or homophonies increase or decrease, or at least of the frequency with which generalization and specialization occur. Also, is there any quantitative work on the gross rate at which homophonies have been created or destroyed? Creation might be the effect of large-scale phonemic changes (vowel shift etc.), reductions or other changes in individual lexemes, innovation of new lexemes and borrowing. Destruction of homophony might result from evolution of distinct surface forms for previously homophonous lexemes, or from complete elimination of some uses. Information about any studies on the history of any language would be much appreciated. Please respond to me at traugott at stanford.edu. I will post the results of this survey. Elizabeth Traugott From tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA Mon Aug 5 14:41:25 2002 From: tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA (Kevin Tuite) Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 10:41:25 EDT Subject: Voltaire on etymology Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, Doubtless all of you have heard, and many have repeated, the remark attributed to Voltaire that etymology is "une science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose". I have just borrowed a copy of Rüdiger Schmitt's 1977 collection "Etymologie", and in fact four of the dozen or so linguists represented in the volume -- from Ernst Tappolet in 1905 to Klaus Kohler in 1970 -- repeat the quote, and cite Voltaire as its author, without giving a precise source. Two of them however specify that Voltaire was moved to make this disparaging comment after examining Ménage's "Origines de la langue françoise" (1650), in which, for example, "rat" is derived from "mouse" (mus > muratus > ratus > rat), and "haricot" from "faba" (faba > fabaricus > fabaricotus > (h)aricotus). In his introduction to the collection, Schmitt himself refers to the Voltaire quote, but expresses doubt about its authenticity ("... wenn das Zitat authentisch ist - was mir nach wiederholten eigenen Recherchen immer zweifelhafter wird ..."). Do any of you know if the precise origin of this "definition" of etymology has been pinpointed? I tried searching on the web, but only found the same sort of imprecise attribution to Voltaire (and an interesting range of variants of the quote itself). thanks in advance Kevin -- ************************************************************************* Kevin Tuite 514-343-6514 (bureau) Département d'anthropologie 514-343-2494 (télécopieur) Université de Montréal C.P. 6128, succursale centre-ville Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7 tuitekj at anthro.umontreal.ca NOUVEAU! Site Web en construction: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/ ************************************************************************* From cecil at cecilward.com Sat Aug 10 13:34:10 2002 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 09:34:10 EDT Subject: "It is me who likes sprouts" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [This is a modified version of a post I made on RRG-LIST.] On the list "RRG-LIST", Emma Pavey recently brought up some interesting facts about sentences like It is me who likes sprouts. It is him who likes sprouts. It is us who likes/*like sprouts. Emma raised the point that the agreement pattern between the verb likes and the (non-dummy) pronoun is very odd, showing number agreement but not person agreement. I was hoping that list members might be able to contribute some background concerning the historical origin of this kind of sentence, and make some comments on the basic identificatory sentence "it's me." in English. I am also hoping that list members would be kind enough to fill in some of the gaps or point out some of the glaring errors in this suggestion of my own. I assume that sometimes languages evolve anomalous syntactic patterns because they are trying to do two jobs in one hit, as if a single sentence starts trying to do the work of two. Maybe such patterns even evolve from the roll-up of sentence pairs accompanied by elision plus various other "adjustments". These sentences contain a "double-hit" semantic payload, in that they perform carry out a double function in a compact package, that is, they are identificatory "It is him." "He is the sprout-lover" - and they also convey the secondary proposition "he likes sprouts". I am wondering if it is reasonable to suppose that this compressed structure indeed evolved in some way from two short sentences when a syntactic technique became available that permitted their rolling up into one. Another fascinating thing about these sentences is that they looks superficially like they contain a straight relative clause, a modifier on the non-dummy pronoun. My take on this is that this is the modern situation is the result of historical reanalysis, rebracketing, if you like, following which the "relative clause as modifier" interpretation was bleached out. Now as far as the minimal identificatory sentence is concerned, When English is compared to German, say, what do we find? (Maybe list members who are speakers of Germanic languages might care to chip in.) I assume that for German we would have *Es ist ich/mich. *Es ist wir/uns. Rather Ich bin es. Wir sind es. And presumably, Ich bin es, der ... "It's me who.." Wir sind es, die ... The position of the comma, is interesting. Notice how the construction is ripe for rebracketing. In English, maybe the demands of movement into stressed position (rightward movement, the opposite of fronting) is at work in English, our Germano-Celtic language, as in Celtic. Maybe this was the driver towards the modern "It is me" vs a possible earlier "*I am it". Let's take the modern sentence pairs, It's me. The [one that likes/*like sprouts]. It's John. The [one who/that likes sprouts]. It's us. (=We are the ones.) The [ones who/that *likes/like sprouts]. We can elide them together and remove the duplication It is us who/that *likes/like sprouts -etc Notice that the agreement pattern now fits. In modern German, there is an identification between the definite article, pronoun ("Die ist nett") and relativizer. I assume this was true for early English (eg "that"), and presumably this played a contributory role as well. I assume then that we had the following situation when the dummy, always 3rd-person pronoun was on the right I am 3sg. + 3sg REL likes/*like sprouts We are 3pl. + 3pl REL likes/*like sprouts We then invert to move the first pronoun into a fully stressed position, according to the demands of its identificatory function. Meanwhile the verb agreement on "like" retains the same pattern. I keep returning to the question of various frameworks deal with the results of reanalysis. How do we get past an overly literally parse of the apparent syntactic patterns (literal reading: relative clause modifier) in order to get to with the correct semantic load we actually understand. Cecil Ward From jer at cphling.dk Sat Aug 10 22:36:14 2002 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 18:36:14 EDT Subject: IE at ICHL 2003 Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, for the 16th ICHL, staged by Prof. Lene Scho/sler of the Department of Romance at the University of Copenhagen, a special Indo-European section has now been planned: IE Section at ICHL 2003 in Copenhagen. The 16th International Conference of Historical Linguistics will take place at the University of Copenhagen in the week 11th through 15th of August, 2003. The program is subdivided into a number of sections, cf. the preliminary program at www.ku.dk/romansk (click on Forskningsprojekter produces link to the ICHL homepage). Recently, a special section devoted to "Internal Reconstruction and Comparative Method in Indo-European: Results and Problems" was added, to be organized by myself. Each section includes a plenary session; at that of the IE section a paper will be presented by Professor Jay Jasanoff (Harvard). Our section will be held on Friday, August 15, and an urgent "CALL FOR PAPERS" is hereby issued to colleagues all over the world. The title of the section is meant to capture investigations into the system of Proto-Indo-European (its phonology, morphology, syntax, lexematics - anything) on points where problems still remain even after comparative reconstruction has reached its goal by uncovering the protolanguage. Papers offering solutions to problems of irregular inflection or derivation (or the analog on other levels of linguistic analysis) on the basis of motivatable "deeper" reconstruction are specifically elicited. Welcome are also papers on internal reconstruction working from one of the intermediate protolanguages (Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, etc.), or centering on theoretical aspects of the reconstructional techniques applicable to Indo-European. A one-page summary should be submitted no later than March 1st, 2003. Write to: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen, Department of Linguistics (IAAS), University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. For additional information the e-mail line to jer at cphling.dk is always open. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen From tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA Sun Aug 11 23:51:06 2002 From: tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA (Kevin Tuite) Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 19:51:06 EDT Subject: Voltaire on etymology Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, A week ago I asked the members of the list if anyone could identify the source of the quote attributed to Voltaire that etymology is "une science où les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose". So far, I must sadly report, no one has been able to do so. Bob Rankin, Stefan Georg and Alexis Manaster-Ramer reported having searched at one time or another for the quote in Voltaire's writings, without success. Stefan took pains to point out that "this doesn't necessarily mean that the quote is made up. A possible source, apart from published works of V:'s, maybe his correspondence, as far as it got published in *other* peoples' collections of letters, or other peoples' diaries, or, if worse comes to worse, in other peoples' works//letters, who mention the quote as "pers. comm.". So it might be somewhere after all, but not necessarily in a text signed V." He is right, of course, but I cannot imagine how anyone, other than an experienced Voltaire scholar, could ever make an exhaustive search of this secondary documentation. Marc Picard sent me a copy of posting No. 8.1459 to the LINGUIST List (10 Oct 1997), by Rebecca Larche Moreton, which summarized the results of an earlier unsuccessful attempt to track down the origin of this oft-cited quote. Among those who responded to that inquiry, Peter Daniels reported that he had searched the CD of Voltaire's collected works, and found nothing resembling the phrase in question. Finally, I asked Konrad Koerner, who is not a subscriber to this list, but who is well known for his work on the history of linguistics, if he had any idea about the alleged Voltaire quote. He told me that some years ago, he went so far as to offer a prize to anyone who could track down the source of the alleged quote (he didn't say how much he offered). Despite the financial incentive, no one came forward. So, the conclusion I derive from the history of unsuccessful attempts to identify the provenance of the quote -- which appears to be nearly as long as the history of attributions of the remark to Voltaire -- is that what we have here is an instance of what I strongly suspect is a more widespread phenomenon. While the vast majority of citations that make the rounds of a community of scholars circulate according to accepted norms of acknowledgment and referencing, there is -- at least in the fields I have some acquaintance with -- a sort of parallel citation pool of anecdotes, pithy definitions and witty remarks which are distributed off-the-record, for the most part, but which surface in published works from time to time. The alleged Voltaire quote reminds me of the expression "it's turtles all the way down", which was repeated ad nauseam by anthropologists and linguists in the 1970s and 80s, and credited to god knows how many different sources. I recall having heard it attributed to William James, Bertrand Russell, Clifford Geertz, an Indian (from India), an "Iroquois sage", and probably others I have forgotten about. I think Haj Ross was the first linguist to popularize it, but PLEASE DON'T QUOTE ME! I do not want to be responsible for setting another rumor into motion. thanks to all who responded. Kevin -- ************************************************************************* Kevin Tuite 514-343-6514 (bureau) Département d'anthropologie 514-343-2494 (télécopieur) Université de Montréal C.P. 6128, succursale centre-ville Montréal, Québec H3C 3J7 tuitekj at anthro.umontreal.ca NOUVEAU! Site Web en construction: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/ ************************************************************************* From jer at cphling.dk Mon Aug 12 20:33:23 2002 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 16:33:23 EDT Subject: Website of IE at ICHL In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The website address I gave of the ICHL 2003 in Copenhagen was incomplete. The correct site is: www.hum.ku.dk/romansk (click on "Forskningsprojekter" opens link to ICHL). Sorry about any inconvenience. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 15 17:48:36 2002 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (Steve Long) Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 13:48:36 EDT Subject: "It is me who likes sprouts" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 8/10/02 9:35:54 AM, cecil at cecilward.com writes: << Maybe this was the driver towards the modern "It is me" vs a possible earlier "*I am it". Let's take the modern sentence pairs, It's me. The [one that likes/*like sprouts]. It's John. The [one who/that likes sprouts]. It's us. (=We are the ones.) The [ones who/that *likes/like sprouts]. We can elide them together and remove the duplication It is us who/that *likes/like sprouts -etc Notice that the agreement pattern now fits. >> -------Note that the examples above all imply some prior question about what or who likes sprouts. In English, the statement "John likes sprouts" conveys no less meaning than "It's John who likes sprouts" unless we assume a question has been asked about who likes sprouts. -------In some beat generation novel that I can no longer identify (it could have been Kerouac), a character responds to a knock on the door with "Who is it?" The answer she gets is "Us is it!" "Who?" "Us, you ninny! Us is it!" The joke I guess was in taking the syntax literally. ------I've seen this explained as the difference between "pronominal identity construction" and "expletive identity construction." That helps I think would rule out any 'possible earlier *I am it,' mentioned above. -------So, perhaps this construction has a functional explanation that needs at least two sentences to explain it. In English, it seems that "it is I..." always implies or is a response to a prior question. E.g., "It was I who parted the sea!" In real-life or dramatic dialogue, this statement of fact implies someone was wondering or asking, who parted the sea? ------The most accurate sense might be - Q: Who is [it] at the door? A: We are at the door. [We it is who are at the door.] Compare "Who was it at the door?" "It was the mailman." [The mailman was at the door.] ------The construction of the question above anticipates or rather invites the construction of the answer. And the construction of the answer appears to primarily function to avoid repeating the final phrase. In essence, the questioner has invited loss of the redundancy of adding "at the door" to the answer, offering "it is" as the substitute to the responder. ------Pronomial agreement may have been lost or purposely left ambiguous in the question first and then carried over into the construction of the answer. [What or who is it that walks this dreary night?] ------A character in a story who enters a scene announcing, "'Tis I, the Duke of Gloucester!" answers an implied question in the minds of other characters or the audience. [Who is he? Who is it who just came on stage now?] ------A "'Tis I!" all by itself with no prior question raised is a non sequitur. On this basis perhaps one might conjecture that this form of construction arose in specific contexts and was functionally created by developments in interrogatory construction. Steve Long From wymer at email.unc.edu Wed Aug 21 22:38:40 2002 From: wymer at email.unc.edu (Kathryn Wymer) Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 18:38:40 EDT Subject: CFP: Technology at Kzoo Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IN MEDIEVAL SCHOLARSHIP session: Sponsored by the Carolina Association for Medieval Studies International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 8-11, 2003 Paper submissions are invited on the topic of advanced technology in medieval scholarship. Proposals dealing with new uses of technology for academic research are eligible, as are proposals dealing with the development of such technologies. Possible subject matter might include, but is not limited to, the following: databases, imaging, statistical analysis, dictionaries/glossaries, online resources, library tools, etc. Send abstracts or queries to Kathryn Wymer by email at wymer at email.unc.edu, or by surface mail at the following address: Kathryn Wymer CAMS, c/o Department of English Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520 If you send an abstract by surface mail, include your email address so we can confirm receipt of your submission. Submission deadline is Sept. 15, 2002. This message is being sent to the listserv addresses below. If it does not reach one of these lists or you know others who may be interested, please forward as appropriate. ANSAX-L CHAUCER GERLINGL HEL-L HISTLING MEDTEXTL ONN From A.v.Kemenade at let.kun.nl Wed Aug 21 22:38:53 2002 From: A.v.Kemenade at let.kun.nl (Ans van Kemenade) Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 18:38:53 EDT Subject: please post Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Support is available to do PhD research for a four year period on the syntactic effects of language contact in Middle English. For a description of the project and further application details, please contact Ans van Kemenade, University of Nijmegen, dept. of English. E-mail A.v.Kemenade at let.kun.nl From traugott at csli.Stanford.EDU Sun Aug 4 11:59:51 2002 From: traugott at csli.Stanford.EDU (Elizabeth Traugott) Date: Sun, 4 Aug 2002 07:59:51 EDT Subject: quantitative studies of lexical change Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Some of my colleagues and I would be interested to know whether there are there quantitative studies of the frequency with which lexical polysemies or homophonies increase or decrease, or at least of the frequency with which generalization and specialization occur. Also, is there any quantitative work on the gross rate at which homophonies have been created or destroyed? Creation might be the effect of large-scale phonemic changes (vowel shift etc.), reductions or other changes in individual lexemes, innovation of new lexemes and borrowing. Destruction of homophony might result from evolution of distinct surface forms for previously homophonous lexemes, or from complete elimination of some uses. Information about any studies on the history of any language would be much appreciated. Please respond to me at traugott at stanford.edu. I will post the results of this survey. Elizabeth Traugott From tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA Mon Aug 5 14:41:25 2002 From: tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA (Kevin Tuite) Date: Mon, 5 Aug 2002 10:41:25 EDT Subject: Voltaire on etymology Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, Doubtless all of you have heard, and many have repeated, the remark attributed to Voltaire that etymology is "une science o? les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose". I have just borrowed a copy of R?diger Schmitt's 1977 collection "Etymologie", and in fact four of the dozen or so linguists represented in the volume -- from Ernst Tappolet in 1905 to Klaus Kohler in 1970 -- repeat the quote, and cite Voltaire as its author, without giving a precise source. Two of them however specify that Voltaire was moved to make this disparaging comment after examining M?nage's "Origines de la langue fran?oise" (1650), in which, for example, "rat" is derived from "mouse" (mus > muratus > ratus > rat), and "haricot" from "faba" (faba > fabaricus > fabaricotus > (h)aricotus). In his introduction to the collection, Schmitt himself refers to the Voltaire quote, but expresses doubt about its authenticity ("... wenn das Zitat authentisch ist - was mir nach wiederholten eigenen Recherchen immer zweifelhafter wird ..."). Do any of you know if the precise origin of this "definition" of etymology has been pinpointed? I tried searching on the web, but only found the same sort of imprecise attribution to Voltaire (and an interesting range of variants of the quote itself). thanks in advance Kevin -- ************************************************************************* Kevin Tuite 514-343-6514 (bureau) D?partement d'anthropologie 514-343-2494 (t?l?copieur) Universit? de Montr?al C.P. 6128, succursale centre-ville Montr?al, Qu?bec H3C 3J7 tuitekj at anthro.umontreal.ca NOUVEAU! Site Web en construction: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/ ************************************************************************* From cecil at cecilward.com Sat Aug 10 13:34:10 2002 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 09:34:10 EDT Subject: "It is me who likes sprouts" In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- [This is a modified version of a post I made on RRG-LIST.] On the list "RRG-LIST", Emma Pavey recently brought up some interesting facts about sentences like It is me who likes sprouts. It is him who likes sprouts. It is us who likes/*like sprouts. Emma raised the point that the agreement pattern between the verb likes and the (non-dummy) pronoun is very odd, showing number agreement but not person agreement. I was hoping that list members might be able to contribute some background concerning the historical origin of this kind of sentence, and make some comments on the basic identificatory sentence "it's me." in English. I am also hoping that list members would be kind enough to fill in some of the gaps or point out some of the glaring errors in this suggestion of my own. I assume that sometimes languages evolve anomalous syntactic patterns because they are trying to do two jobs in one hit, as if a single sentence starts trying to do the work of two. Maybe such patterns even evolve from the roll-up of sentence pairs accompanied by elision plus various other "adjustments". These sentences contain a "double-hit" semantic payload, in that they perform carry out a double function in a compact package, that is, they are identificatory "It is him." "He is the sprout-lover" - and they also convey the secondary proposition "he likes sprouts". I am wondering if it is reasonable to suppose that this compressed structure indeed evolved in some way from two short sentences when a syntactic technique became available that permitted their rolling up into one. Another fascinating thing about these sentences is that they looks superficially like they contain a straight relative clause, a modifier on the non-dummy pronoun. My take on this is that this is the modern situation is the result of historical reanalysis, rebracketing, if you like, following which the "relative clause as modifier" interpretation was bleached out. Now as far as the minimal identificatory sentence is concerned, When English is compared to German, say, what do we find? (Maybe list members who are speakers of Germanic languages might care to chip in.) I assume that for German we would have *Es ist ich/mich. *Es ist wir/uns. Rather Ich bin es. Wir sind es. And presumably, Ich bin es, der ... "It's me who.." Wir sind es, die ... The position of the comma, is interesting. Notice how the construction is ripe for rebracketing. In English, maybe the demands of movement into stressed position (rightward movement, the opposite of fronting) is at work in English, our Germano-Celtic language, as in Celtic. Maybe this was the driver towards the modern "It is me" vs a possible earlier "*I am it". Let's take the modern sentence pairs, It's me. The [one that likes/*like sprouts]. It's John. The [one who/that likes sprouts]. It's us. (=We are the ones.) The [ones who/that *likes/like sprouts]. We can elide them together and remove the duplication It is us who/that *likes/like sprouts -etc Notice that the agreement pattern now fits. In modern German, there is an identification between the definite article, pronoun ("Die ist nett") and relativizer. I assume this was true for early English (eg "that"), and presumably this played a contributory role as well. I assume then that we had the following situation when the dummy, always 3rd-person pronoun was on the right I am 3sg. + 3sg REL likes/*like sprouts We are 3pl. + 3pl REL likes/*like sprouts We then invert to move the first pronoun into a fully stressed position, according to the demands of its identificatory function. Meanwhile the verb agreement on "like" retains the same pattern. I keep returning to the question of various frameworks deal with the results of reanalysis. How do we get past an overly literally parse of the apparent syntactic patterns (literal reading: relative clause modifier) in order to get to with the correct semantic load we actually understand. Cecil Ward From jer at cphling.dk Sat Aug 10 22:36:14 2002 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2002 18:36:14 EDT Subject: IE at ICHL 2003 Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, for the 16th ICHL, staged by Prof. Lene Scho/sler of the Department of Romance at the University of Copenhagen, a special Indo-European section has now been planned: IE Section at ICHL 2003 in Copenhagen. The 16th International Conference of Historical Linguistics will take place at the University of Copenhagen in the week 11th through 15th of August, 2003. The program is subdivided into a number of sections, cf. the preliminary program at www.ku.dk/romansk (click on Forskningsprojekter produces link to the ICHL homepage). Recently, a special section devoted to "Internal Reconstruction and Comparative Method in Indo-European: Results and Problems" was added, to be organized by myself. Each section includes a plenary session; at that of the IE section a paper will be presented by Professor Jay Jasanoff (Harvard). Our section will be held on Friday, August 15, and an urgent "CALL FOR PAPERS" is hereby issued to colleagues all over the world. The title of the section is meant to capture investigations into the system of Proto-Indo-European (its phonology, morphology, syntax, lexematics - anything) on points where problems still remain even after comparative reconstruction has reached its goal by uncovering the protolanguage. Papers offering solutions to problems of irregular inflection or derivation (or the analog on other levels of linguistic analysis) on the basis of motivatable "deeper" reconstruction are specifically elicited. Welcome are also papers on internal reconstruction working from one of the intermediate protolanguages (Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, etc.), or centering on theoretical aspects of the reconstructional techniques applicable to Indo-European. A one-page summary should be submitted no later than March 1st, 2003. Write to: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen, Department of Linguistics (IAAS), University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark. For additional information the e-mail line to jer at cphling.dk is always open. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen From tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA Sun Aug 11 23:51:06 2002 From: tuitekj at ANTHRO.UMontreal.CA (Kevin Tuite) Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 19:51:06 EDT Subject: Voltaire on etymology Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear colleagues, A week ago I asked the members of the list if anyone could identify the source of the quote attributed to Voltaire that etymology is "une science o? les voyelles ne font rien et les consonnes fort peu de chose". So far, I must sadly report, no one has been able to do so. Bob Rankin, Stefan Georg and Alexis Manaster-Ramer reported having searched at one time or another for the quote in Voltaire's writings, without success. Stefan took pains to point out that "this doesn't necessarily mean that the quote is made up. A possible source, apart from published works of V:'s, maybe his correspondence, as far as it got published in *other* peoples' collections of letters, or other peoples' diaries, or, if worse comes to worse, in other peoples' works//letters, who mention the quote as "pers. comm.". So it might be somewhere after all, but not necessarily in a text signed V." He is right, of course, but I cannot imagine how anyone, other than an experienced Voltaire scholar, could ever make an exhaustive search of this secondary documentation. Marc Picard sent me a copy of posting No. 8.1459 to the LINGUIST List (10 Oct 1997), by Rebecca Larche Moreton, which summarized the results of an earlier unsuccessful attempt to track down the origin of this oft-cited quote. Among those who responded to that inquiry, Peter Daniels reported that he had searched the CD of Voltaire's collected works, and found nothing resembling the phrase in question. Finally, I asked Konrad Koerner, who is not a subscriber to this list, but who is well known for his work on the history of linguistics, if he had any idea about the alleged Voltaire quote. He told me that some years ago, he went so far as to offer a prize to anyone who could track down the source of the alleged quote (he didn't say how much he offered). Despite the financial incentive, no one came forward. So, the conclusion I derive from the history of unsuccessful attempts to identify the provenance of the quote -- which appears to be nearly as long as the history of attributions of the remark to Voltaire -- is that what we have here is an instance of what I strongly suspect is a more widespread phenomenon. While the vast majority of citations that make the rounds of a community of scholars circulate according to accepted norms of acknowledgment and referencing, there is -- at least in the fields I have some acquaintance with -- a sort of parallel citation pool of anecdotes, pithy definitions and witty remarks which are distributed off-the-record, for the most part, but which surface in published works from time to time. The alleged Voltaire quote reminds me of the expression "it's turtles all the way down", which was repeated ad nauseam by anthropologists and linguists in the 1970s and 80s, and credited to god knows how many different sources. I recall having heard it attributed to William James, Bertrand Russell, Clifford Geertz, an Indian (from India), an "Iroquois sage", and probably others I have forgotten about. I think Haj Ross was the first linguist to popularize it, but PLEASE DON'T QUOTE ME! I do not want to be responsible for setting another rumor into motion. thanks to all who responded. Kevin -- ************************************************************************* Kevin Tuite 514-343-6514 (bureau) D?partement d'anthropologie 514-343-2494 (t?l?copieur) Universit? de Montr?al C.P. 6128, succursale centre-ville Montr?al, Qu?bec H3C 3J7 tuitekj at anthro.umontreal.ca NOUVEAU! Site Web en construction: http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/tuitekj/ ************************************************************************* From jer at cphling.dk Mon Aug 12 20:33:23 2002 From: jer at cphling.dk (Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen) Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 16:33:23 EDT Subject: Website of IE at ICHL In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The website address I gave of the ICHL 2003 in Copenhagen was incomplete. The correct site is: www.hum.ku.dk/romansk (click on "Forskningsprojekter" opens link to ICHL). Sorry about any inconvenience. Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen From X99Lynx at aol.com Thu Aug 15 17:48:36 2002 From: X99Lynx at aol.com (Steve Long) Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2002 13:48:36 EDT Subject: "It is me who likes sprouts" Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 8/10/02 9:35:54 AM, cecil at cecilward.com writes: << Maybe this was the driver towards the modern "It is me" vs a possible earlier "*I am it". Let's take the modern sentence pairs, It's me. The [one that likes/*like sprouts]. It's John. The [one who/that likes sprouts]. It's us. (=We are the ones.) The [ones who/that *likes/like sprouts]. We can elide them together and remove the duplication It is us who/that *likes/like sprouts -etc Notice that the agreement pattern now fits. >> -------Note that the examples above all imply some prior question about what or who likes sprouts. In English, the statement "John likes sprouts" conveys no less meaning than "It's John who likes sprouts" unless we assume a question has been asked about who likes sprouts. -------In some beat generation novel that I can no longer identify (it could have been Kerouac), a character responds to a knock on the door with "Who is it?" The answer she gets is "Us is it!" "Who?" "Us, you ninny! Us is it!" The joke I guess was in taking the syntax literally. ------I've seen this explained as the difference between "pronominal identity construction" and "expletive identity construction." That helps I think would rule out any 'possible earlier *I am it,' mentioned above. -------So, perhaps this construction has a functional explanation that needs at least two sentences to explain it. In English, it seems that "it is I..." always implies or is a response to a prior question. E.g., "It was I who parted the sea!" In real-life or dramatic dialogue, this statement of fact implies someone was wondering or asking, who parted the sea? ------The most accurate sense might be - Q: Who is [it] at the door? A: We are at the door. [We it is who are at the door.] Compare "Who was it at the door?" "It was the mailman." [The mailman was at the door.] ------The construction of the question above anticipates or rather invites the construction of the answer. And the construction of the answer appears to primarily function to avoid repeating the final phrase. In essence, the questioner has invited loss of the redundancy of adding "at the door" to the answer, offering "it is" as the substitute to the responder. ------Pronomial agreement may have been lost or purposely left ambiguous in the question first and then carried over into the construction of the answer. [What or who is it that walks this dreary night?] ------A character in a story who enters a scene announcing, "'Tis I, the Duke of Gloucester!" answers an implied question in the minds of other characters or the audience. [Who is he? Who is it who just came on stage now?] ------A "'Tis I!" all by itself with no prior question raised is a non sequitur. On this basis perhaps one might conjecture that this form of construction arose in specific contexts and was functionally created by developments in interrogatory construction. Steve Long From wymer at email.unc.edu Wed Aug 21 22:38:40 2002 From: wymer at email.unc.edu (Kathryn Wymer) Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 18:38:40 EDT Subject: CFP: Technology at Kzoo Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IN MEDIEVAL SCHOLARSHIP session: Sponsored by the Carolina Association for Medieval Studies International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, May 8-11, 2003 Paper submissions are invited on the topic of advanced technology in medieval scholarship. Proposals dealing with new uses of technology for academic research are eligible, as are proposals dealing with the development of such technologies. Possible subject matter might include, but is not limited to, the following: databases, imaging, statistical analysis, dictionaries/glossaries, online resources, library tools, etc. Send abstracts or queries to Kathryn Wymer by email at wymer at email.unc.edu, or by surface mail at the following address: Kathryn Wymer CAMS, c/o Department of English Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520 If you send an abstract by surface mail, include your email address so we can confirm receipt of your submission. Submission deadline is Sept. 15, 2002. This message is being sent to the listserv addresses below. If it does not reach one of these lists or you know others who may be interested, please forward as appropriate. ANSAX-L CHAUCER GERLINGL HEL-L HISTLING MEDTEXTL ONN From A.v.Kemenade at let.kun.nl Wed Aug 21 22:38:53 2002 From: A.v.Kemenade at let.kun.nl (Ans van Kemenade) Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 18:38:53 EDT Subject: please post Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Support is available to do PhD research for a four year period on the syntactic effects of language contact in Middle English. For a description of the project and further application details, please contact Ans van Kemenade, University of Nijmegen, dept. of English. E-mail A.v.Kemenade at let.kun.nl