From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Thu May 1 13:45:16 2003 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (Jess Tauber) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:45:16 EDT Subject: linkage between pattern of expressive system organization and lexical sound change? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Hi folks. Got up this morning with one of those "aha" experiences, and wanted to run it by the list to see if anyone might have some constructive critical remarks in response. As many of you know, I am obsessed with matters sound symbolic (and actually DO do normal linguistic stuff, but am just much less vocal about it). In the past 20 years I've cumulated data on the phonosemantics of more than 300 languages, from many dozens of families from around the world, looking for patterns within each language as well as generalizations crosslinguistically. So far major generalizations include: 1)A gross inverse correlation between degree of morphological synthesis and raw numbers of free ideophone or expressive forms in any particular language. Polysynthetic languages have in general the fewest, analytic languages the most (there is also a related inverse correlation between degree of fusion and numbers of forms as well- this difference shows up in many isolating languages, where interestingly numbers of free expressive roots seems to be inversely correlated with numbers of elaborate expressive forms). 2) Geometrical form/meaning mapping- the phonological system used in expressives (often different from normal lexical phonology) provides the basis for diagrammatical iconic mapping between form and meaning. Grave opposes acute, compact opposes diffuse, and so on. Even so, the mapping is NOT an absolute one crosslinguistically, but seems to largely depend on the morphosyntactic state of the language. In CVC type expressive roots (i.e those NOT compounds of CV+CV) C1 usually has some opposition in meaning (either in terms of interpretation of spatial position in an object, or temporal increase or decrease of development of some physicomechanical state) to C2. This "mirror principle" is the same relatively in all languages with such roots, but the orientation in absolute terms in inverted between C1 and C2 in left- versus right- headed languages (and this seems to be connected to the tendencies of the one to prefer alliteration versus rhyming preferences of the latter). Thus in Japanese many C2=/b/or/p/ is found in expressives descriptive of liquid impact, but in many left-headed languages C1 does this job instead. And so on through the system. My issue here today has to do with possible linkage between the systemic orientation of the expressive system of a language and sound change in the normal lexical phonology. As many of you are aware, expressives and ideophones are often relatively immune to historical sound shifts (though this varies depending on how lexicalized expressives themselves are- expressive lexicalization is one of the major concomitants of 1) above, though with apparent "Darwinian" selection and attrition as well. In general it seems that surviving free forms have broader semantic scope while the more semantically specialized forms are the ones which lexicalize, with apparent implicational hierarchical pecking orders along several lines, including semantic domain). It is not completely controversial that sound shift is often chained. If the geometrical principle from 2)above is applied for instance in Salishan languages to lexicon as well, then the vast majority of attested shifts in consonantal articulatory position follow the edge, in a square wave (or baseball seam) pattern, of a cubic representation mappable from the 8 articulatory types available generally in those languages (labial, alveolar, lateral, alveopalatal, velar, labiovelar, uvular, labiouvular). >>From what I've seen in my language sample, such articulatory shifts seldom are more than two vertices long, which would tend to invert the system to some extent, depending on how complete such chaining is. My question is whether there might be any correlation between such inversion in the lexical phonology, on the one hand, and the overall orientation of the expressive system on the other, as outlined in 2) above. If there is, then might we be able to hypothesize that the sound shifts are perhaps a kind of game of "catch up"? Expressives, when not lexicalized, are themselves formed as needed templatically, influenced by the prevailing morphosyntactic winds, as it were. Their orientation there can change rather quickly. On the other hand, lexicalization would entrap such forms and largely prevent them from reacting so quickly to morphosyntactic change, fixing them in whatever state they were first formed. Lexical sound changes might allow the system to reequilibrate, assuming there is enough time to do it, and also allowing for the system to delete forms whose mutation in this regard would not fit the resulting smooth pattern. Obviously any such systemic reequilibration, if real, would follow a variety of different dimensions available for change, not just articulatory position. A big matrix? At this stage, this idea is still not completely thought out, and all constructive critical comments are welcome. Thanks. Best regards, Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From andersen at ucla.edu Fri May 2 11:33:33 2003 From: andersen at ucla.edu (Henning Andersen) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 07:33:33 EDT Subject: farmers and lg dispersal Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear All, In case you don't have access to the *Science* website, you can read a summary of Diamond & Bellwood's findings/theses on the UCLA home page: www.ucla.com. It' under "In the News". Diamond is quoted as saying "I wake up in the morning and think farmers spread Indo-European languages, and by 6 p.m. I've changed my mind". The fact that the authors have more trouble with Indo-European than with any of the other language families reminds one of "Ebeling's paradox" -- the more information one has about a language the harder it is to assign it a unique description -- mutatis mutandis. H -- ||||| Henning Andersen ||||| Slavic Languages and Literatures ||||| University of California, Los Angeles ||||| P.O.Box 951502 ||||| Los Angeles, CA 90095-1502 ||||| Phone +1-310-837-6743 * Fax +1-310-206-5263 From panis at PACBELL.NET Fri May 2 15:34:11 2003 From: panis at PACBELL.NET (John McChesney-Young) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 11:34:11 EDT Subject: Fwd: farmers and lg dispersal Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Henning Andersen thoughtfully wrote: >In case you don't have access to the *Science* website, you can read >a summary of Diamond & Bellwood's findings/theses on the UCLA home >page: www.ucla.com. It' under "In the News". http://www.ucla.edu/, rather than .com. The URL for the particular page for the news article is: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?id=4137 John -- ******* *** John McChesney-Young ** panis at pacbell.net ** Berkeley, California, U.S.A. *** From eboudovs at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Tue May 6 11:10:44 2003 From: eboudovs at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (Elena Boudovskaia) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 07:10:44 EDT Subject: linguistic geography - program for maps? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am trying to locate some software that lets one download (or draw, or scan) maps of certain areas and then put on them some dialectological data. Does anyone know such software? Someone recommended to me ArcView 3.x, but it costs $1,195.00 (ArcView 8.3 - even $1,500.00). Does anyone have any experience with cheaper products like XMap, or anything else? Thanks a lot in advance, Elena From rankin at ku.edu Tue May 6 18:40:59 2003 From: rankin at ku.edu (rankin) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:40:59 EDT Subject: Maps. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I do not personally have a source of outline maps for dialectological use, but a good place to start a search for maps of all kinds (other than Google, which is too broad) is the University of Texas Library map site. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_sites/map_sites.html It is possible that one of the links they list may have what is needed. Good luck. Bob Rankin Department of Linguistics University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66044 USA From X99Lynx at AOL.COM Wed May 7 13:13:04 2003 From: X99Lynx at AOL.COM (X99Lynx at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 09:13:04 EDT Subject: Farmers and Language Spread - A Critique Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 4/30/03 10:26:38 AM, l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ writes: <> Having read the pdf version of Prof Campbell's response, I think some observations may be helpful. In order for the dialogue to be productive -- and to avoid knee-jerk reactions to any hypothesis -- it is important to recognize where terminology may be causing the problem. 1. There really is no justification for separating "agriculture" from the "social" factors that might cause the spread of languages. Prof Campbell writes "The farming/language dispersal model... leave[s] social factors mostly out of the picture,... Nevertheless, many social factors are highly relevant to questions of language spread...." Whatever the problem with exposition, it is absolutely clear the original spread of "agriculture" (food production versus food gathering) changed human societies in quite dramatic ways -- probably as pivotal as any other event in the 200,000(?) year history of modern humans. The archaeological record shows that in most cases the first diffusion of food production completely rearranged social organization, social processes and, it strongly appears, social identities. In fact, the first adoption of many forms of agriculture on any kind of significant scale often required deep changes in the structure of a society. And it is questionable whether such things as cities and social strata could even exist in true pre-agricultural societies. In many cases, before food production -- or, just as importantly, contact with food producing cultures -- hunter/gatherers lived very different lives under very different "social" factors than afterward. It is not good history to separate the effects of the coming of "agriculture" from the broad social impact of that coming. If Bellwood, et al, have not addressed that unity of concept, it is clear in any case. The development of agriculture -- or more properly food production -- involved far more than raising cattle versus hunting wild cattle. (For a better picture of the complexities of prehistoric "first contact" between farming and mesolithic foraging societies, see Marek Zvelibil, Transition to agriculture in eastern Europe, in EUROPE'S FIRST FARMERS, ed. by T. Douglas Price, 64-71, Cambridge 2000.) So when we speak of the first farmers and the spread of languages, we are not merely speaking of a mere change in dinner menu. The concept of "agriculture" (versus food-gathering) involves far more. And that includes sometimes extreme social, economic and even political change. Prof Campbell's distinction between "social factors" and agriculture as a factor in the spread of languages is therefore inaccurate in a fundamental way and does not advance the dialogue. 2. Prof Campbell also writes, "Agricultural dispersal is only one factor in the bigger picture of what drives language diversification and spread..." There really is no argument here. Today, "agricultural dispersal" probably plays an insignificant role in language spread. The real issue revolves around when agriculture first spread -- a singular event in human history. It is a fundamental observation of economics that once food production enters the picture, the surplus enriches groups who are not directly agriculturalists. Some groups may never have to develop a farmer's lifestyle in order to benefit from the coming of agriculture. For example, a mountain tribe of gold miners might benefit greatly by exchanging their metal for food grown on the plain. Whether or not they would come to speak the same language as the farmers of the plain, it was agriculture that produced the surplus, created the trade and even the possibility of language change. In effect, agriculture could also be credited with independently spreading the gold miners' language. (PS - I believe there is NO indication that gold had any value in purely mesolithic Eurasia. It seems "agriculture" created the surplus that created the value of gold.) Prof Campbell's mentions that "Xinkans maintained their distinct identity and language in face of the powerful Mayan agriculturalists, first as non-cultivators, later as cultivators,..." But this tells us nothing unless we know quite precisely how economic power was distributed and whether or not the Xinhans were even permitted to speak Mayan (or vice versa). Exclusionary practices are a powerful tool for obtaining economic power. Perhaps the Mayan denied the Xinkans their agricultural know-how and likewise the language that carried that know-how. Or perhaps the Xinkans held the upper hand by controlling raw materials and used their language to control the trade with Mayan agriculturalists. In either case, neither language may have spread without the economic surpluses provided by agriculture. The point here is that when agriculture first started spreading in human history, the effects would have been felt far beyond the agriculturalists themselves. There are very few known major human language groups that might be called truly "non-agricultural" in the sense that they were untouched by the "neolithic" revolution. For the Uralic family to qualify, e.g., as a "non-agricultural" language spread, we need to disregard the intense contact this group seems to show with agriculture and its agricultural neighbors, right down to pit comb ceramics. 3. Finally, Prof Campbell also writes: "It is doubtful that the non-linguistic, non-social generalizations discussed in this paper take us more than a short distance towards answering the questions raised here." Actually, it is doubtful that simple linguistic generalizations will help us out much here either. If Gaulish businessmen started speaking Latin bilingually in order to have a salesman's advantage in both the Gaulish and Latin marketplaces, and this would lead to language conversion after some generations in their progeny, is that a linguistic cause? A social cause? Or an economic one? Or do we forget that agriculture underpinned the very existence of Gaul, Rome and their marketplaces? The answer is linguistic in one clear sense that is hardly mentioned in historical linguistics -- the value of communication. The base, bottom reason that two people speak the same language. If we posit that a language spreads because people have a strong motive to exchange information, we can understand why the radical economic and social change brought by agriculture often (but not always) brought a new language with it. There is often no need for "language dominance" (one of the worse concepts in all of linguistics) to account for the spread of a language. The spread of agriculture and language are often treated as co-incidental. But isn't it possible that it WAS language itself that carried the extreme life-style altering advent of agriculture. Just as -- on a smaller scale -- computer science travels with English around the world, might not have various languages helped carry food production technology and its radical new life-style around the world? Compare most true prehistoric foraging cultures to the food producing cultures that followed and you will see the need to convey a great deal of additional information between the two. The hypothesis here is that the main mover of language spread (beyond raw population growth) is the exchange of complex information. Whether that information has economic, social, political or technical advantage, language will spread -- even against the natural inertia that any speaker logically has against changing his or her native language. In the case of the first spread of agriculture, there was a great deal of information to exchange. And a common language would be the obvious solution. Steve Long From l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Tue May 13 14:21:29 2003 From: l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Lyle Campbell) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:21:29 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: Dear All, A second edition is being done of my textbook, 1998 Historical Linguistics: an Introduction . Edinburgh University Press (and 1999 MIT Press) (Lyle Campbell), and I am writing to ask for advice. Two questions have come up about which I would especially like to hear opinions. One is the recommendation that the spelling be changed from the British spelling of the first edition (with -ise, -isation, -our [colour], centre, tyre, programme, etc.) to follow American spelling conventions (with -ize, -isation, -or, center, tire, program, etc.) for the second. What do you think? What is your advice, your opinion about this? (Edinburgh University Press apparently do not mind one way or the other now, though for the first edition they did want British orthographic conventions to be followed. Some suggest it would be more accessible (= sell better?) with American spelling. My guess is that for several other countries, which orthographic conventions are followed may matter little, but I wonder to what extent one or the other may be important for North America or for the UK? In particular, I wonder whether it makes a significant difference in the US? (The MIT edition has UK conventions, which were commented on by some reviewers).) The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you think? What is your opinion here? In particular, it would be helpful to know whether IPA or American usage has any advantage or disadvantage for students in North America. Possibly the differences are not so great (or at least frequent) except for some vowel symbols and for certain fricatives and affricates. A problem, though, comes from the different conventions typically used in the traditions for different language areas. For example, to use [y] for IPA [j] in Germanic examples just looks odd/wrong to some scholars. However, to use [j] for American [y] just seems wrong to others when used to represent various American Indian languages, and various Romance languages, and others, where the scholarly tradition is with "y" not "j" -- (some readers probably noticed some inconsistency in this regard in this in the first edition, alas -- sorry). What advice would you offer? There is a possible compromise, with, say IPA representations given first and then with the forms repeated in American phonetics in parentheses adjacent to the IPA forms. (This might be OK for some forms, but it could get cumbersome when very many examples requiring phonetic notation are given in any one place.) My question is whether there is enough advantage to make giving both IPA and American usage worthwhile? Finally, I would be very happy to receive any comments, advice, recommendations, or corrections which would be useful for the second edition. (As a preview to the changes anticipated for the 2nd edition, I hope to correct the typos; I expect to cull out some of the less accessible examples and substitute hopefully better ones; I expect to make fairly substantial changes in the exercises of several chapters, taking out some that don't seem to work so well and also adding several new ones to give a better range from easy to intermediate to more challenging cases. Also, I hope to update and improve the discussion of a few topics.) Any feedback will be gratefully received. Many thanks in advance, Lyle -- Professor Lyle Campbell, Dept. of Linguistics University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand Fax: 64-3-364-2969 Phone: 64-3-364-2242 (office), 64-3-364-2089 (Linguistics dept) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From roger.wright at liverpool.ac.uk Wed May 14 12:43:05 2003 From: roger.wright at liverpool.ac.uk (roger wright) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 08:43:05 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It is essential to use IPA. That's what it's for. RW --On 13 May 2003 10:21 -0400 Lyle Campbell wrote: > > Dear All, > > A second edition is being done of my textbook, 1998 Historical > Linguistics: an Introduction . Edinburgh University Press (and 1999 > MIT Press) (Lyle Campbell), and I am writing to ask for advice. Two > questions have come up about which I would especially like to hear > opinions. > > One is the recommendation that the spelling be changed from the British > spelling of the first edition (with -ise, -isation, -our [colour], > centre, tyre, programme, etc.) to follow American spelling conventions > (with -ize, -isation, -or, center, tire, program, etc.) for the second. > What do you think? What is your advice, your opinion about this? > (Edinburgh University Press apparently do not mind one way or the other > now, though for the first edition they did want British orthographic > conventions to be followed. Some suggest it would be more accessible (= > sell better?) with American spelling. My guess is that for several other > countries, which orthographic conventions are followed may matter little, > but I wonder to what extent one or the other may be important for North > America or for the UK? In particular, I wonder whether it makes a > significant difference in the US? (The MIT edition has UK conventions, > which were commented on by some reviewers).) > > > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the book > perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent examples > in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you think? > What is your opinion here? In particular, it would be helpful to know > whether IPA or American usage has any advantage or disadvantage for > students in North America. Possibly the differences are not so great (or > at least frequent) except for some vowel symbols and for certain > fricatives and affricates. A problem, though, comes from the different > conventions typically used in the traditions for different language > areas. For example, to use [y] for IPA [j] in Germanic examples just > looks odd/wrong to some scholars. However, to use [j] for American [y] > just seems wrong to others when used to represent various American Indian > languages, and various Romance languages, and others, where the scholarly > tradition is with "y" not "j" -- (some readers probably noticed some > inconsistency in this regard in this in the first edition, alas -- > sorry). What advice would you offer? There is a possible > compromise, with, say IPA representations given first and then with the > forms repeated in American phonetics in parentheses adjacent to the IPA > forms. (This might be OK for some forms, but it could get cumbersome > when very many examples requiring phonetic notation are given in any one > place.) My question is whether there is enough advantage to make giving > both IPA and American usage worthwhile? > > > Finally, I would be very happy to receive any comments, advice, > recommendations, or corrections which would be useful for the second > edition. (As a preview to the changes anticipated for the 2nd edition, I > hope to correct the typos; I expect to cull out some of the less > accessible examples and substitute hopefully better ones; I expect to > make fairly substantial changes in the exercises of several chapters, > taking out some that don't seem to work so well and also adding several > new ones to give a better range from easy to intermediate to more > challenging cases. Also, I hope to update and improve the discussion of > a few topics.) Any feedback will be gratefully received. > > Many thanks in advance, > Lyle > > > > > > > > > -- > Professor Lyle Campbell, > Dept. of Linguistics > University of Canterbury > Christchurch, New Zealand > Fax: 64-3-364-2969 > Phone: 64-3-364-2242 (office), 64-3-364-2089 (Linguistics dept) From ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP Wed May 14 12:47:53 2003 From: ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 08:47:53 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent > examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you > think? What is your opinion here? To me this is like the author of a physics textbook asking if he should change his metric measurements to feet, inches, ounces, quarts, etc. for the American edition. If mount A is 974 meters and mount B is 2984 feet, can you tell which is higher? If location A is 34 celsius and location B is 93 fahrenheit, which is hotter? Consistent representation is a foundational principle of scientific methodology, and the IPA is one of the most basic and important tools we have. People who don't know how to use it should not be doing linguistics on any level. If professors are offering historical linguistics courses to students without linguistic background, the IPA should be taught in the first week. There is no alternative to it-- especially when we are talking about comparing languages. There are of course various "traditions" of research in particular languages or language groups with their idiosyncracies and peculiarities. But none, as far as I know, has been systematically codified, much less adapted to apply to all languages across the board. The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography is the evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead languages (like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) where there is controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a degree of certainty which is not possible. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it, just pure academic inertia. Looking forward to the new edition. Best Wishes ____________________________________ Robert R. Ratcliffe Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp $B%i%H%/%j%U!%%m%P!<%H=u65pJs9V:B!&%"%i%S%"8l at l96!" (J $BEl5~309q8lBg3X (J $B") (J183-8534 $BEl5~ (J $BI\Cf;TD+F|D. (J3-11-1 From tcravens at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Thu May 15 14:11:36 2003 From: tcravens at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (THOMAS D CRAVENS) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:11:36 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Total agreement here -- IPA is absolutely essential. (no opinion on Brit or American spelling conventions.) Tom Cravens ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 7:47 am Subject: Re: seeking advice > ----------------------------Original message----------------------- > ----- > > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, > and is > > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the > > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to > represent> examples in the first edition to American phonetic > usage. What do you > > think? What is your opinion here? > > To me this is like the author of a physics textbook asking if he > shouldchange his metric measurements to feet, inches, ounces, > quarts, etc. for > the American edition. If mount A is 974 meters and mount B is 2984 > feet,can you tell which is higher? If location A is 34 celsius and > location B > is 93 fahrenheit, which is hotter? Consistent representation is a > foundational principle of scientific methodology, and the IPA is > one of > the most basic and important tools we have. People who don't know > how to > use it should not be doing linguistics on any level. If professors are > offering historical linguistics courses to students without linguistic > background, the IPA should be taught in the first week. There is no > alternative to it-- especially when we are talking about comparing > languages. There are of course various "traditions" of research in > particular languages or language groups with their idiosyncracies and > peculiarities. But none, as far as I know, has been systematically > codified, much less adapted to apply to all languages across the > board.The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography > is the > evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead > languages(like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) > where there is > controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a > degree of certainty which is not possible. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit > of an > IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument > against it, > just pure academic inertia. > > Looking forward to the new edition. > > Best Wishes > > ____________________________________ > Robert R. Ratcliffe > Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics > Tokyo University of Foreign Studies > Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan > ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp > > $B%i%H%/%j%U!%%m%P!<%H=u65 $B8 at 8l>pJs9V:B!&%"%i%S%"8l at l96!" (J $BEl5~309q8lBg3X (J > $B") (J183-8534 $BEl5~ (J $BI\Cf;TD+F|D. (J3-11-1 > From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu May 15 14:13:18 2003 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:13:18 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Lyle, I'm afraid my reply is likely to amount to more of a rant than a piece of sober advice. Please feel free to ignore my noises. But I have strong feelings about these matters. First, there is no earthly reason to switch to US spelling. Most of the English-speaking countries use British spelling, and all of them are used to seeing American spelling in all kinds of publications. There is no reason for Americans or anyone else to object to the sight of British spellings. American objections to British spellings are ignorant and parochial, and those who raise such objections should be ashamed of themselves. This is true in any discipline, but it's doubly true in ours. How can somebody who calls himself a linguist get the heebie-jeebies on seeing a slightly different variety of English? Do such people also panic on seeing Shakespeare or Chaucer in the original? The choice of spelling will make no difference in Britain. If it's really the case that some American instructors won't use a book with British spelling, then I guess you have to decide whether selling a few more copies is worth kowtowing to idiots. On the issue of phonetic symbols, stick to the IPA. American phonetic transcription was invented for fieldworkers using manual typewriters. These days, when all of us can use laptops with the SIL IPA font attached, there is no longer any point to American transcription. This creaky old system is an anachronism; it should be given its gold watch and a decent retirement. Attempts at perpetuating this antique are strictly retrograde. Apart from being a parochial curiosity, American transcription has one obvious and very serious drawback. It has no agreed form, and transcription practice varies from user to user, perhaps most obviously with affricates and fricatives, but not only there. There is nothing comparable to the IPA chart to which students can turn to learn the system. As for the differing traditions in different language areas, there is nothing to be done about this matter in a general textbook except to ignore it. Local traditions vary almost without limit. For example, specialists in Tibeto-Burman languages, I recall learning in my student days, use orthographic to represent schwa. All this colourful variation must be excised in a general textbook, which needs to stick to a single consistent transcription throughout. And I don't think giving transcriptions in two systems is a really good idea. This will surely be more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, can there really be an instructor out there who believes that students are going to make careers in linguistics without learning the IPA? Cantankerous of Brighton (but American) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From picard at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA Thu May 15 14:13:46 2003 From: picard at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA (Marc Picard) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:13:46 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is > > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the > > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent > > examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you > > think? What is your opinion here? > > Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an > IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it, > just pure academic inertia. > How about sheer volume of usage? Here's a quote from Hitch's review of The World's Writing Systems (Daniels & Bright, eds., OUP. 1996) in IJAL 64: "The International Phonetic Alphabet . . . is claimed to be 'the main phonetic alphabet in use today throughout the world' (p. 821). There certainly are no formalized, or officialized, alphabets in greater use, but one wonders if the traditional Americanist symbols . . . are not more used among linguists who are describing languages" (1998: 289). Note that I have no strong feelings one way or another. I only want to suggest that arguments in favor of the IPA are not that cut and dried. Marc Picard -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From olga.fischer at HUM.UVA.NL Thu May 15 14:28:18 2003 From: olga.fischer at HUM.UVA.NL (Olga Fischer) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:28:18 EDT Subject: job vacancies at the university of Ansterdam/English department Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: vacature engels tekst.doc Type: application/msword Size: 35840 bytes Desc: not available URL: From eichorn at CLUB.LEMONDE.FR Fri May 16 01:23:23 2003 From: eichorn at CLUB.LEMONDE.FR (eichorn at CLUB.LEMONDE.FR) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:23:23 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- As another American transplanted to the UK, I second Larry's emotion. Did you know they actually replaced the middle segment of many "Teletubbies" episodes with Americanised bits? Apparently the American distributor was afraid the voices of 3-year old Brits would frighten, corrupt, or confuse American toddlers. And why are British programs relegated to the highbrow ghetto of PBS, and Canadian/Irish/Australian/NZ programmes not seen at all? No wonder Americans think they've got the best country on earth----they're blissfully unaware of the rest of the world. No wonder American teenagers have no clue how to conjugate the pluperfect mediopassive subjunctive. ------------------------------------------------------------- club.lemonde.fr, votre bureau virtuel sur Internet : Mail... Web : www.lemonde.fr From geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU Fri May 16 01:26:15 2003 From: geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU (Geoff Nathan) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:26:15 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <36859971.3261913211@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mewinters at wayne.edu Fri May 16 01:26:57 2003 From: mewinters at wayne.edu (Margaret Winters) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:26:57 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: As a user of the Trask historical book for several years in an American setting, I can attest to no problems at all with British spelling and no complaints from students either. I tend to agree that students should be exposed to variation. As for the choice of IPA or American transcription, I'd vote for the IPA as a matter of personal prejudice. When I used to teach French phonetics, I'd make my students learn those conventions, but, again, they need to learn the IPA and know that there is some language(-family) variation in transcription depending on convention. I have stronger feelings about two transcriptions in the single volume - don't do it! It will look clunky, potentially cause confusion, and add very little if anything. With emphasis, Margaret Margaret E. Winters Associate Provost for Academic Personnel 656 Kirby #4092 Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202 phone: 313 577-2256 fax: 313 577-5666 e-mail: mewinters at wayne.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From X99Lynx at AOL.COM Fri May 16 01:29:29 2003 From: X99Lynx at AOL.COM (X99Lynx at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:29:29 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 5/14/03 8:52:04 AM, ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP writes: << The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography is the evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead languages (like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) where there is controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a degree of certainty which is not possible. >> Textbooks would not seem to fall under either exemption. This suggests a third alternative that would solve both problems. Print the book in IPA. "Nobody uses English orthography for anything but English, and I don't think that's enough to justify keeping it in English..." - David H. Kelley :) S. Long From bartlett at SMART.NET Fri May 16 01:29:04 2003 From: bartlett at SMART.NET (Paul O. BARTLETT) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:29:04 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <36859971.3261913211@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 15 May 2003, Larry Trask wrote: > Lyle, I'm afraid my reply is likely to amount to more of a rant than a > piece of sober advice. Please feel free to ignore my noises. But I have > strong feelings about these matters. As a non-specialist American, I totally concur with Larry Trask on this matter. Switching to American rather than British spelling because some self-centered Yankees might be momentarily uncomfortable is simply absurd. (As I non-specialist I can't comment about different phonetic transcriptions, but I would presume that IPA is best.) -- Paul Bartlett bartlett at smart.net PGP key info in message headers From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Fri May 16 01:27:33 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:27:33 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, I think we have to recognise that having a universal set of phonetic symbols is a very desirable thing, and the IPA was created for that purpose. Anyone who has had to contend with numerous idiosyncratic transcription systems (often unexplained or part of a vanished tradition) when looking for data realises what a boon the IPA is. Even if it is not yet universal, we should take steps to ensure that it does become so. Imagine mathematics or music with traditional culture-specific notational systems. A nightmare!!! On the subject of British vs American spelling, I would have to side with Larry Trask in principle, but we Brits are used to spellings like 'labor' and 'center', and they don't give much cause for concern. I find 'soccer' for 'football' much more distressing... Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Fri May 16 01:28:47 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (rankin) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:28:47 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: seeking adviceAll, Having read the posts and replied once off the top of my head, I have given the matter of transcription a little more thought. In the interest of promulgating student understanding and not making this a referendum on Britain vs. America's "Place In The World", I would suggest the following. Most students taking a course in comparative linguistics will have had an introductory course in linguistics and, one hopes, a course in phonology -- almost certainly at least the former. Is there any degree of uniformity in the transcription systems in the introductory textbooks that are most commonly being used today? How about phonology textbooks? Use by major journals in the field might be a secondary consideration. If it turns out that there is a reasonable degree of uniformity in the books students will have already used, then by all means continue it. If there isn't any such uniformity, then we're no worse off than we were before. The other factor I would personally like to see considered is the extent to which a transcription system provides a "feature-like" way of handling segmental transcription. Examples and problems need to be given in alphabetic notation, but in the study of language change and reconstruction we are often dealing with changes affecting natural classes. Some symbol usage facilitates seeing the relationship among segments that share places or manners of articulation. Other symbol sets do not. This was one of the things in the back of my mind when I mentioned that I liked the letters with haceks to indicate strident palato-alveolars. The hacek signals something consistently to the student. I like the various diacritics used by the IPA for specialized articulations (palatalization, retroflexion, laryngealization, etc.) and other systems have similar diacritics. If only King Seijong had designed the IPA. . . . I have not done the math to see which of the various competing systems or textbooks comes out on top, given the abovementioned criteria, but I hope Lyle will. I certainly agree that it would be nice to have a standard, and maybe IPA approaches that, but I also think Marc Picard makes a good point regarding relative use and productivity. I'm just sort of glad Inow that I never wrote that historical linguistics textbook I was thinking about producing a decade or so ago. Bob Rankin Department of Linguistics University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66044 USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Fri May 16 12:53:05 2003 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:53:05 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I think IPA should be used (as it was intended) for phonetic transcription and things that are to be sounded out, while something more readable should be used for phonemic transcriptions and the like that are intended to be read. Most of our own professional publication about reconstruction, sound changes, etc. uses approximately phonemic transcriptions, and of course discussions of loan vocabulary, morphological change, etc. almost never require phonetic transcription; why use phonetic transcription in a textbook just because it has a standard set of symbols? (Note that I'm not debating that the plethora of academic transcriptions needs to be reduced to a single system in a textbook. I'm just questioning whether that single system needs to be IPA.) I'm not sure just what counts as "American phonetic usage", but by "something more readable" I mean a system that maximizes use of Latin letters and minimizes special symbols and diacritics. Also, one that prefers letter+diacritic combinations to nonletter special symbols and writes affricates with unit symbols when possible. I believe it's worldwide common practice to use "c-hachek", barred lambda, etc. to write affricates. Another example of typical practice: if a language has one more or less back, more or less mid, more or less round vowel, write "o" and don't try to capture the phonetic details unless there are two "o"-like vowels or the phonetic details are at issue. If the language in the next problem set has a similar but lower vowel, write it "o" too even though the two languages would have different symbols for their "o" vowels if transcribed in IPA. Although it's true, as previous replies on this have noted, that we have IPA fonts and computers now and can print out IPA, our students often don't have or use IPA fonts. Typing IPA is extremely slow and complex; why should students have to go through that in order to type up homeworks? It's true that in a few years we'll have Unicode everywhere and 40,000,000-character fonts and all, but in the future are we going to have *more* time to prepare handouts and will our students have *more* time to prepare homework than now? I believe today's computer-raised younger generation reads by eye much better and faster than 15 years ago; they are accustomed to different values for familiar letters, distinctive spellings for sheer fun, etc. but not to new symbols instead of letters, and IPA or any other alphabet switch is a bigger annoyance now than formerly. Readability and typability are more important than the mere fact of standard symbols. (Anyway I would argue that common practice in phonemic and more abstract transcription is about 80-85% standard overall. So IPA vs. common practice isn't a matter of standard vs. no standard.) So I vote for picking something readable and typable and close to common practice and using it consistently throughout the book, switching to IPA only if the phonetic detail is really at issue. Johanna Nichols >===== Original Message From picard at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA ===== >"Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: > >> ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >> > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is >> > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the >> > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent >> > examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you >> > think? What is your opinion here? >> >> Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an >> IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it, >> just pure academic inertia. >> > >How about sheer volume of usage? Here's a quote from Hitch's review of The >World's Writing Systems (Daniels & Bright, eds., OUP. 1996) in IJAL 64: >"The International Phonetic Alphabet . . . is claimed to be 'the main >phonetic alphabet in use today throughout the world' (p. 821). There >certainly are no formalized, or officialized, alphabets in greater use, but >one wonders if the traditional Americanist symbols . . . are not more used >among linguists who are describing languages" (1998: 289). Note that I have >no strong feelings one way or another. I only want to suggest that >arguments in favor of the IPA are not that cut and dried. > >Marc Picard - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Professor Johanna Nichols University of California, Berkeley Slavic Department #2979 Berkeley, CA 94720, USA http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jbn http://ingush.berkeley.edu:7012/ http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~chechen http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp/ 510-642-1097 (office) 510-642-2979 (department) 510-642-6220 (fax) From Roger.Wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Mon May 19 16:41:08 2003 From: Roger.Wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (roger wright) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:41:08 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <001101c31b10$40037160$e2b5ed81@ku.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There's another reform which I would love historical linguistics handbooks to undertake in this respect, but nobody ever has; when presenting lexical items that have undergone sound changes in the past, couldn't we use IPA then rather than the orthographical forms? I mean this: textbooks on Romance historical linguistics, for example, will tell us that e.g. (in Spanish) LUPUM > lobo (usually in Italics); but although there has indeed been an orthographical change, the phonetic change is the one we're interested in, so why not write "[lupum] > [lobo]? RW From bhk at HD1.VSNL.NET.IN Mon May 19 16:43:54 2003 From: bhk at HD1.VSNL.NET.IN (bhk) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:43:54 EDT Subject: Fwd: Re: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 12:28:30 +0530 >To: Lyle Campbell >From: bhk >Subject: Fwd: Re: seeking advice > > >>Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 12:23:18 +0530 >>To: Lyle Campbell >>From: bhk >>Subject: Re: seeking advice >> >>Dear Lyle: >> >>For South Asian languages I find the IPA too cumbersome for two reasons: >>(1) Proto-Dravidian and several modern Dravidian lgs have >>dental-alveolar-retroflex contrast: IPA is heavily oriented toward the >>European lgs and hence uses a diacritic for dental t but leaves the >>alveolar unmarked. In South Asian lgs the dental is the unmarked segment >>and the alveolar marked (restricted in occurrence by lg). So here, >>traditionally, the alveolar is shown with a subscript bar and the dental >>remains as t.(2) Also we have so many retroflexes which, with long tails >>of IPA, look awkward in print. We use subscript dots with the following >>letters r l t s n z for retroflexes and corresponding dentals/alveolars >>do not carry diacritics I have followed what I call the Indic Roman in my >>recent book *The Dravidian Languages* (CUP 2003). There is no harm in >>using more than one transcription as long as you mention this fact in a >>note on transcription at the beginning..All the best, >> >>Krishna Bh. Krishnamurti House No. 12-13-1233 "Bhaarati", Street No. 9 Tarnaka Hyderabad 500 017 (A.P) India Phone (R): 40-2700 5665 From cecil at cecilward.com Mon May 19 16:43:04 2003 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:43:04 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <3EE98211@bearmail.berkeley.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Johanna Nichols wrote: > So I vote for picking something readable and typable and close to common > practice Johanna said it herself, "something". The problem is what is the "something" to be, it’s as vague as that. Johanna Nichols' advice is sensible, but I disagree, speaking as a victim of various old textbooks where I had a devil of a job trying to guess what the system of transcription in use actually meant. Even if an author makes some arbitrary non-standard choice, how is the reader meant to interpret that choice and be confident about their understanding of it. So as a novice student, and victim, rather than an expert, my plea is "Enough. Stick to IPA. Finally its time for clear standards." Johanna is right about the practical problems of making use of IPA and Unicode, but I suggest that we should be finding ways of making them more usable, rather than just accepting the inadequacies of old technologies. After all, outside of academia, Microsoft Windows NT and its successors have been completely Unicode-based for ten years (down to the currently shipping Windows Xp product), so the excuses for not using these technologies are already getting more slight. Do authors really want to spend time *explaining themselves* and do users really want to spend time studying these definitions/explanations? Regards, Cecil Ward. From ejp10 at PSU.EDU Mon May 19 16:41:41 2003 From: ejp10 at PSU.EDU (Elizabeth J. Pyatt) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:41:41 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.2.20030515111522.026fcff8@mail.wayne.edu> Message-ID: Hello: I see that there have been questions about what the "American transcription" system is. I was interpreting it to mean the use of some alternate phonetic symbols - specifically s-hachek for IPA long s, z-hacheck for Z (affricate), c-hachek and j-hachek for the affricates; y to mean a palatal glide (vs. IPA /j/) and u-umlaut to mean front-rounded vowel (vs. IPA /y/) and o-umlaut to mean mid front-rounded vowel (vs. IPA o-slash); t-dot/d-dot to represent retroflex stops; n-tilde to represent palatal n. This system is used in some phonology textbooks such as "Phonology in Generative Grammar" by Michael Kenstowicz. Although it is not pure IPA, it is a valid transcription system used by practicing phonologists, particularly those studying Native American languages. I have no opinion on wheter to use IPA or a modified transcription system, although I agree consistency is important. Furthermore, there is no reason to contribute to the general perception that Americans just can't handle phonetic symbols, a perception that is reinforced by the fact that American dictionary makers, and only they, refuse to use IPA for pronunciation guides. I think this refers to the practice of Websters and other American dictionaries of using "cheesy" phonetic spelling as in "long i" to represent the /ay/ or /aj/ diphthong. I also consider this to be inane and very irritating. I hope that's not what the publisher wants. I also concur that Americans can cope with British spellings, although it may be a standard publish practice to translate items into an American edition. For instance, my Handbook of the IPA, printed in the UK by a British company (Cambridge University Press) is using the American spelling (I did buy it in the US, so maybe it's a special print run just for us). So at this point, I would like to add a plea for my cheerfully oblivious fellow citizens that if we have been exposed to American editions of textbooks, it may be out of our control. However, I have never heard anyone strenuously object to the existence of British/Canadian spelling or seriously say that they cannot read it. We just have to special order the books if we want to see them in UK spelling (and some people do just that). Cheers Elizabeth Pyatt On the other hand, some transcription traditions are older than IPA, and I think it would look really funny transcribing Sanskrit palatal glides with [j] and the postalveolar affricate with a [dZ]. Do we really want to write 'joga' and 'radZa'? Sorry, but even German-speaking linguists write Sanskrit with 'y'. Geoff Nathan Geoffrey S. Nathan Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology, Wayne State University Linguistics Program (snailmail) Department of English Wayne State University Detroit, MI, 48202 Phone Numbers Computing and Information Technology: (313) 577-1259 Linguistics (English): (313) 577-8621 -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. Instructional Designer Education Technology Services, TLT Penn State University ejp10 at psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 228A Computer Building University Park, PA 16801 http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10 http://tlt.psu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From 0210186C at STUDENT.GLA.AC.UK Mon May 19 16:43:24 2003 From: 0210186C at STUDENT.GLA.AC.UK (David Webster Hare Cochran) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:43:24 EDT Subject: Stochastic Grammar and Catastrophe Theory Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear All, This is primarily a bibliographical query, as my literature searches on these topics so far have turned up only indirectly relevant material. Is anyone aware of any work published, or theses written on either; 1) Diachronic and/or developmental applications of Stochastic Tree Substitution Grammars/Data-Oriented Parsing? or; 2)Applications of Catastrophe Theory to syntax, again, particularly from a diachronic or developmental perspective? With thanks in advance, Dave Cochran. Random Student, Department of English Language, University of Glasgow. From erickson at KUMAGAKU.AC.JP Tue May 20 20:24:49 2003 From: erickson at KUMAGAKU.AC.JP (Blaine Erickson) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:24:49 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: This is a little off-topic, but I think it raises an important point that seems to have been misunderstood. "Elizabeth J. Pyatt" , apparently quoting someone, wrote: > Furthermore, there is no reason to contribute to the > general perception that Americans just can't handle > phonetic symbols, a perception that is reinforced by > the fact that American dictionary makers, and only > they, refuse to use IPA for pronunciation guides. > > I think this refers to the practice of Websters and > other American dictionaries of using "cheesy" phonetic > spelling as in "long i" to represent the /ay/ or /aj/ > diphthong. I also consider this to be inane and very > irritating. I hope that's not what the publisher wants. Although I laud the use of the word "cheesy," dictionary publishers have a very good reason for not using IPA: no one wants to buy a dictionary that tells them they "talk wrong." If dictionaries were to use IPA, then they would have to settle on one pronunciation, and all non-standard speakers would therefore be "wrong"--according to the dictionary, which for non-linguists is the de facto authority on "proper" usage. On the other hand, if dictionary makers use a system in which they define the pronunciation value of symbols with familiar words (i.e., the system they use now), then users can figure out how to say unfamiliar words, in a way that is appropriate for their dialect. I, for one, don't want to be told by my dictionary that I'm "wrong" for not having a contrast between the vowels in _cot_ and _caught_, or that I'm "wrong" for maintaining the / contrast. On the other hand, I wouldn't want a dictionary that didn't represent these differently. So while there are excellent dialectal (and economic!) reasons for not using IPA in dictionaries, and although it is important for students to understand that there are several phonetic transcription traditions, I, like just about everyone else commenting on this, think that Lyle should stick with IPA in his book. Best wishes, Blaine Erickson erickson at kumagaku.ac.jp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ERobert52 at AOL.COM Tue May 20 20:25:24 2003 From: ERobert52 at AOL.COM (ERobert52 at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:25:24 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: In a message dated 19/05/03 18:30:02 GMT Daylight Time, cecil at CECILWARD.COM writes: > Johanna is right about the practical problems of making use of IPA and > Unicode, but I suggest that we should be finding ways of making them more > usable, rather than just accepting the inadequacies of old technologies. > After all, outside of academia, Microsoft Windows NT and its successors > have been completely Unicode-based for ten years (down to the currently > shipping Windows Xp product), so the excuses for not using these > technologies are already getting more slight. > > In most circumstances (including printing books, which was the original question) the use of IPA is perfectly straightforward and based on a universally accepted standard. If this applies, there is no reason to deviate from that norm or to perpetuate minority deviations from it. But it doesn't work for everything (e.g. email messages) and I don't expect technology to provide a universally portable or backward compatible solution to this anytime soon. There are still 3 incompatible systems for encoding Cyrillic, so providing support to serve the relatively tiny community that wants to use IPA is not going to be at the top of anybody's list of priorities other than ours. But in circumstances where IPA won't work, we can use SAMPA. This is a system with an agreed systematic correspondence with most IPA symbols (or all of them, if we include John Wells' suggested extensions), typable on any keyboard that supports the Latin alphabet, and universally portable, even to ancient legacy equipment, as it uses only the 7-bit ASCII character set. If you can't use one, you can use the other. Ed Robertson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed May 21 22:16:49 2003 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 18:16:49 EDT Subject: Q: Borrowing of French Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The French word , 'chestnut' and later 'brown', is first attested as a color term only in 1824, in Balzac (I am told). Since then, it has achieved basic status in French, and several recent sources suggest that it is gaining ground at the expense of the older word (and that it has displaced more or less completely in some regions of France). But I'm interested in the way has been borrowed into the other Romance languages. Contemporary sources tell me that the basic, unmarked words for 'brown' in these other languages are as follows: Occitan , Portuguese , European Spanish (but apparently not American Spanish) , Catalan , Italian , Romanian , and Judeo-Spanish . (I have no data for Galician, Sardinian, or the Rhaeto-Romance varieties, or for Brazilian Portuguese.) These borrowings appear to be recent. For Spanish, doesn't even get an entry in Corominas's well-known etymological dictionary. For Italian, dictionaries up until about the 1960s give as the unmarked term for 'brown', and cite only as 'dark brown'. But all contemporary sources insist that 'brown' is , while is now confined to hair and skin. For Romanian, a 1952 dictionary gives and as the words for 'brown', and is not entered. A 1986 grammar gives as the general term for 'brown', and cites only as 'maroon'. Yet all the contemporary sources I've managed to consult insist that 'brown' is and nothing else. For Judeo-Spanish, I'm told that is recently borrowed and still marginal, but without competitors. I find all this more than a little surprising. Has anyone made a study of it? Or can anybody explain to me how and why this word has seemingly spread so far and so fast -- apparently in some cases displacing earlier words? Please reply to me, and I'll summarize to the list. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at AOL.COM Thu May 22 13:17:15 2003 From: X99Lynx at AOL.COM (X99Lynx at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 09:17:15 EDT Subject: Q: Borrowing of French Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 5/21/03 6:24:21 PM, larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK writes: << The French word , 'chestnut' and later 'brown', is first attested as a color term only in 1824, in Balzac (I am told).>> A quick note: ('marones') appears as a color word in English in 1791 in a translation of Claude-Louis Berthollet’s "Elements de l’art de la teinture", a highly influential and often revised and reprinted scientific treatise on commercial dyeing - an industry that would have significant economic and cultural importance in the 19th Century. Also, in the same translation, a "light marrone" is compared to cinnamon, consistent with "maroon" generally and rather consistently being used in English to refer to a dark or drab red hue, not a brown. (E.g., Pantone Process Maroon #208). I realize this was not the question, but this would give some indication that the word was already in use in reference to a dye -- if not an abstract color -- in French before Balzac. And possibly that it referred to a n attempt to scientifically or commercially standardize a particular fabric dye name early on. And also that this color itself was not equivalent to a modern color wheel "brown." And finally, at least in its first mention in English given in the OED (1594), "marrons" are mentioned in distinction to chestnuts. Steve Long From l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Sun May 25 14:52:01 2003 From: l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Lyle Campbell) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 10:52:01 EDT Subject: summary, thanks, advice Message-ID: Dear All, Thanks to everyone who wrote/responded to my request for help and advice (about the revised edition of my historical linguistics textbook). Unexpectedly, many answered (I believe I received some 50 messages addressed just to me, not to the group as a whole, which is what I expected, plus the large number who wrote to the whole group, unexpected). I write now to thank all, and also to apologize for being so swamped I'm not able to respond to everyone individually. Given the number of responses, perhaps I should provide something of a summary of answers with respect to the 2 main questions I had asked. First, though, I received only a couple of (very helpful) messages with feedback on how to improve the book and with corrections that ought to be made. I would be extremely grateful to receive more advice of this sort. About whether the IPA forms should be replaced by or supported by the addition of American phonetic spellings brought interesting comments and much helpful advice. It is clear the majority see IPA as best. However, many also point out how it is important in citing forms from language and language areas with their own traditions to utilize the conventions of those areas. My tentative decision at the moment, then, is as follows. I will rely on the IPA and use it wherever possible, but at the same time when citing forms which have a conventional spelling, I will use those representations also. Thus, Sanskrit, Gothic, etc. will look the way Sanskrit, Gothic, etc. typically look but will have IPA representations whenever needed. Similarly, Finnish, Estonian, Spanish, German, French, etc. will be cited in their standard traditional orthographies but with IPA to make them clear. In the case of American Indian languages and others, where there is a strong tradition of, say, "y" instead of "j" or of "s" and "c" plus haceks instead of long s and t+long s, I will present both the form as expected by people working with these languages and in IPA. In the end, most examples that occur in an introductory historical linguistics book are not going to require detailed or complicated phonetic transcriptions -- some do. As an aside, though, as some respondents pointed out, it is probably important to keep in mind that there is a good deal that the IPA does not handle at all -- sounds which have no IPA symbols --, other things it does not handle well, and that there is considerable variation in the deployment of IPA symbols among scholars in spite of the fact that mostly we use such a system of transcription for the potential uniformity it provides. One other comment, American phonetic usage is not at all the hodgepodge some seem to suggest. It is clear and consistent and codified in most of the matters where the IPA is clear (cf. for example, Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw. 1986. Phonetic symbol guide. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.) It also has a history to rival the IPA and probably until very recently numbers of users comparable to the IPA. That said, I do intend to rely principally on the IPA and utilize representations only when the tradition surrounding the languages involved seems also to require other representations in addition. About whether UK or US spelling conventions/orthographic practices should be used, most felt it was not a big deal one way or the other. This is also my own feeling; I asked for advice on this because of unclear advice I had been given about switching. It should be noted, for the record, that with respect to the -ise/-ize, -isation/-ization, this is not really a division along national lines. Rather, in the UK the Oxford dictionaries (OED in particular, but also the Pocket Oxford Dictionary and others) follow the -z- tradition, while many others go for -s-. In New Zealand, most use -s-, but a surprising number instead use the -z- conventions, in spite of overwhelming support for the -s- versions in schools, institutions, government, newspapers. I will weigh the matter further and then decide which convention to follow. However, to repeat, I agree with the majority who do not see this as a very significant issue. (However, the tradition one is educated in appears to have powerful impact on what one considers proper or best in this matter; I have to admit, coming from the -z- school, I find myself subconsciously thinking that -civilisation- with -s- is uncivilized -- sympathies with and apologies to all who feel just the opposite!) (Just one additional parenthetical remark about this -- I was surprised by a couple of strong anti-American comments I received in this context. I believe you can be for or against George W. Bush and what he stands for using either spelling convention. I was sad to imagine the many Americans who share these moral and political stands who would apparently not be exempt from the negative sentiments. Weren't there some "-ise" UK supporters of Bush (and Blair) thickly involved in recent events?; I know plenty of "-ize"-ites deeply opposed. Moral: don't spell at all?) Thanks, Lyle -- Professor Lyle Campbell, Dept. of Linguistics University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand Fax: 64-3-364-2969 Phone: 64-3-364-2242 (office), 64-3-364-2089 (Linguistics dept) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mikko.laitinen at helsinki.fi Mon May 26 14:44:21 2003 From: mikko.laitinen at helsinki.fi (Mikko Laitinen) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 10:44:21 EDT Subject: Call for papers / reminder Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- (Apologies for multiple postings.) Call for papers The Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki, organizes DIATYPE Symposium on diachrony, dialectology and typological linguistics Helsinki, 16-18 October, 2003 Contributions are invited to a symposium on diachrony, dialectology and language typology to be held in Helsinki in mid-October 2003. The aim of the symposium is to explore connections between these three fields of research, looking for ways in which historical linguists and dialectologists could learn from insights to be gained from typological studies, and vice versa. The symposium is organised by the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English (VARIENG), a National Centre of Excellence funded by the Academy of Finland and the University of Helsinki. All contributions to the symposium need not necessarily focus on questions to do with the English language, although the organizers will naturally be most interested in topics connected with the evolution and regional variation of English. Invited speakers and their topics: • Dieter Kastovsky (University of Vienna): Historical morphology from a typological point of view • Bernd Kortmann (University of Freiburg): The European dimension of the new partnership between dialectology and typology • Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University): On the development of non- accusative person agreement Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 300 words) is June 10, 2003. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to diatype- organizers at helsinki.fi. The abstract should be included in the body of the message. E-mail submissions are recommended. If, however, you send your abstract by ordinary mail, please provide an e-mail address as a contact address. Participants will be notified of acceptance by June 16, 2003. The accepted abstracts will be published on the web pages of the symposium at: http://www.eng.helsinki.fi/varieng/main/news.htm Registration: The deadline for registration for all participants is September 1, 2003. Register by e-mail to the address diatype-organizers at helsinki.fi. The registration fee is EUR 50. Accommodation: The City of Helsinki Tourist Office web pages provide several links to accommodation in Helsinki. The pages can be accessed from the symposium web pages or directly from http://www.hel.fi/tourism/html/english/artikkelit/index.html. The academic programme of the symposium will run from late Thursday afternoon till Saturday afternoon. The conference venue will be in the centre of Helsinki in the vicinity of the Senate Square. For further information, please contact diatype-organizers at helsinki.fi. The organizing committee: • Terttu Nevalainen, e-mail: terttu.nevalainen at helsinki.fi • Juhani Klemola, e-mail: juhani.klemola at uwasa.fi • Mikko Laitinen (secretary of the symposium), e-mail: mikko.laitinen at helsinki.fi Address: Department of English, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40B), FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. From rankin at KU.EDU Fri May 30 20:56:13 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (rankin) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 16:56:13 EDT Subject: Outline maps again. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This is for the individual who was looking for outline maps for dialect work. I ran across this useful site: it provides downloadable outline maps of all the nations and continents of the world as well as regional maps and, in the US, each state and even each county within the states. Hope this is helpful. http://geography.about.com/library/blank/blxindex.htm Best, Bob Rankin Dept. of Linguistics University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66044 USA From phonosemantics at earthlink.net Thu May 1 13:45:16 2003 From: phonosemantics at earthlink.net (Jess Tauber) Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 09:45:16 EDT Subject: linkage between pattern of expressive system organization and lexical sound change? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Hi folks. Got up this morning with one of those "aha" experiences, and wanted to run it by the list to see if anyone might have some constructive critical remarks in response. As many of you know, I am obsessed with matters sound symbolic (and actually DO do normal linguistic stuff, but am just much less vocal about it). In the past 20 years I've cumulated data on the phonosemantics of more than 300 languages, from many dozens of families from around the world, looking for patterns within each language as well as generalizations crosslinguistically. So far major generalizations include: 1)A gross inverse correlation between degree of morphological synthesis and raw numbers of free ideophone or expressive forms in any particular language. Polysynthetic languages have in general the fewest, analytic languages the most (there is also a related inverse correlation between degree of fusion and numbers of forms as well- this difference shows up in many isolating languages, where interestingly numbers of free expressive roots seems to be inversely correlated with numbers of elaborate expressive forms). 2) Geometrical form/meaning mapping- the phonological system used in expressives (often different from normal lexical phonology) provides the basis for diagrammatical iconic mapping between form and meaning. Grave opposes acute, compact opposes diffuse, and so on. Even so, the mapping is NOT an absolute one crosslinguistically, but seems to largely depend on the morphosyntactic state of the language. In CVC type expressive roots (i.e those NOT compounds of CV+CV) C1 usually has some opposition in meaning (either in terms of interpretation of spatial position in an object, or temporal increase or decrease of development of some physicomechanical state) to C2. This "mirror principle" is the same relatively in all languages with such roots, but the orientation in absolute terms in inverted between C1 and C2 in left- versus right- headed languages (and this seems to be connected to the tendencies of the one to prefer alliteration versus rhyming preferences of the latter). Thus in Japanese many C2=/b/or/p/ is found in expressives descriptive of liquid impact, but in many left-headed languages C1 does this job instead. And so on through the system. My issue here today has to do with possible linkage between the systemic orientation of the expressive system of a language and sound change in the normal lexical phonology. As many of you are aware, expressives and ideophones are often relatively immune to historical sound shifts (though this varies depending on how lexicalized expressives themselves are- expressive lexicalization is one of the major concomitants of 1) above, though with apparent "Darwinian" selection and attrition as well. In general it seems that surviving free forms have broader semantic scope while the more semantically specialized forms are the ones which lexicalize, with apparent implicational hierarchical pecking orders along several lines, including semantic domain). It is not completely controversial that sound shift is often chained. If the geometrical principle from 2)above is applied for instance in Salishan languages to lexicon as well, then the vast majority of attested shifts in consonantal articulatory position follow the edge, in a square wave (or baseball seam) pattern, of a cubic representation mappable from the 8 articulatory types available generally in those languages (labial, alveolar, lateral, alveopalatal, velar, labiovelar, uvular, labiouvular). >>From what I've seen in my language sample, such articulatory shifts seldom are more than two vertices long, which would tend to invert the system to some extent, depending on how complete such chaining is. My question is whether there might be any correlation between such inversion in the lexical phonology, on the one hand, and the overall orientation of the expressive system on the other, as outlined in 2) above. If there is, then might we be able to hypothesize that the sound shifts are perhaps a kind of game of "catch up"? Expressives, when not lexicalized, are themselves formed as needed templatically, influenced by the prevailing morphosyntactic winds, as it were. Their orientation there can change rather quickly. On the other hand, lexicalization would entrap such forms and largely prevent them from reacting so quickly to morphosyntactic change, fixing them in whatever state they were first formed. Lexical sound changes might allow the system to reequilibrate, assuming there is enough time to do it, and also allowing for the system to delete forms whose mutation in this regard would not fit the resulting smooth pattern. Obviously any such systemic reequilibration, if real, would follow a variety of different dimensions available for change, not just articulatory position. A big matrix? At this stage, this idea is still not completely thought out, and all constructive critical comments are welcome. Thanks. Best regards, Jess Tauber phonosemantics at earthlink.net From andersen at ucla.edu Fri May 2 11:33:33 2003 From: andersen at ucla.edu (Henning Andersen) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 07:33:33 EDT Subject: farmers and lg dispersal Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear All, In case you don't have access to the *Science* website, you can read a summary of Diamond & Bellwood's findings/theses on the UCLA home page: www.ucla.com. It' under "In the News". Diamond is quoted as saying "I wake up in the morning and think farmers spread Indo-European languages, and by 6 p.m. I've changed my mind". The fact that the authors have more trouble with Indo-European than with any of the other language families reminds one of "Ebeling's paradox" -- the more information one has about a language the harder it is to assign it a unique description -- mutatis mutandis. H -- ||||| Henning Andersen ||||| Slavic Languages and Literatures ||||| University of California, Los Angeles ||||| P.O.Box 951502 ||||| Los Angeles, CA 90095-1502 ||||| Phone +1-310-837-6743 * Fax +1-310-206-5263 From panis at PACBELL.NET Fri May 2 15:34:11 2003 From: panis at PACBELL.NET (John McChesney-Young) Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 11:34:11 EDT Subject: Fwd: farmers and lg dispersal Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Henning Andersen thoughtfully wrote: >In case you don't have access to the *Science* website, you can read >a summary of Diamond & Bellwood's findings/theses on the UCLA home >page: www.ucla.com. It' under "In the News". http://www.ucla.edu/, rather than .com. The URL for the particular page for the news article is: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/page.asp?id=4137 John -- ******* *** John McChesney-Young ** panis at pacbell.net ** Berkeley, California, U.S.A. *** From eboudovs at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU Tue May 6 11:10:44 2003 From: eboudovs at HUMNET.UCLA.EDU (Elena Boudovskaia) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 07:10:44 EDT Subject: linguistic geography - program for maps? Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I am trying to locate some software that lets one download (or draw, or scan) maps of certain areas and then put on them some dialectological data. Does anyone know such software? Someone recommended to me ArcView 3.x, but it costs $1,195.00 (ArcView 8.3 - even $1,500.00). Does anyone have any experience with cheaper products like XMap, or anything else? Thanks a lot in advance, Elena From rankin at ku.edu Tue May 6 18:40:59 2003 From: rankin at ku.edu (rankin) Date: Tue, 6 May 2003 14:40:59 EDT Subject: Maps. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I do not personally have a source of outline maps for dialectological use, but a good place to start a search for maps of all kinds (other than Google, which is too broad) is the University of Texas Library map site. http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_sites/map_sites.html It is possible that one of the links they list may have what is needed. Good luck. Bob Rankin Department of Linguistics University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66044 USA From X99Lynx at AOL.COM Wed May 7 13:13:04 2003 From: X99Lynx at AOL.COM (X99Lynx at AOL.COM) Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 09:13:04 EDT Subject: Farmers and Language Spread - A Critique Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 4/30/03 10:26:38 AM, l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ writes: <> Having read the pdf version of Prof Campbell's response, I think some observations may be helpful. In order for the dialogue to be productive -- and to avoid knee-jerk reactions to any hypothesis -- it is important to recognize where terminology may be causing the problem. 1. There really is no justification for separating "agriculture" from the "social" factors that might cause the spread of languages. Prof Campbell writes "The farming/language dispersal model... leave[s] social factors mostly out of the picture,... Nevertheless, many social factors are highly relevant to questions of language spread...." Whatever the problem with exposition, it is absolutely clear the original spread of "agriculture" (food production versus food gathering) changed human societies in quite dramatic ways -- probably as pivotal as any other event in the 200,000(?) year history of modern humans. The archaeological record shows that in most cases the first diffusion of food production completely rearranged social organization, social processes and, it strongly appears, social identities. In fact, the first adoption of many forms of agriculture on any kind of significant scale often required deep changes in the structure of a society. And it is questionable whether such things as cities and social strata could even exist in true pre-agricultural societies. In many cases, before food production -- or, just as importantly, contact with food producing cultures -- hunter/gatherers lived very different lives under very different "social" factors than afterward. It is not good history to separate the effects of the coming of "agriculture" from the broad social impact of that coming. If Bellwood, et al, have not addressed that unity of concept, it is clear in any case. The development of agriculture -- or more properly food production -- involved far more than raising cattle versus hunting wild cattle. (For a better picture of the complexities of prehistoric "first contact" between farming and mesolithic foraging societies, see Marek Zvelibil, Transition to agriculture in eastern Europe, in EUROPE'S FIRST FARMERS, ed. by T. Douglas Price, 64-71, Cambridge 2000.) So when we speak of the first farmers and the spread of languages, we are not merely speaking of a mere change in dinner menu. The concept of "agriculture" (versus food-gathering) involves far more. And that includes sometimes extreme social, economic and even political change. Prof Campbell's distinction between "social factors" and agriculture as a factor in the spread of languages is therefore inaccurate in a fundamental way and does not advance the dialogue. 2. Prof Campbell also writes, "Agricultural dispersal is only one factor in the bigger picture of what drives language diversification and spread..." There really is no argument here. Today, "agricultural dispersal" probably plays an insignificant role in language spread. The real issue revolves around when agriculture first spread -- a singular event in human history. It is a fundamental observation of economics that once food production enters the picture, the surplus enriches groups who are not directly agriculturalists. Some groups may never have to develop a farmer's lifestyle in order to benefit from the coming of agriculture. For example, a mountain tribe of gold miners might benefit greatly by exchanging their metal for food grown on the plain. Whether or not they would come to speak the same language as the farmers of the plain, it was agriculture that produced the surplus, created the trade and even the possibility of language change. In effect, agriculture could also be credited with independently spreading the gold miners' language. (PS - I believe there is NO indication that gold had any value in purely mesolithic Eurasia. It seems "agriculture" created the surplus that created the value of gold.) Prof Campbell's mentions that "Xinkans maintained their distinct identity and language in face of the powerful Mayan agriculturalists, first as non-cultivators, later as cultivators,..." But this tells us nothing unless we know quite precisely how economic power was distributed and whether or not the Xinhans were even permitted to speak Mayan (or vice versa). Exclusionary practices are a powerful tool for obtaining economic power. Perhaps the Mayan denied the Xinkans their agricultural know-how and likewise the language that carried that know-how. Or perhaps the Xinkans held the upper hand by controlling raw materials and used their language to control the trade with Mayan agriculturalists. In either case, neither language may have spread without the economic surpluses provided by agriculture. The point here is that when agriculture first started spreading in human history, the effects would have been felt far beyond the agriculturalists themselves. There are very few known major human language groups that might be called truly "non-agricultural" in the sense that they were untouched by the "neolithic" revolution. For the Uralic family to qualify, e.g., as a "non-agricultural" language spread, we need to disregard the intense contact this group seems to show with agriculture and its agricultural neighbors, right down to pit comb ceramics. 3. Finally, Prof Campbell also writes: "It is doubtful that the non-linguistic, non-social generalizations discussed in this paper take us more than a short distance towards answering the questions raised here." Actually, it is doubtful that simple linguistic generalizations will help us out much here either. If Gaulish businessmen started speaking Latin bilingually in order to have a salesman's advantage in both the Gaulish and Latin marketplaces, and this would lead to language conversion after some generations in their progeny, is that a linguistic cause? A social cause? Or an economic one? Or do we forget that agriculture underpinned the very existence of Gaul, Rome and their marketplaces? The answer is linguistic in one clear sense that is hardly mentioned in historical linguistics -- the value of communication. The base, bottom reason that two people speak the same language. If we posit that a language spreads because people have a strong motive to exchange information, we can understand why the radical economic and social change brought by agriculture often (but not always) brought a new language with it. There is often no need for "language dominance" (one of the worse concepts in all of linguistics) to account for the spread of a language. The spread of agriculture and language are often treated as co-incidental. But isn't it possible that it WAS language itself that carried the extreme life-style altering advent of agriculture. Just as -- on a smaller scale -- computer science travels with English around the world, might not have various languages helped carry food production technology and its radical new life-style around the world? Compare most true prehistoric foraging cultures to the food producing cultures that followed and you will see the need to convey a great deal of additional information between the two. The hypothesis here is that the main mover of language spread (beyond raw population growth) is the exchange of complex information. Whether that information has economic, social, political or technical advantage, language will spread -- even against the natural inertia that any speaker logically has against changing his or her native language. In the case of the first spread of agriculture, there was a great deal of information to exchange. And a common language would be the obvious solution. Steve Long From l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Tue May 13 14:21:29 2003 From: l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Lyle Campbell) Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 10:21:29 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: Dear All, A second edition is being done of my textbook, 1998 Historical Linguistics: an Introduction . Edinburgh University Press (and 1999 MIT Press) (Lyle Campbell), and I am writing to ask for advice. Two questions have come up about which I would especially like to hear opinions. One is the recommendation that the spelling be changed from the British spelling of the first edition (with -ise, -isation, -our [colour], centre, tyre, programme, etc.) to follow American spelling conventions (with -ize, -isation, -or, center, tire, program, etc.) for the second. What do you think? What is your advice, your opinion about this? (Edinburgh University Press apparently do not mind one way or the other now, though for the first edition they did want British orthographic conventions to be followed. Some suggest it would be more accessible (= sell better?) with American spelling. My guess is that for several other countries, which orthographic conventions are followed may matter little, but I wonder to what extent one or the other may be important for North America or for the UK? In particular, I wonder whether it makes a significant difference in the US? (The MIT edition has UK conventions, which were commented on by some reviewers).) The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you think? What is your opinion here? In particular, it would be helpful to know whether IPA or American usage has any advantage or disadvantage for students in North America. Possibly the differences are not so great (or at least frequent) except for some vowel symbols and for certain fricatives and affricates. A problem, though, comes from the different conventions typically used in the traditions for different language areas. For example, to use [y] for IPA [j] in Germanic examples just looks odd/wrong to some scholars. However, to use [j] for American [y] just seems wrong to others when used to represent various American Indian languages, and various Romance languages, and others, where the scholarly tradition is with "y" not "j" -- (some readers probably noticed some inconsistency in this regard in this in the first edition, alas -- sorry). What advice would you offer? There is a possible compromise, with, say IPA representations given first and then with the forms repeated in American phonetics in parentheses adjacent to the IPA forms. (This might be OK for some forms, but it could get cumbersome when very many examples requiring phonetic notation are given in any one place.) My question is whether there is enough advantage to make giving both IPA and American usage worthwhile? Finally, I would be very happy to receive any comments, advice, recommendations, or corrections which would be useful for the second edition. (As a preview to the changes anticipated for the 2nd edition, I hope to correct the typos; I expect to cull out some of the less accessible examples and substitute hopefully better ones; I expect to make fairly substantial changes in the exercises of several chapters, taking out some that don't seem to work so well and also adding several new ones to give a better range from easy to intermediate to more challenging cases. Also, I hope to update and improve the discussion of a few topics.) Any feedback will be gratefully received. Many thanks in advance, Lyle -- Professor Lyle Campbell, Dept. of Linguistics University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand Fax: 64-3-364-2969 Phone: 64-3-364-2242 (office), 64-3-364-2089 (Linguistics dept) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From roger.wright at liverpool.ac.uk Wed May 14 12:43:05 2003 From: roger.wright at liverpool.ac.uk (roger wright) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 08:43:05 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- It is essential to use IPA. That's what it's for. RW --On 13 May 2003 10:21 -0400 Lyle Campbell wrote: > > Dear All, > > A second edition is being done of my textbook, 1998 Historical > Linguistics: an Introduction . Edinburgh University Press (and 1999 > MIT Press) (Lyle Campbell), and I am writing to ask for advice. Two > questions have come up about which I would especially like to hear > opinions. > > One is the recommendation that the spelling be changed from the British > spelling of the first edition (with -ise, -isation, -our [colour], > centre, tyre, programme, etc.) to follow American spelling conventions > (with -ize, -isation, -or, center, tire, program, etc.) for the second. > What do you think? What is your advice, your opinion about this? > (Edinburgh University Press apparently do not mind one way or the other > now, though for the first edition they did want British orthographic > conventions to be followed. Some suggest it would be more accessible (= > sell better?) with American spelling. My guess is that for several other > countries, which orthographic conventions are followed may matter little, > but I wonder to what extent one or the other may be important for North > America or for the UK? In particular, I wonder whether it makes a > significant difference in the US? (The MIT edition has UK conventions, > which were commented on by some reviewers).) > > > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the book > perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent examples > in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you think? > What is your opinion here? In particular, it would be helpful to know > whether IPA or American usage has any advantage or disadvantage for > students in North America. Possibly the differences are not so great (or > at least frequent) except for some vowel symbols and for certain > fricatives and affricates. A problem, though, comes from the different > conventions typically used in the traditions for different language > areas. For example, to use [y] for IPA [j] in Germanic examples just > looks odd/wrong to some scholars. However, to use [j] for American [y] > just seems wrong to others when used to represent various American Indian > languages, and various Romance languages, and others, where the scholarly > tradition is with "y" not "j" -- (some readers probably noticed some > inconsistency in this regard in this in the first edition, alas -- > sorry). What advice would you offer? There is a possible > compromise, with, say IPA representations given first and then with the > forms repeated in American phonetics in parentheses adjacent to the IPA > forms. (This might be OK for some forms, but it could get cumbersome > when very many examples requiring phonetic notation are given in any one > place.) My question is whether there is enough advantage to make giving > both IPA and American usage worthwhile? > > > Finally, I would be very happy to receive any comments, advice, > recommendations, or corrections which would be useful for the second > edition. (As a preview to the changes anticipated for the 2nd edition, I > hope to correct the typos; I expect to cull out some of the less > accessible examples and substitute hopefully better ones; I expect to > make fairly substantial changes in the exercises of several chapters, > taking out some that don't seem to work so well and also adding several > new ones to give a better range from easy to intermediate to more > challenging cases. Also, I hope to update and improve the discussion of > a few topics.) Any feedback will be gratefully received. > > Many thanks in advance, > Lyle > > > > > > > > > -- > Professor Lyle Campbell, > Dept. of Linguistics > University of Canterbury > Christchurch, New Zealand > Fax: 64-3-364-2969 > Phone: 64-3-364-2242 (office), 64-3-364-2089 (Linguistics dept) From ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP Wed May 14 12:47:53 2003 From: ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP (Robert R. Ratcliffe) Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 08:47:53 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent > examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you > think? What is your opinion here? To me this is like the author of a physics textbook asking if he should change his metric measurements to feet, inches, ounces, quarts, etc. for the American edition. If mount A is 974 meters and mount B is 2984 feet, can you tell which is higher? If location A is 34 celsius and location B is 93 fahrenheit, which is hotter? Consistent representation is a foundational principle of scientific methodology, and the IPA is one of the most basic and important tools we have. People who don't know how to use it should not be doing linguistics on any level. If professors are offering historical linguistics courses to students without linguistic background, the IPA should be taught in the first week. There is no alternative to it-- especially when we are talking about comparing languages. There are of course various "traditions" of research in particular languages or language groups with their idiosyncracies and peculiarities. But none, as far as I know, has been systematically codified, much less adapted to apply to all languages across the board. The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography is the evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead languages (like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) where there is controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a degree of certainty which is not possible. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it, just pure academic inertia. Looking forward to the new edition. Best Wishes ____________________________________ Robert R. Ratcliffe Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp $B%i%H%/%j%U!%%m%P!<%H=u65pJs9V:B!&%"%i%S%"8l at l96!" (J $BEl5~309q8lBg3X (J $B") (J183-8534 $BEl5~ (J $BI\Cf;TD+F|D. (J3-11-1 From tcravens at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU Thu May 15 14:11:36 2003 From: tcravens at FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU (THOMAS D CRAVENS) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:11:36 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Total agreement here -- IPA is absolutely essential. (no opinion on Brit or American spelling conventions.) Tom Cravens ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" Date: Wednesday, May 14, 2003 7:47 am Subject: Re: seeking advice > ----------------------------Original message----------------------- > ----- > > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, > and is > > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the > > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to > represent> examples in the first edition to American phonetic > usage. What do you > > think? What is your opinion here? > > To me this is like the author of a physics textbook asking if he > shouldchange his metric measurements to feet, inches, ounces, > quarts, etc. for > the American edition. If mount A is 974 meters and mount B is 2984 > feet,can you tell which is higher? If location A is 34 celsius and > location B > is 93 fahrenheit, which is hotter? Consistent representation is a > foundational principle of scientific methodology, and the IPA is > one of > the most basic and important tools we have. People who don't know > how to > use it should not be doing linguistics on any level. If professors are > offering historical linguistics courses to students without linguistic > background, the IPA should be taught in the first week. There is no > alternative to it-- especially when we are talking about comparing > languages. There are of course various "traditions" of research in > particular languages or language groups with their idiosyncracies and > peculiarities. But none, as far as I know, has been systematically > codified, much less adapted to apply to all languages across the > board.The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography > is the > evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead > languages(like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) > where there is > controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a > degree of certainty which is not possible. Sorry, maybe I'm a bit > of an > IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument > against it, > just pure academic inertia. > > Looking forward to the new edition. > > Best Wishes > > ____________________________________ > Robert R. Ratcliffe > Associate Professor, Arabic and Linguistics > Tokyo University of Foreign Studies > Asahi-machi 3-11-1, Fuchu-shi, Tokyo 183-8534 Japan > ratcliffe at tufs.ac.jp > > $B%i%H%/%j%U!%%m%P!<%H=u65 $B8 at 8l>pJs9V:B!&%"%i%S%"8l at l96!" (J $BEl5~309q8lBg3X (J > $B") (J183-8534 $BEl5~ (J $BI\Cf;TD+F|D. (J3-11-1 > From larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk Thu May 15 14:13:18 2003 From: larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk (Larry Trask) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:13:18 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Lyle, I'm afraid my reply is likely to amount to more of a rant than a piece of sober advice. Please feel free to ignore my noises. But I have strong feelings about these matters. First, there is no earthly reason to switch to US spelling. Most of the English-speaking countries use British spelling, and all of them are used to seeing American spelling in all kinds of publications. There is no reason for Americans or anyone else to object to the sight of British spellings. American objections to British spellings are ignorant and parochial, and those who raise such objections should be ashamed of themselves. This is true in any discipline, but it's doubly true in ours. How can somebody who calls himself a linguist get the heebie-jeebies on seeing a slightly different variety of English? Do such people also panic on seeing Shakespeare or Chaucer in the original? The choice of spelling will make no difference in Britain. If it's really the case that some American instructors won't use a book with British spelling, then I guess you have to decide whether selling a few more copies is worth kowtowing to idiots. On the issue of phonetic symbols, stick to the IPA. American phonetic transcription was invented for fieldworkers using manual typewriters. These days, when all of us can use laptops with the SIL IPA font attached, there is no longer any point to American transcription. This creaky old system is an anachronism; it should be given its gold watch and a decent retirement. Attempts at perpetuating this antique are strictly retrograde. Apart from being a parochial curiosity, American transcription has one obvious and very serious drawback. It has no agreed form, and transcription practice varies from user to user, perhaps most obviously with affricates and fricatives, but not only there. There is nothing comparable to the IPA chart to which students can turn to learn the system. As for the differing traditions in different language areas, there is nothing to be done about this matter in a general textbook except to ignore it. Local traditions vary almost without limit. For example, specialists in Tibeto-Burman languages, I recall learning in my student days, use orthographic to represent schwa. All this colourful variation must be excised in a general textbook, which needs to stick to a single consistent transcription throughout. And I don't think giving transcriptions in two systems is a really good idea. This will surely be more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, can there really be an instructor out there who believes that students are going to make careers in linguistics without learning the IPA? Cantankerous of Brighton (but American) Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From picard at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA Thu May 15 14:13:46 2003 From: picard at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA (Marc Picard) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:13:46 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: "Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: > ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- > > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is > > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the > > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent > > examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you > > think? What is your opinion here? > > Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an > IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it, > just pure academic inertia. > How about sheer volume of usage? Here's a quote from Hitch's review of The World's Writing Systems (Daniels & Bright, eds., OUP. 1996) in IJAL 64: "The International Phonetic Alphabet . . . is claimed to be 'the main phonetic alphabet in use today throughout the world' (p. 821). There certainly are no formalized, or officialized, alphabets in greater use, but one wonders if the traditional Americanist symbols . . . are not more used among linguists who are describing languages" (1998: 289). Note that I have no strong feelings one way or another. I only want to suggest that arguments in favor of the IPA are not that cut and dried. Marc Picard -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From olga.fischer at HUM.UVA.NL Thu May 15 14:28:18 2003 From: olga.fischer at HUM.UVA.NL (Olga Fischer) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 10:28:18 EDT Subject: job vacancies at the university of Ansterdam/English department Message-ID: A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: vacature engels tekst.doc Type: application/msword Size: 35840 bytes Desc: not available URL: From eichorn at CLUB.LEMONDE.FR Fri May 16 01:23:23 2003 From: eichorn at CLUB.LEMONDE.FR (eichorn at CLUB.LEMONDE.FR) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:23:23 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- As another American transplanted to the UK, I second Larry's emotion. Did you know they actually replaced the middle segment of many "Teletubbies" episodes with Americanised bits? Apparently the American distributor was afraid the voices of 3-year old Brits would frighten, corrupt, or confuse American toddlers. And why are British programs relegated to the highbrow ghetto of PBS, and Canadian/Irish/Australian/NZ programmes not seen at all? No wonder Americans think they've got the best country on earth----they're blissfully unaware of the rest of the world. No wonder American teenagers have no clue how to conjugate the pluperfect mediopassive subjunctive. ------------------------------------------------------------- club.lemonde.fr, votre bureau virtuel sur Internet : Mail... Web : www.lemonde.fr From geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU Fri May 16 01:26:15 2003 From: geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU (Geoff Nathan) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:26:15 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <36859971.3261913211@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mewinters at wayne.edu Fri May 16 01:26:57 2003 From: mewinters at wayne.edu (Margaret Winters) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:26:57 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: As a user of the Trask historical book for several years in an American setting, I can attest to no problems at all with British spelling and no complaints from students either. I tend to agree that students should be exposed to variation. As for the choice of IPA or American transcription, I'd vote for the IPA as a matter of personal prejudice. When I used to teach French phonetics, I'd make my students learn those conventions, but, again, they need to learn the IPA and know that there is some language(-family) variation in transcription depending on convention. I have stronger feelings about two transcriptions in the single volume - don't do it! It will look clunky, potentially cause confusion, and add very little if anything. With emphasis, Margaret Margaret E. Winters Associate Provost for Academic Personnel 656 Kirby #4092 Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202 phone: 313 577-2256 fax: 313 577-5666 e-mail: mewinters at wayne.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From X99Lynx at AOL.COM Fri May 16 01:29:29 2003 From: X99Lynx at AOL.COM (X99Lynx at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:29:29 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 5/14/03 8:52:04 AM, ratcliffe at TUFS.AC.JP writes: << The only reasons not to use IPA are 1) when the orthography is the evidence (as often the case in historical linguistics) 2) dead languages (like Biblical Hebrew, Classical Arabic, Geez, etc.) where there is controversy about actual pronunciations and the use of IPA implies a degree of certainty which is not possible. >> Textbooks would not seem to fall under either exemption. This suggests a third alternative that would solve both problems. Print the book in IPA. "Nobody uses English orthography for anything but English, and I don't think that's enough to justify keeping it in English..." - David H. Kelley :) S. Long From bartlett at SMART.NET Fri May 16 01:29:04 2003 From: bartlett at SMART.NET (Paul O. BARTLETT) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:29:04 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <36859971.3261913211@wren.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- On Thu, 15 May 2003, Larry Trask wrote: > Lyle, I'm afraid my reply is likely to amount to more of a rant than a > piece of sober advice. Please feel free to ignore my noises. But I have > strong feelings about these matters. As a non-specialist American, I totally concur with Larry Trask on this matter. Switching to American rather than British spelling because some self-centered Yankees might be momentarily uncomfortable is simply absurd. (As I non-specialist I can't comment about different phonetic transcriptions, but I would presume that IPA is best.) -- Paul Bartlett bartlett at smart.net PGP key info in message headers From mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK Fri May 16 01:27:33 2003 From: mjj13 at CAM.AC.UK (Mark J. Jones) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:27:33 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear all, I think we have to recognise that having a universal set of phonetic symbols is a very desirable thing, and the IPA was created for that purpose. Anyone who has had to contend with numerous idiosyncratic transcription systems (often unexplained or part of a vanished tradition) when looking for data realises what a boon the IPA is. Even if it is not yet universal, we should take steps to ensure that it does become so. Imagine mathematics or music with traditional culture-specific notational systems. A nightmare!!! On the subject of British vs American spelling, I would have to side with Larry Trask in principle, but we Brits are used to spellings like 'labor' and 'center', and they don't give much cause for concern. I find 'soccer' for 'football' much more distressing... Mark Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge From rankin at KU.EDU Fri May 16 01:28:47 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (rankin) Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 21:28:47 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: seeking adviceAll, Having read the posts and replied once off the top of my head, I have given the matter of transcription a little more thought. In the interest of promulgating student understanding and not making this a referendum on Britain vs. America's "Place In The World", I would suggest the following. Most students taking a course in comparative linguistics will have had an introductory course in linguistics and, one hopes, a course in phonology -- almost certainly at least the former. Is there any degree of uniformity in the transcription systems in the introductory textbooks that are most commonly being used today? How about phonology textbooks? Use by major journals in the field might be a secondary consideration. If it turns out that there is a reasonable degree of uniformity in the books students will have already used, then by all means continue it. If there isn't any such uniformity, then we're no worse off than we were before. The other factor I would personally like to see considered is the extent to which a transcription system provides a "feature-like" way of handling segmental transcription. Examples and problems need to be given in alphabetic notation, but in the study of language change and reconstruction we are often dealing with changes affecting natural classes. Some symbol usage facilitates seeing the relationship among segments that share places or manners of articulation. Other symbol sets do not. This was one of the things in the back of my mind when I mentioned that I liked the letters with haceks to indicate strident palato-alveolars. The hacek signals something consistently to the student. I like the various diacritics used by the IPA for specialized articulations (palatalization, retroflexion, laryngealization, etc.) and other systems have similar diacritics. If only King Seijong had designed the IPA. . . . I have not done the math to see which of the various competing systems or textbooks comes out on top, given the abovementioned criteria, but I hope Lyle will. I certainly agree that it would be nice to have a standard, and maybe IPA approaches that, but I also think Marc Picard makes a good point regarding relative use and productivity. I'm just sort of glad Inow that I never wrote that historical linguistics textbook I was thinking about producing a decade or so ago. Bob Rankin Department of Linguistics University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66044 USA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu Fri May 16 12:53:05 2003 From: johanna at uclink.berkeley.edu (Johanna Nichols) Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 08:53:05 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- I think IPA should be used (as it was intended) for phonetic transcription and things that are to be sounded out, while something more readable should be used for phonemic transcriptions and the like that are intended to be read. Most of our own professional publication about reconstruction, sound changes, etc. uses approximately phonemic transcriptions, and of course discussions of loan vocabulary, morphological change, etc. almost never require phonetic transcription; why use phonetic transcription in a textbook just because it has a standard set of symbols? (Note that I'm not debating that the plethora of academic transcriptions needs to be reduced to a single system in a textbook. I'm just questioning whether that single system needs to be IPA.) I'm not sure just what counts as "American phonetic usage", but by "something more readable" I mean a system that maximizes use of Latin letters and minimizes special symbols and diacritics. Also, one that prefers letter+diacritic combinations to nonletter special symbols and writes affricates with unit symbols when possible. I believe it's worldwide common practice to use "c-hachek", barred lambda, etc. to write affricates. Another example of typical practice: if a language has one more or less back, more or less mid, more or less round vowel, write "o" and don't try to capture the phonetic details unless there are two "o"-like vowels or the phonetic details are at issue. If the language in the next problem set has a similar but lower vowel, write it "o" too even though the two languages would have different symbols for their "o" vowels if transcribed in IPA. Although it's true, as previous replies on this have noted, that we have IPA fonts and computers now and can print out IPA, our students often don't have or use IPA fonts. Typing IPA is extremely slow and complex; why should students have to go through that in order to type up homeworks? It's true that in a few years we'll have Unicode everywhere and 40,000,000-character fonts and all, but in the future are we going to have *more* time to prepare handouts and will our students have *more* time to prepare homework than now? I believe today's computer-raised younger generation reads by eye much better and faster than 15 years ago; they are accustomed to different values for familiar letters, distinctive spellings for sheer fun, etc. but not to new symbols instead of letters, and IPA or any other alphabet switch is a bigger annoyance now than formerly. Readability and typability are more important than the mere fact of standard symbols. (Anyway I would argue that common practice in phonemic and more abstract transcription is about 80-85% standard overall. So IPA vs. common practice isn't a matter of standard vs. no standard.) So I vote for picking something readable and typable and close to common practice and using it consistently throughout the book, switching to IPA only if the phonetic detail is really at issue. Johanna Nichols >===== Original Message From picard at VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA ===== >"Robert R. Ratcliffe" wrote: > >> ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >> > The second recommendation is about the phonetic symbols used, and is >> > probably subject to even stronger feelings: some suggest that the >> > book perhaps should be changed from the IPA symbols used to represent >> > examples in the first edition to American phonetic usage. What do you >> > think? What is your opinion here? >> >> Sorry, maybe I'm a bit of an >> IPA-fundamentalist. But I've never heard a rational argument against it, >> just pure academic inertia. >> > >How about sheer volume of usage? Here's a quote from Hitch's review of The >World's Writing Systems (Daniels & Bright, eds., OUP. 1996) in IJAL 64: >"The International Phonetic Alphabet . . . is claimed to be 'the main >phonetic alphabet in use today throughout the world' (p. 821). There >certainly are no formalized, or officialized, alphabets in greater use, but >one wonders if the traditional Americanist symbols . . . are not more used >among linguists who are describing languages" (1998: 289). Note that I have >no strong feelings one way or another. I only want to suggest that >arguments in favor of the IPA are not that cut and dried. > >Marc Picard - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Professor Johanna Nichols University of California, Berkeley Slavic Department #2979 Berkeley, CA 94720, USA http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jbn http://ingush.berkeley.edu:7012/ http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~chechen http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~autotyp/ 510-642-1097 (office) 510-642-2979 (department) 510-642-6220 (fax) From Roger.Wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK Mon May 19 16:41:08 2003 From: Roger.Wright at LIVERPOOL.AC.UK (roger wright) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:41:08 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <001101c31b10$40037160$e2b5ed81@ku.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- There's another reform which I would love historical linguistics handbooks to undertake in this respect, but nobody ever has; when presenting lexical items that have undergone sound changes in the past, couldn't we use IPA then rather than the orthographical forms? I mean this: textbooks on Romance historical linguistics, for example, will tell us that e.g. (in Spanish) LUPUM > lobo (usually in Italics); but although there has indeed been an orthographical change, the phonetic change is the one we're interested in, so why not write "[lupum] > [lobo]? RW From bhk at HD1.VSNL.NET.IN Mon May 19 16:43:54 2003 From: bhk at HD1.VSNL.NET.IN (bhk) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:43:54 EDT Subject: Fwd: Re: seeking advice Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- >Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 12:28:30 +0530 >To: Lyle Campbell >From: bhk >Subject: Fwd: Re: seeking advice > > >>Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 12:23:18 +0530 >>To: Lyle Campbell >>From: bhk >>Subject: Re: seeking advice >> >>Dear Lyle: >> >>For South Asian languages I find the IPA too cumbersome for two reasons: >>(1) Proto-Dravidian and several modern Dravidian lgs have >>dental-alveolar-retroflex contrast: IPA is heavily oriented toward the >>European lgs and hence uses a diacritic for dental t but leaves the >>alveolar unmarked. In South Asian lgs the dental is the unmarked segment >>and the alveolar marked (restricted in occurrence by lg). So here, >>traditionally, the alveolar is shown with a subscript bar and the dental >>remains as t.(2) Also we have so many retroflexes which, with long tails >>of IPA, look awkward in print. We use subscript dots with the following >>letters r l t s n z for retroflexes and corresponding dentals/alveolars >>do not carry diacritics I have followed what I call the Indic Roman in my >>recent book *The Dravidian Languages* (CUP 2003). There is no harm in >>using more than one transcription as long as you mention this fact in a >>note on transcription at the beginning..All the best, >> >>Krishna Bh. Krishnamurti House No. 12-13-1233 "Bhaarati", Street No. 9 Tarnaka Hyderabad 500 017 (A.P) India Phone (R): 40-2700 5665 From cecil at cecilward.com Mon May 19 16:43:04 2003 From: cecil at cecilward.com (Cecil Ward) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:43:04 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <3EE98211@bearmail.berkeley.edu> Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Johanna Nichols wrote: > So I vote for picking something readable and typable and close to common > practice Johanna said it herself, "something". The problem is what is the "something" to be, it?s as vague as that. Johanna Nichols' advice is sensible, but I disagree, speaking as a victim of various old textbooks where I had a devil of a job trying to guess what the system of transcription in use actually meant. Even if an author makes some arbitrary non-standard choice, how is the reader meant to interpret that choice and be confident about their understanding of it. So as a novice student, and victim, rather than an expert, my plea is "Enough. Stick to IPA. Finally its time for clear standards." Johanna is right about the practical problems of making use of IPA and Unicode, but I suggest that we should be finding ways of making them more usable, rather than just accepting the inadequacies of old technologies. After all, outside of academia, Microsoft Windows NT and its successors have been completely Unicode-based for ten years (down to the currently shipping Windows Xp product), so the excuses for not using these technologies are already getting more slight. Do authors really want to spend time *explaining themselves* and do users really want to spend time studying these definitions/explanations? Regards, Cecil Ward. From ejp10 at PSU.EDU Mon May 19 16:41:41 2003 From: ejp10 at PSU.EDU (Elizabeth J. Pyatt) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:41:41 EDT Subject: seeking advice In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.2.20030515111522.026fcff8@mail.wayne.edu> Message-ID: Hello: I see that there have been questions about what the "American transcription" system is. I was interpreting it to mean the use of some alternate phonetic symbols - specifically s-hachek for IPA long s, z-hacheck for Z (affricate), c-hachek and j-hachek for the affricates; y to mean a palatal glide (vs. IPA /j/) and u-umlaut to mean front-rounded vowel (vs. IPA /y/) and o-umlaut to mean mid front-rounded vowel (vs. IPA o-slash); t-dot/d-dot to represent retroflex stops; n-tilde to represent palatal n. This system is used in some phonology textbooks such as "Phonology in Generative Grammar" by Michael Kenstowicz. Although it is not pure IPA, it is a valid transcription system used by practicing phonologists, particularly those studying Native American languages. I have no opinion on wheter to use IPA or a modified transcription system, although I agree consistency is important. Furthermore, there is no reason to contribute to the general perception that Americans just can't handle phonetic symbols, a perception that is reinforced by the fact that American dictionary makers, and only they, refuse to use IPA for pronunciation guides. I think this refers to the practice of Websters and other American dictionaries of using "cheesy" phonetic spelling as in "long i" to represent the /ay/ or /aj/ diphthong. I also consider this to be inane and very irritating. I hope that's not what the publisher wants. I also concur that Americans can cope with British spellings, although it may be a standard publish practice to translate items into an American edition. For instance, my Handbook of the IPA, printed in the UK by a British company (Cambridge University Press) is using the American spelling (I did buy it in the US, so maybe it's a special print run just for us). So at this point, I would like to add a plea for my cheerfully oblivious fellow citizens that if we have been exposed to American editions of textbooks, it may be out of our control. However, I have never heard anyone strenuously object to the existence of British/Canadian spelling or seriously say that they cannot read it. We just have to special order the books if we want to see them in UK spelling (and some people do just that). Cheers Elizabeth Pyatt On the other hand, some transcription traditions are older than IPA, and I think it would look really funny transcribing Sanskrit palatal glides with [j] and the postalveolar affricate with a [dZ]. Do we really want to write 'joga' and 'radZa'? Sorry, but even German-speaking linguists write Sanskrit with 'y'. Geoff Nathan Geoffrey S. Nathan Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology, Wayne State University Linguistics Program (snailmail) Department of English Wayne State University Detroit, MI, 48202 Phone Numbers Computing and Information Technology: (313) 577-1259 Linguistics (English): (313) 577-8621 -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. Instructional Designer Education Technology Services, TLT Penn State University ejp10 at psu.edu, (814) 865-0805 228A Computer Building University Park, PA 16801 http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10 http://tlt.psu.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From 0210186C at STUDENT.GLA.AC.UK Mon May 19 16:43:24 2003 From: 0210186C at STUDENT.GLA.AC.UK (David Webster Hare Cochran) Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 12:43:24 EDT Subject: Stochastic Grammar and Catastrophe Theory Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- Dear All, This is primarily a bibliographical query, as my literature searches on these topics so far have turned up only indirectly relevant material. Is anyone aware of any work published, or theses written on either; 1) Diachronic and/or developmental applications of Stochastic Tree Substitution Grammars/Data-Oriented Parsing? or; 2)Applications of Catastrophe Theory to syntax, again, particularly from a diachronic or developmental perspective? With thanks in advance, Dave Cochran. Random Student, Department of English Language, University of Glasgow. From erickson at KUMAGAKU.AC.JP Tue May 20 20:24:49 2003 From: erickson at KUMAGAKU.AC.JP (Blaine Erickson) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:24:49 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: This is a little off-topic, but I think it raises an important point that seems to have been misunderstood. "Elizabeth J. Pyatt" , apparently quoting someone, wrote: > Furthermore, there is no reason to contribute to the > general perception that Americans just can't handle > phonetic symbols, a perception that is reinforced by > the fact that American dictionary makers, and only > they, refuse to use IPA for pronunciation guides. > > I think this refers to the practice of Websters and > other American dictionaries of using "cheesy" phonetic > spelling as in "long i" to represent the /ay/ or /aj/ > diphthong. I also consider this to be inane and very > irritating. I hope that's not what the publisher wants. Although I laud the use of the word "cheesy," dictionary publishers have a very good reason for not using IPA: no one wants to buy a dictionary that tells them they "talk wrong." If dictionaries were to use IPA, then they would have to settle on one pronunciation, and all non-standard speakers would therefore be "wrong"--according to the dictionary, which for non-linguists is the de facto authority on "proper" usage. On the other hand, if dictionary makers use a system in which they define the pronunciation value of symbols with familiar words (i.e., the system they use now), then users can figure out how to say unfamiliar words, in a way that is appropriate for their dialect. I, for one, don't want to be told by my dictionary that I'm "wrong" for not having a contrast between the vowels in _cot_ and _caught_, or that I'm "wrong" for maintaining the / contrast. On the other hand, I wouldn't want a dictionary that didn't represent these differently. So while there are excellent dialectal (and economic!) reasons for not using IPA in dictionaries, and although it is important for students to understand that there are several phonetic transcription traditions, I, like just about everyone else commenting on this, think that Lyle should stick with IPA in his book. Best wishes, Blaine Erickson erickson at kumagaku.ac.jp -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ERobert52 at AOL.COM Tue May 20 20:25:24 2003 From: ERobert52 at AOL.COM (ERobert52 at AOL.COM) Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:25:24 EDT Subject: seeking advice Message-ID: In a message dated 19/05/03 18:30:02 GMT Daylight Time, cecil at CECILWARD.COM writes: > Johanna is right about the practical problems of making use of IPA and > Unicode, but I suggest that we should be finding ways of making them more > usable, rather than just accepting the inadequacies of old technologies. > After all, outside of academia, Microsoft Windows NT and its successors > have been completely Unicode-based for ten years (down to the currently > shipping Windows Xp product), so the excuses for not using these > technologies are already getting more slight. > > In most circumstances (including printing books, which was the original question) the use of IPA is perfectly straightforward and based on a universally accepted standard. If this applies, there is no reason to deviate from that norm or to perpetuate minority deviations from it. But it doesn't work for everything (e.g. email messages) and I don't expect technology to provide a universally portable or backward compatible solution to this anytime soon. There are still 3 incompatible systems for encoding Cyrillic, so providing support to serve the relatively tiny community that wants to use IPA is not going to be at the top of anybody's list of priorities other than ours. But in circumstances where IPA won't work, we can use SAMPA. This is a system with an agreed systematic correspondence with most IPA symbols (or all of them, if we include John Wells' suggested extensions), typable on any keyboard that supports the Latin alphabet, and universally portable, even to ancient legacy equipment, as it uses only the 7-bit ASCII character set. If you can't use one, you can use the other. Ed Robertson -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK Wed May 21 22:16:49 2003 From: larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK (Larry Trask) Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 18:16:49 EDT Subject: Q: Borrowing of French Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- The French word , 'chestnut' and later 'brown', is first attested as a color term only in 1824, in Balzac (I am told). Since then, it has achieved basic status in French, and several recent sources suggest that it is gaining ground at the expense of the older word (and that it has displaced more or less completely in some regions of France). But I'm interested in the way has been borrowed into the other Romance languages. Contemporary sources tell me that the basic, unmarked words for 'brown' in these other languages are as follows: Occitan , Portuguese , European Spanish (but apparently not American Spanish) , Catalan , Italian , Romanian , and Judeo-Spanish . (I have no data for Galician, Sardinian, or the Rhaeto-Romance varieties, or for Brazilian Portuguese.) These borrowings appear to be recent. For Spanish, doesn't even get an entry in Corominas's well-known etymological dictionary. For Italian, dictionaries up until about the 1960s give as the unmarked term for 'brown', and cite only as 'dark brown'. But all contemporary sources insist that 'brown' is , while is now confined to hair and skin. For Romanian, a 1952 dictionary gives and as the words for 'brown', and is not entered. A 1986 grammar gives as the general term for 'brown', and cites only as 'maroon'. Yet all the contemporary sources I've managed to consult insist that 'brown' is and nothing else. For Judeo-Spanish, I'm told that is recently borrowed and still marginal, but without competitors. I find all this more than a little surprising. Has anyone made a study of it? Or can anybody explain to me how and why this word has seemingly spread so far and so fast -- apparently in some cases displacing earlier words? Please reply to me, and I'll summarize to the list. Larry Trask COGS University of Sussex Brighton BN1 9QH UK larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk From X99Lynx at AOL.COM Thu May 22 13:17:15 2003 From: X99Lynx at AOL.COM (X99Lynx at AOL.COM) Date: Thu, 22 May 2003 09:17:15 EDT Subject: Q: Borrowing of French Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- In a message dated 5/21/03 6:24:21 PM, larryt at COGS.SUSX.AC.UK writes: << The French word , 'chestnut' and later 'brown', is first attested as a color term only in 1824, in Balzac (I am told).>> A quick note: ('marones') appears as a color word in English in 1791 in a translation of Claude-Louis Berthollet?s "Elements de l?art de la teinture", a highly influential and often revised and reprinted scientific treatise on commercial dyeing - an industry that would have significant economic and cultural importance in the 19th Century. Also, in the same translation, a "light marrone" is compared to cinnamon, consistent with "maroon" generally and rather consistently being used in English to refer to a dark or drab red hue, not a brown. (E.g., Pantone Process Maroon #208). I realize this was not the question, but this would give some indication that the word was already in use in reference to a dye -- if not an abstract color -- in French before Balzac. And possibly that it referred to a n attempt to scientifically or commercially standardize a particular fabric dye name early on. And also that this color itself was not equivalent to a modern color wheel "brown." And finally, at least in its first mention in English given in the OED (1594), "marrons" are mentioned in distinction to chestnuts. Steve Long From l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Sun May 25 14:52:01 2003 From: l.campbell at LING.CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Lyle Campbell) Date: Sun, 25 May 2003 10:52:01 EDT Subject: summary, thanks, advice Message-ID: Dear All, Thanks to everyone who wrote/responded to my request for help and advice (about the revised edition of my historical linguistics textbook). Unexpectedly, many answered (I believe I received some 50 messages addressed just to me, not to the group as a whole, which is what I expected, plus the large number who wrote to the whole group, unexpected). I write now to thank all, and also to apologize for being so swamped I'm not able to respond to everyone individually. Given the number of responses, perhaps I should provide something of a summary of answers with respect to the 2 main questions I had asked. First, though, I received only a couple of (very helpful) messages with feedback on how to improve the book and with corrections that ought to be made. I would be extremely grateful to receive more advice of this sort. About whether the IPA forms should be replaced by or supported by the addition of American phonetic spellings brought interesting comments and much helpful advice. It is clear the majority see IPA as best. However, many also point out how it is important in citing forms from language and language areas with their own traditions to utilize the conventions of those areas. My tentative decision at the moment, then, is as follows. I will rely on the IPA and use it wherever possible, but at the same time when citing forms which have a conventional spelling, I will use those representations also. Thus, Sanskrit, Gothic, etc. will look the way Sanskrit, Gothic, etc. typically look but will have IPA representations whenever needed. Similarly, Finnish, Estonian, Spanish, German, French, etc. will be cited in their standard traditional orthographies but with IPA to make them clear. In the case of American Indian languages and others, where there is a strong tradition of, say, "y" instead of "j" or of "s" and "c" plus haceks instead of long s and t+long s, I will present both the form as expected by people working with these languages and in IPA. In the end, most examples that occur in an introductory historical linguistics book are not going to require detailed or complicated phonetic transcriptions -- some do. As an aside, though, as some respondents pointed out, it is probably important to keep in mind that there is a good deal that the IPA does not handle at all -- sounds which have no IPA symbols --, other things it does not handle well, and that there is considerable variation in the deployment of IPA symbols among scholars in spite of the fact that mostly we use such a system of transcription for the potential uniformity it provides. One other comment, American phonetic usage is not at all the hodgepodge some seem to suggest. It is clear and consistent and codified in most of the matters where the IPA is clear (cf. for example, Geoffrey K. Pullum and William A. Ladusaw. 1986. Phonetic symbol guide. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.) It also has a history to rival the IPA and probably until very recently numbers of users comparable to the IPA. That said, I do intend to rely principally on the IPA and utilize representations only when the tradition surrounding the languages involved seems also to require other representations in addition. About whether UK or US spelling conventions/orthographic practices should be used, most felt it was not a big deal one way or the other. This is also my own feeling; I asked for advice on this because of unclear advice I had been given about switching. It should be noted, for the record, that with respect to the -ise/-ize, -isation/-ization, this is not really a division along national lines. Rather, in the UK the Oxford dictionaries (OED in particular, but also the Pocket Oxford Dictionary and others) follow the -z- tradition, while many others go for -s-. In New Zealand, most use -s-, but a surprising number instead use the -z- conventions, in spite of overwhelming support for the -s- versions in schools, institutions, government, newspapers. I will weigh the matter further and then decide which convention to follow. However, to repeat, I agree with the majority who do not see this as a very significant issue. (However, the tradition one is educated in appears to have powerful impact on what one considers proper or best in this matter; I have to admit, coming from the -z- school, I find myself subconsciously thinking that -civilisation- with -s- is uncivilized -- sympathies with and apologies to all who feel just the opposite!) (Just one additional parenthetical remark about this -- I was surprised by a couple of strong anti-American comments I received in this context. I believe you can be for or against George W. Bush and what he stands for using either spelling convention. I was sad to imagine the many Americans who share these moral and political stands who would apparently not be exempt from the negative sentiments. Weren't there some "-ise" UK supporters of Bush (and Blair) thickly involved in recent events?; I know plenty of "-ize"-ites deeply opposed. Moral: don't spell at all?) Thanks, Lyle -- Professor Lyle Campbell, Dept. of Linguistics University of Canterbury Christchurch, New Zealand Fax: 64-3-364-2969 Phone: 64-3-364-2242 (office), 64-3-364-2089 (Linguistics dept) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mikko.laitinen at helsinki.fi Mon May 26 14:44:21 2003 From: mikko.laitinen at helsinki.fi (Mikko Laitinen) Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 10:44:21 EDT Subject: Call for papers / reminder Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- (Apologies for multiple postings.) Call for papers The Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the Department of English, University of Helsinki, organizes DIATYPE Symposium on diachrony, dialectology and typological linguistics Helsinki, 16-18 October, 2003 Contributions are invited to a symposium on diachrony, dialectology and language typology to be held in Helsinki in mid-October 2003. The aim of the symposium is to explore connections between these three fields of research, looking for ways in which historical linguists and dialectologists could learn from insights to be gained from typological studies, and vice versa. The symposium is organised by the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English (VARIENG), a National Centre of Excellence funded by the Academy of Finland and the University of Helsinki. All contributions to the symposium need not necessarily focus on questions to do with the English language, although the organizers will naturally be most interested in topics connected with the evolution and regional variation of English. Invited speakers and their topics: ? Dieter Kastovsky (University of Vienna): Historical morphology from a typological point of view ? Bernd Kortmann (University of Freiburg): The European dimension of the new partnership between dialectology and typology ? Anna Siewierska (Lancaster University): On the development of non- accusative person agreement Abstracts: The deadline for submission of abstracts (in English; max 300 words) is June 10, 2003. Please submit your abstract by e-mail to diatype- organizers at helsinki.fi. The abstract should be included in the body of the message. E-mail submissions are recommended. If, however, you send your abstract by ordinary mail, please provide an e-mail address as a contact address. Participants will be notified of acceptance by June 16, 2003. The accepted abstracts will be published on the web pages of the symposium at: http://www.eng.helsinki.fi/varieng/main/news.htm Registration: The deadline for registration for all participants is September 1, 2003. Register by e-mail to the address diatype-organizers at helsinki.fi. The registration fee is EUR 50. Accommodation: The City of Helsinki Tourist Office web pages provide several links to accommodation in Helsinki. The pages can be accessed from the symposium web pages or directly from http://www.hel.fi/tourism/html/english/artikkelit/index.html. The academic programme of the symposium will run from late Thursday afternoon till Saturday afternoon. The conference venue will be in the centre of Helsinki in the vicinity of the Senate Square. For further information, please contact diatype-organizers at helsinki.fi. The organizing committee: ? Terttu Nevalainen, e-mail: terttu.nevalainen at helsinki.fi ? Juhani Klemola, e-mail: juhani.klemola at uwasa.fi ? Mikko Laitinen (secretary of the symposium), e-mail: mikko.laitinen at helsinki.fi Address: Department of English, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 24 (Unioninkatu 40B), FIN-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. From rankin at KU.EDU Fri May 30 20:56:13 2003 From: rankin at KU.EDU (rankin) Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 16:56:13 EDT Subject: Outline maps again. Message-ID: ----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This is for the individual who was looking for outline maps for dialect work. I ran across this useful site: it provides downloadable outline maps of all the nations and continents of the world as well as regional maps and, in the US, each state and even each county within the states. Hope this is helpful. http://geography.about.com/library/blank/blxindex.htm Best, Bob Rankin Dept. of Linguistics University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66044 USA