random BE slang in the HDAS

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jul 26, 2004, at 10:27 AM, Beverly Flanigan wrote:

> ...BTW, the audiotapes accompanying LF are priceless, and I've had
> them for years.  But when I was at OSU a couple of years ago and asked
> for a replacement for one I had lost (on the Ten Top Languages of the
> World--anyone have it?), Brian Joseph said they could no longer find
> them!  What a loss.

sigh.  here you see the down side of running the Language Files as a
cottage industry, with new sets of people preparing each edition;
there's nobody responsible for maintaining continuity, keeping files,
etc.  meanwhile, offices get moved around, the department moves to a
new building, the staff at OSU Press changes, and so on.  things get
lost, or thrown away in housecleaning fits.

when i left ohio state (physically; i still have an emeritus
appointment there) in 1998, rather than truck this stuff across the
country, i donated to the department library my complete set of Intro
to Language materials, going back to the early '70s (collections of
loose-leaf files, hence the name "Language Files") and including copies
of all the editions (including a preliminary one) of LF.  not long
after, the department library was disbanded (to make more space), and
its contents were given to the OSU main library, which discarded
material it had no use for.  obviously it had no use for outdated
editions of a book it already had several copies of.  i tried to get
someone to save the LF stuff and ship it back to me (at my expense),
but apparently my appeal came too late.

so now i have none of it, except the two most recent editions.  no
tapes.  and a piece of the historical record is lost.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), who started the whole thing 30+
years ago