diacritical marks WAS Re: Word (Phrase?) of the Year (so far)?; Rambo'd (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Laurence Horn]

On Feb 1, 2013, at 9:50 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> I checked the list of dissertations on the UCLA Linguistics web site, and
> neither of ours is listed.  We obviously spent at least a year there at the
> same time.  I was doing coursework from Fall '67 through Summer 69, when I
> took a position in African linguistics at Illinois.  I finished my
> dissertation in  Summer 1971.  What was your topic?
>
> Herb

We overlapped a bunch, as I recall--I was doing East African linguistics when you were doing, if memory serves, West African.  Apparently the dissertations listed at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/research/55-ucla-phd-dissertations.html are just the downloadable ones.  I don't know how they decided which ones to include.  Mine was, as I said, from 1972, the title was "On the semantics of logical operators in English", and if nothing else it did contribute a first cite to the OED.  ("Scalar implicature")

Actually, I see that none of Barbara Partee's students who received a dissertation (and there were several) are listed.  Coincidence?

LH
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: diacritical marks WAS Re: Word (Phrase?) of the Year (so
>>              far)?; Rambo'd (UNCLASSIFIED)
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On Jan 31, 2013, at 11:18 PM, W Brewer wrote:
>>
>>> LH:  <<<"Söze".  The question of when the tradition of a following "e"
>> can
>>> be used is a separate one>>>
>>> WB:  In my German class in days of yore (I once more reference mein
>> Lehrer,
>>> Adolf Hoffmann), I probably learned that the German Doppelpunkt was a
>>> manuscript practice, an abbreviation of a Frakturschrift letter <e>,
>> which
>>> was penned (mit einem Feder) sort of like two upright harpoons joined
>>> together, sort of like a pointy lower-case <n>. The Frakturschrift <e>
>> was
>>> moved from behind /a,o, u/, shrunk and placed on top of the vowel.
>>>    Once upon a time, a general editor in Taiwan ordered me to "stop
>>> putting umlauts" on people's vowels; there had been complaints. I
>> replied,
>>> okay, no more umlauts, but the DAIAERESES MUST STAND!" Of course, what he
>>> meant was, stop putting any diacritics whatsoever on manuscripts.
>>>    Alas, I was undoubtedly one of the last PhD candidates at UCLA to
>>> crank out a dissertation on a manual typewriter, with dead keys for
>> accents
>>> and double-dots, tilde, and other civilized goodies I have long forgotten
>>> about. Damn you, Bill Gates.
>>>
>> I'm (virtually) sure yours is indeed a later manually cranked out
>> dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the
>> degree of Doctor of Philosophy at UCLA than mine (1972) was, but I'll bet
>> you didn't have to go through each of 306 pages to retype the page numbers
>> because the archivist determined that the page numbers on the submitted
>> version were too close to (or too far from, I forget which) the bottom of
>> the page.  There is something to be said for digital word processing.
>>
>> LH
>>
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