informatics

[Jonathan Lighter]

> Sorry, what's notable about this?

Notable to me and conceivably to some others of equally limited vocabulary.

Does that answer your question?

JL


On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 12:10 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: informatics
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Apr 15, 2014, at 10:50 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
> > On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >>
> >> Major in them at Adelphi:
> >>
> >>
> http://onlinemshidegree.adelphi.edu/lp-new/?Access_Code=AU-MSHI-YAHOOCONTENT&kwd=stream_ad&utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=stream_ad
> >>
> >> It used to be that such gimmicky new words were restricted to greedy,
> >> cynical advertisers. Now institutions of higher learning are inventing
> them.
> >>
> >> Oh. Right. Silly me.
> >
> > Sorry, what's notable about this? OED says "informatics" has been
> > around since 1967 (and "bioinformatics" since 1976). Formed from
> > Russian "informatika," with parallels in German and French. It might
> > be a bit more popular in the UK -- in the States you'd more often see
> > "information science."
>
> It's also sometimes used for what linguists more usually call "information
> structure".  I used it in a seminar on that topic (dealing with old and new
> information, topic and comment, focus, etc., as explored in work since the
> Prague School on "functional sentence perspective" in the 1920s) but
> switched to "information structure" because of the possible confusion with
> the uses Ben mentions above, and I think it's no longer used in that way.
>  See e.g.
>
> Vallduví, Enric (2003). A theory of informatics. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach,
> ed., _Semantics: Critical concepts in linguistics_, vol. 1, 359-384.
> London: Routledge.
>
> But then E.V. is a native speaker of Catalan.
>
> LH
>
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