[Lingtyp] Technology standards in conflict with linguistic standards

Mon Jul 6 13:27:29 UTC 2015

(Warning: Tangent. Thank you Grev that's another entry in my list of "terms
to watch out for" aka terms that are used differently in different
regions/families or thought to be restricted to one region/family or show
other unusual behaviour. If anyone has any other suggestions, feel free to
add them here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c13_SuVEH6gcvxnschtKtk3o4uucg1kMqxFUpGTrMB8/edit?usp=sharing

/Hedvig)

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Please forgive me for any mistakes of orthography (especially Swedish and
French diacritics), I try to answer as fast as possible and sometimes that
results in less than optimal key board output.

2015-07-06 23:22 GMT+10:00 <g.corbett at surrey.ac.uk>:

>  I guess there is a small answer and a larger answer.
>
> small: changing commas to full stops for journal A, and then back to
> commas for journal B isn’t a great use of people’s time. Better we
> diversify our thinking rather than our reference formatting. Share the
> tools but diversify the products.
>
>  larger: we don’t always realise which things are the same and which are
> different, and that’s a waste too. For instance, there are Africanists who
> believe that ‘pluractionals' are special to the languages of Africa. But
> they are what others call ‘verbal number’ and you can find that all over.
>
>  And then there’s the worst case scenario:
> http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~gtan/bug/localCopies/marsOrbiter
>
>  Very best, Grev
>
>
>  On 6 Jul 2015, at 13:30, Hurch, Bernhard (bernhard.hurch at uni-graz.at) <
> bernhard.hurch at uni-graz.at> wrote:
>
>  Can anybody tell me why everything must be standardized, unified,
> vereinheitlicht?
>
>  Can’t people live with diversification / in a diversified world?
>
>  Aren’t different styles the (necessary) result of different traditions,
> different discourse types and different views of the world?
>
>  I seem not to know what modern typology is about. Traditional typology
> presumably wasn’t like that.
>
>  Best wishes,
>
>  Bernhard
>
>
>
>  Am 06.07.2015 um 12:38 schrieb Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>:
>
>  On 04.07.15 08:37, Kilu von Prince wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
>  I agree that acceptance of articles in LaTeX format should be more
> widespread than it is at the moment. I may add that the style guides of
> many linguistics journals could be significantly improved if they
> incorporated more of the established best-practices in typesetting that are
> automatically implemented by default LaTeX styles.
>
>
> Moreover, it would be better if linguistics journals agreed on a single
> style guide, see
> http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2015/03/18/how-to-make-linguistics-publication-more-efficient-use-discipline-wide-style-rules/
>
> These issues should ideally be discussed by a committee of linguistics
> editors, such as the LSA's CeLxJ (http://celxj.org/).
>
> There will be a meeting of European linguistics editors just before the
> next SLE meeting in Leiden (see http://sle2015.eu/programme,
> "pre-conference mini-workshop"), which will primarily discuss other issues,
> but where we may decide to found such a committee of the SLE.
>
> Regards,
> Martin
>
>
>  Also, to share a related anecdote,  it is sometimes in fact the editors
> rather than the publisher who insist on a submission in .doc format. I once
> submitted an articles to a Benjamins journal. When the editors requested a
> .doc version, I asked them to speak with their publisher if they couldn't
> work with a LaTeX or PDF file. Then I learned that it was the editors
> themselves who needed the .doc file for their workflow during the revisions
> process. I'd like to appeal to editors to have mercy on their LaTeX-using
> authors and try to develop a workflow that is compatible with PDFs.
> Converting LaTeX to .doc is time-consuming and depressing.
>
>  Kind regards,
> Kilu
>
> On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 1:35 PM, Guillaume Jacques <rgyalrongskad at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> Dear Don,
>>
>>  It is obvious to anyone who has learned LaTeX that word-processors like
>> "word" or "open office" are completely inadapted to the typesetting of
>> linguistics dissertations or articles. LaTeX is superior in particular for
>> handling aligned glossed examples (package gb4e), complex figures (tikz),
>> Stammbäume, cross-references, bibliography, complex scripts and of course
>> math formulas. I actually now require from all my new MA and PhD students
>> to write their dissertations in LaTeX (in general, three days are enough to
>> master the most important commands).
>>
>>  Fortunately, the number of linguistics journal and of publishers
>> accepting LaTeX is now growing year after year. At the present moment, most
>> if not all linguistics journals published by the following major publishers
>> accept LaTeX submissions (only those I have personnally tested; the list is
>> not exhaustive):
>>
>>  Mouton de Gruyter
>> Benjamins
>> Brill
>> Elsevier
>> MIT Press
>>
>>  I rarely have to convert my articles into word format anymore.
>>
>>  Publishers that are still lagging behind with LaTeX include (we should
>> collectively give them some pressure to catch up with the rest of the
>> world):
>> Cambridge University Press (for instance, Journal of the IPA)
>> Chicago University Press (IJAL)
>> (perhaps also Wiley)
>>
>>  Some journasl do not use LaTeX files, but will convert them for you
>> (from my personal experience, Anthropological Linguistics and Journal of
>> Chinese Linguistics)
>>
>>  If you submit to a collective volume for Mouton de Gruyter or
>> Benjamins, they should be able to handle a LaTeX submission even if most of
>> the volume is in word, but the editors of the volume may have to insist a
>> little bit.
>>
>>  Best wishes,
>>
>>  Guillaume
>>
>> 2015-07-04 11:22 GMT+02:00 Don Killian <donald.killian at helsinki.fi>:
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> After fighting with Microsoft Word for the past few weeks, I was
>>> wondering if there is any way we can find additional standards for article
>>> and chapter submission?
>>>
>>> It seems that a majority of editors still have a fairly strict
>>> requirement of Microsoft Word and Times New Roman, even if the publisher
>>> itself is more open to other formats. Times New Roman is more flexible, but
>>> I have not had very much luck with alternatives to Word (such as Open
>>> Office or pdfs made from LaTeX).
>>>
>>> This is a problem for more than one reason. The biggest problem I can
>>> see (in addition to the fact that both Word as well as Times New Roman are
>>> proprietary!) is that the technological requirements do not actually
>>> support the formatting requirements we suggest. Neither Word nor Times New
>>> Roman support the IPA in its entirety.
>>>
>>> While these problems do not affect all linguists (such as those who do
>>> not have certain sounds in their languages they work on), it definitely
>>> affects plenty of others.
>>>
>>> For instance, there is no way to change glyph selection in Word, and <a>
>>> changes to <ɑ> when italicized. It is relatively common to italicize words
>>> when you mix languages in text. But if you are discussing a language which
>>> has both a and ɑ, this is problematic. Furthermore, Word has no way of
>>> rendering the MH or HM tonal contours properly, in any font. Those symbols
>>> are only supported in Charis SIL and Doulos SIL fonts, and Word renders
>>> them incorrectly.
>>>
>>> There are plenty of other difficulties (e.g. making a vowel chart), so
>>> these are just some examples.
>>>
>>> I realize the main reason for using Word/TNR is simplicity and what
>>> people are used to, but I do find it problematic that our technology
>>> requirements do not support or make it easy to deal with common problems in
>>> our field.
>>>
>>> Is there any way to change this? LaTeX does support almost everything I
>>> have ever needed, but I admit it is not always very easy to learn or use. I
>>> would be happy to hear alternative views or suggestions.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>>
>>> Don
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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