[Lingtyp] Lingtyp Digest, Vol 10, Issue 13

Tue Jul 7 09:23:52 UTC 2015

Tip to French French writers: if you chose 'English' in the language settings (onglet 'révision', puis 'langue'), then the non-breaking space won't be automatically inserted to the great pleasure of the editors! Marine Vuillermet-----
Radboud Excellence Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for Linguistic Studies
Radboud University Nijmegen
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 Envoyé le : Lundi 6 juillet 2015 17h16
 Objet : Lingtyp Digest, Vol 10, Issue 13

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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: Technology standards in conflict with linguistic
      standards (Plank)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 6 Jul 2015 17:15:45 +0200
From: Plank <frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de>
To: Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com>
Cc: "<LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>"
    <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] Technology standards in conflict with
    linguistic    standards
Message-ID: <0DCCAE14-35B4-48BE-92FD-4901658A8E8E at uni-konstanz.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Some further terms to watch out for, Hedvig, in "What exactly is ...?", Linguist. Typol., 17: 267-8, 2003.  Only CONATIVE got sorted out so far, thanks to Nigel Vincent, LT 17, 269--289.  PLURACTIONAL had not been put on this initial list:  with hindsight an inexcusable omission, for IS everybody agreed that pluractionals are indeed verbal NUMBERS, in Africa, America, and Eurasia and Oceania too?  Looking forward to a further instalment of "What exactly is ...?"  Submissions can be freestyle, within reason;  but once you're accepted you must follow the LT style (attached). 

What Bernhard probably had in mind, like Aristotle and Cicero before him, was that variatio delectat in RHETORICAL styles, a quality of scholarly publishing not easy to define but still perceptible, and usually correlated with national academic traditions.  Journal publishing in linguistics and elsewhere clearly favours the Anglo-American rhetorical style, putting the rest of us at an additional, rhetorical as well as grammatical and lexical, disadvantage.

As to TEXT-STRUCTURE styles, which Martin, et multi alii, would like to see unified, ain't they already?  I don't see Linguist. Typol. differ dramatically from his recommendations at http://www.frank-m-richter.de/freescienceblog/2015/03/18/how-to-make-linguistics-publication-more-efficient-use-discipline-wide-style-rules, and I can't believe this journal is unique.  (Well, in other senses it IS.)

TYPOGRAPHICAL styles can remain diverse, Bernhard -- though you won't have much of a say here, unless you do do-it-yourself publishing.  Which reminds me, since we're at it, I've long wanted to know from (French) French writers whether it is for them a typographical or a text-structural matter to leave a (non-breaking, originally thin) space before bi-partite punctuation marks (i.e., all other than period and comma).  Assuming they are text-structural, deleting these damn spaces has cost me a lot of work over 20 years of editing Linguist. Typol., for despite everything we do get submissions from France.  But what if they were merely typographical, or on the contrary were intended as making a rhetorical statement -- and should have remained on both grounds?!  

Does LaTeX have a solution ?  By the way, the editorial office as well as the typesetters of Linguist. Typol. are able to deal with LaTeX as well as with other reasonable formats in use among reasonable typologists (including Word).  

Frans  

Frans Plank
Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Konstanz
78457 Konstanz
Germany

Tel  +49 (0)7531 88 2656
Fax +49 (0)7531 88 4190
eMail frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de
http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/plank/

On 06 Jul 2015, at 15:27, Hedvig Skirgård <hedvig.skirgard at gmail.com> wrote:

> (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)
> 
> ____________________________________
> Sharing is caring, if you stumble across something you think I might find interesting then send it my way. I do the same.
> 
> 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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