13.1108, Sum: 'Quinto Lingo' Magazine

Mon Apr 22 01:59:03 UTC 2002

LINGUIST List:  Vol-13-1108. Sun Apr 21 2002. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 13.1108, Sum: 'Quinto Lingo' Magazine

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=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Sun, 21 Apr 2002 00:27:52 +0800
From:  "Karen S. Chung" <karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw>
Subject:  Quinto Lingo

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Sun, 21 Apr 2002 00:27:52 +0800
From:  "Karen S. Chung" <karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw>
Subject:  Quinto Lingo

    Eleven people responded to the 'Quinto Lingo' post of 4/7/02 (archived
at  http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-953.html#1). As I suspected,
_Quinto Lingo_ was somewhere in the life of some of the real live linguists
around us.

    Two respondents hadn't heard of the magazine, but wondered if one could
still subscribe (sorry, no - it's been defunct since the 1980s), and if
somebody might start it up again.

    A more modest idea might be putting all the back issues online at some
point - if anybody is interested, has the Web space, and can resolve the
copyright problems. Of course starting it up again, or a similar
publication, would be great. I don't know what kind of a profit _QL_ ever
made, but at this point I can only imagine it as being a labor of love, and
publishing it mainly or solely online. There are so many linguistics
journals these days; what was special about _QL_ was that it was *leisure*
reading in linguistics, not always as rigorous as one might like, but really
lots of fun to read, and full of fascinating bits useful in filling in the
background knowledge of a linguist in any specialty.

    Well, in any case, my curiosity has been satisfied. Below follow the
responses (or excerpts thereof), in order of receipt. Many thanks to:

Suzette Haden Elgin         ocls at madisoncounty.net
Yehuda N. Falk                msyfalk at mscc.huji.ac.il
Lorna Feldman                 lfeldman at lagcc.cuny.edu
David Gil                          gil at eva.mpg.de
Kathy H.                           kaylynnkathy at hotmail.com
John E. Koontz                 John.Koontz at Colorado.edu
Simone Mueller                Simone.Mueller at anglistik.uni-giessen.de>
Dwan Shipley                   Dwan.Shipley at wwu.edu
Jennifer Spenader             jennifer at ling.su.se
Gary H. Toops                  gary.toops at wichita.edu
Lynell R. Williams            sktutorc at isu.edu

     Regards,

     Karen Steffen Chung
     National Taiwan University
     karchung at ccms.ntu.edu.tw

     Phonetics and more at:
     http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung

(1) Dwan Shipley         Dwan.Shipley at wwu.edu

    I am one who really appreciated my subscription to Quinto Lingo as a
kid. I was either in Junior High or High School and I thoroughly enjoyed
them. I was greatly disappointed when it went defunct. I don't know what
happened to my copies but I'm sure I don't have them. We have moved around
so much.

(2) Yehuda N. Falk             msyfalk at mscc.huji.ac.il

    Quinto Lingo. Now there's a name I haven't heard in years.
    For reasons unbeknownst to me, my parents had a subscription to it. It
may have been for my benefit, as I have always been interested in language,
but I don't know for sure. I don't remember the ads, but many of the
articles were fascinating. I, too, learned the name Mario Pei from Quinto
Lingo, and when I was in high school in the 1970s I read some of his more
pop-science oriented books.
    How much of a role did it have in my becoming a linguist? I honestly
don't know.

Yehuda N. Falk
Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel
Personal Web Site    http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/
Departmental Web Site    http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~english

(3) Lorna Feldman         lfeldman at lagcc.cuny.edu

    How nice to find that someone else knows about Quinto Lingo!  I think I
still have all the copies from my subscription which I had during junior
high.  The magazine certainly was an influence on my decision to go into
linguistics, but I subscribed to it because I already loved studying
languages.  One thing I remember was folding the pages so I wouldn't be
tempted to read in English.
    An interesting side note:  Quinto Lingo was published by Rodale Press,
which also published Prevention Magazine.

(4) Suzette Haden Elgin         ocls at madisoncounty.net

    I'm one of those who was crazy about _Quinto Lingo_ , although I was an
adult before I came across it;  I also shared it with my kids.

(5) Jennifer Spenader             jennifer at ling.su.se

    My piano teacher gave me a set of Quinto Lingo's from the 60's or 70's
when I was about 12. I still remember that they had one article called "What
is it exactly that linguistics do?" or something to that effect. I remember
reading that and thinking "I am going to be a linguist". So I would say
Quinto Lingo had a great effect on my life.  ... It was fun to see your
question on the internet because it reminds me of what got me here. Fun to
see that so many other people were also influenced as well!

(6) David Gil             gil at eva.mpg.de

    Yes, I subscribed to it as a 14-16 year old kid, for the two years
during which I lived, with my parents in the US.

David Gil
Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Webpage:  http://monolith.eva.mpg.de/~gil/

(7) Kathy H.                           kaylynnkathy at hotmail.com

    I used to subscribe to Quinto Lingo a long time ago.  I guess it was
around 1970.  My issues are long gone now.  I do still have a few pages that
I tore out before I threw them away, information that I wanted to keep.  One
of them is on the Russian alphabet.  I think I used information from an
article on Chinese in a report that I wrote in 9th grade, which would have
been the 1970-71 school year (USA).

(8) John E Koontz                  John.Koontz at Colorado.edu

    I had a subscription, that my father got for me.  I think I was older,
perhaps 12-14 or so.  I'm not sure where the magazines went.  My dad's
something of a packrat.  He may still have them somewhere, but most likely
they were discarded at some point.  I don't think I have them myself, though
I have box or two of items from that stage of my life that I haven't looked
in recently.  I seem to remember an article on Tahitian that inspired an
interest in Polynesian, and that must have been seminal in my interest in
language, though I didn't end up working with Austronesian.  My father also
took me on occasion to the U of Denver and U of Colorado libraries specifica
lly so that I could look at the language sections, and he once let me enroll
in an evening class in Mandarin at the U of Denver while I was in high
school.  I don't recall if he suggested
the class, or I picked it myself.  I think the latter.  He also started my
subscription to Language and sent me to the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute
in 1976.  He's not a linguist himself, but he always encouraged me in it.
Not that he didn't encourage other things.  I remember a subscription to the
bimonthly Edmund (?) Scientific Company's kits, and we were all taken
regularly to the public library.  He also showed us the HP
minicomputers at his school and encouraged our interest in them, back before
the days of PCs.
    Other influences:  Mario Pei's popular books - my Dad had his Dictionary
of Linguistics on the shelf; Lancelot Hogben's The Loom of Language, found
in the Littleton Public Library; L.R. Palmer's The Latin Language, found in
the Englewood Public Library; five years of Junior and Senior High School
Spanish; a set of English verb paradigms handed out by my 9th grade English
teacher; diagramming sentences in 7th grade English; my Dad's collection of
grammars and dictionaries of Latin and Greek from his college days at the
Saint John's College - a small liberal arts program in
Annapolis, Maryland - and my mother's college German grammar.
    I'm not sure if Quinto Lingo itself was that much of an influence, but
my father certainly was!

(9) Gary H. Toops <gary.toops at wichita.edu>

    I subscribed to Quinto Lingo as a teenager in the late 1960's and
perhaps in 1970 as well.  One of my letters to the editor was published in
an issue that I have found in the stacks of the library here at Wichita
State (I lived in Newport News, Virginia, at the time).
    I stopped subscribing to the magazine once I realized that the
translations were not very good.  In one French translation, the translator
had used the indicative rather than the subjunctive form of the verb after
the conjunction "bien que".  I wrote to ask that the error be corrected, but
my letter was ignored.  In another French translation of an article dealing
with the Pan-African Union, the translator claimed that the cognate
term "panafricaine" did not exist in French, and so translated the title of
the article as "Union de toute l'Afrique".  A few weeks later I received a
letter from a French-speaking penpal in Algeria who "amazingly" used the
supposedly nonexistent term
_panafricaine_.

Gary H. Toops, Professor
Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures
Wichita State University       Wichita KS 67260-0011 USA
http://mcll.wichita.edu/russian

    And the responses from people who hadn't heard of Quinto Lingo but were
intrigued by the idea:

(10) Simone Mueller                Simone.Mueller at anglistik.uni-giessen.de>

    Until your email on Linguistlist, I had never heard of Quinto Lingo -
but it sounds interesting! Is it still published? I tried to find it on the
web, but without success. Are the same articles published (i.e. translated)
into the five languages or different ones? I bet the five languages are
English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, right? Is it still possible
to subscribe to it?

Simone Mueller
Institut fuer Anglistik Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen GERMANY

(11) Lynell R. Williams <sktutorc at isu.edu>

    I have never heard of _Quinto Lingo_ before, but I think the idea is
fabulous.  I cannot devote the time at this juncture to reviving such an
enterprise, but if you do get it up and going I will definitely subscribe.

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