LINGUIST List 14.1900

Wed Jul 9 2003

Qs: Eng Lexical Borrowing Quote; Digital Recording

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Directory

  1. Steve Hartman Keiser, English lexical borrowing: the Eddy Peters quote
  2. asravivbgumail.bgu.ac.il>, E-prime and EEG???

Message 1: English lexical borrowing: the Eddy Peters quote

 Date: Tue, 08 Jul 2003 14:21:31 +0000
From: Steve Hartman Keiser <s.hartman.keisermarquette.edu>
Subject: English lexical borrowing: the Eddy Peters quote

I'm curious if anyone knows the origin of the following quote on the
purported English proclivity to lexical borrowing:

''Not only does the English Language borrow words from other
languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over
the head, and goes through their pockets.''

A google search finds it all over the web (e.g., by Anu Garg in
Wordsmith.org's Word-a-day Nov. 4, 2002) and it is always
attributed to Eddy Peters. But since I can find no information on
Eddy Peters, I wonder if this attribution isn't apocryphal.

Subject-Language: English; Code: ENG
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Message 2: E-prime and EEG???

 Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 11:46:28 +0530
From: asravivbgumail.bgu.ac.il> <asravivbgumail.bgu.ac.il>
Subject: E-prime and EEG???


I am a graduate student currently working on my thesis, "The P600 and
Syntactic Processing in Israeli Sign Language", under the supervision
of Dr. Jeannette Schaeffer and Dr. Dorit Ben Shalom.

We unfortunately run into a few technical problems that I hope you can
help us with:

The project we are working on is testing deaf people who use Israeli
Sign Language (ISL) on their interpretation of ISL with the
electrophysiological technique "ERP". We need to show the participants
a video of ISL sentences, and measure brainwaves with our EEG system
at the same time (EEG system: (Cadwell Easy-II, 32 channels).

We were going to do this by using the presentation software "E-Prime"
(which is also connected to our analysis program). However, E-Prime
requires bitmap, and if we are going to convert our digital video into
bitmap, we get a file way too large to be supported by any computer,
since each sentence is about 172 bitmap frames and we have 360
sentences. I have also been informed by Psychology Software Tools,
Inc. that E-Prime does not yet support audiovisual files as imported
stimuli. However, it is possible to suspend E-Run and do other tasks,
such as presenting audiovisual files via another software, and return
to E-Run as if uninterrupted. This will allow you to present the movie
and then return to E-Prime, recording key presses only before or after
the movie is shown.

In summary, there are two problems: 
The first problem is that we have the digital video recording on a Mac
(using Media 100), and we are trying to find out how to put this on a
PC (perhaps via a DVD), because the computer from which we need to run
the experiment is a PC. The second question is how to synchronize
this video to our EEG system either through E-prime or somehow getting
around E-prime.

I would be grateful for any suggestion.

Thank you very much.

Sofie Raviv
Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics
Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Beer-Sheva
Israel

asravivbgumail.bgu.ac.il
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