LINGUIST List 15.2810

Thu Oct 07 2004

Qs: Digital Lang Documentation;Lang Acquisition/Poetry

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Jeff Good, Digital Language Documentation
2. Nayyer Chandella, Lang Acquisition/Poetry

Message 1: Digital Language Documentation

Date: 03-Oct-2004
From: Jeff Good <good

eva.mpg.de>
Subject: Digital Language Documentation

As part of work I am doing with several colleagues on the state of archiving of
digital resources, particularly in Americanist linguistics, I would like to
solicit any stories or anecdotes that list members have either (i) about data
that was unfortunately lost because of shifts in technology or media degradation
or (ii) an unexpected use that data was able to be put to because of the use of
good (especially ''best practice'') digital archiving methods.

To be more concrete, on the negative side, this could be a story about, for
example, how a dictionary for an endangered language was lost because of the
degradation of a floppy disk or because no program could be found to read an old
computer file. On the positive side, this could be a story about how a
well-structured and carefully maintained lexical database was able to be put to
multiple uses, for example to produce both an academic and a pedagogical dictionary.

While we are particularly interested in cases from American languages, we expect
such a collection of stories to be of potential value to the general linguistic
community and, therefore, are collecting any relevant stories and
anecdotes--even if we don't use them all in our own research, they may, for
example, be valuable to the E-MELD project (http://www.emeld.org/).

Since a story of ''lost'' data could potentially be embarrassing, I would be
happy to keep such a story anonymous in the summary post of responses to this
query if requested.

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics

Message 2: Lang Acquisition/Poetry

Date: 01-Oct-2004
From: Nayyer Chandella <chandella5

yahoo.com>
Subject: Lang Acquisition/Poetry

I am currently probing on the question of creativity and second language
aquisition: my research is based on whether creativity (poetry writing) is
hampered by acquired language? If yes to what extent and how?

I would be grateful if any one will share his /her valuable knowledge in this
regard.
I will persoally thank the people for helping me out. I would appreciate the
comments of those whose mother tongue is not English but are trying to write
poetry in this language.

Thanking you all in anticipation.

Sincerely,

N Chandella

Linguistic Field(s): Ling & Literature
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