LINGUIST List 16.1114

Thu Apr 07 2005

Qs: Looking for a Comparative Grammar;Missingsch

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Directory

         1.    Ahmed Hafez, Looking for a Comparative Grammar
        2.    Heiko Wiggers, Missingsch

Message 1: Looking for a Comparative Grammar

 Date: 05-Apr-2005
From: Ahmed Hafez <scientist01egyahoo.com>
Subject: Looking for a Comparative Grammar


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Dear Sir/Madam

My reasearch is on the transfer rules of indirect knowledge based machine
translation systems. A HPSG parser (LKB or TRALE) gives the representation
of the source language (English) to be the input of the transfer rule
-applies synsem transfer- that yields an equivalent Arabic representation
of the same English sentence. The transfer rules are structured according
to a comparative grammar.

I am searching for a suitable comparative grammar for my research.

Best -
Ahmad

Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable

Message 2: Missingsch

 Date: 05-Apr-2005
From: Heiko Wiggers <wiggersheikohotmail.com>
Subject: Missingsch


Dear all,

I am doing research on Low German and have come across an interesting
phenomenon, called Missingsch. Missingsch is defined as the attempt to
speak High German but with a Low German substrate, i.e. it is a mix of Low
and High German. It originated ca. in 18th/19th century when Low German was
more and more regarded as "backwards", and its speakers started to imitate
High German because it was seen as "sophisticated". A lot of fun has been
made of this mix language, and it continues to this day, mostly in satire
etc. My question is: are there any other mix languages that originated in
a similar fashion? For example, to use Ferguson's terms, speakers of a Low
variety decide to imitate the High variety, and the outcome is a mixture of
H and L?

thanks

Heiko Wiggers
Undergraduate Instructor of German and Dutch
University of Texas at Austin
Department of Germanics

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics

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