LINGUIST List 2.136

Monday, 15 Apr 1991

Disc: Banned Lgs, Wehrli, Mutative, Roget, Mother

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. "Michael Kac", Banned languages
2. "NORVAL SMITH, wehrli; if this is not up to date, I obviously would like to know
3. , Re: Eric Wehrli's email address:
4. , 'Mutative', Lexicon of Linguistic Terminology
5. , Re: mutative
6. William J Frawley, Re: Roget
7. Dragon Systems, Sorry, Mother

I believe that Irish was at one time (perhaps more than one) banned by the
British authorities in Ireland. I don't know a lot of details, but there IS
a song by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem called 'Mr. Moses Ri-toora-li-ay'
describing a supposedly real incident in which a Jewish shopkeeper in Dublin
is arrested by British policeman for alleged defiance of the ban -- except
that what the policeman thinks is Irish is actually Yiddish. The person to
get details from is my colleague Nancy Stenson; address:

 Stensonumnacvx.bitnet

By the way, the shopkeeper ends up being brought before a Jewish judge, of
course. 'This numbskull has blundered and for it will pay / Said the judge
to Moses Ri-toora-li-ay'.

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 -------------------------------------------------------------
list weh*
 eric wehrli: wehrliuni2a.unige.ch
 eric wehrli: wehrlicgeuge51.bitnet
 Message ends here.
 -------------------------------------------------------------

Try wehrlicgeuge51.bitnet

That's Rizzi's and Haegemann's address, and they're in the same place.

>> Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 12:33 GMT
>> From: Kelvin Woolacott <KJW1vaxb.york.ac.uk>
>> Subject: HELP
>> I've come across the terms "mutativ" and "Mutativa" (referring to categories
>> ...
>> I can only assume this translates as "mutative"! But what is that supposed to
>> mean? 

'Mutativ' refers to verbs which denote changes of state, and thus (through
less than perfect generalization) to perfective aspect in general.


By the way a good source of terminological information is 

 Hadumod Bussman Lexikon der Sprachwissenschaft
 Kroener Verlag, Stuttgart
 2nd Edition, 1990

She has this, and your 'Diathesen' as well.

--John Nerbonne

KJW1  uk.ac.york.vaxa asking about the term 'mutative'. From the
_Dictionary of Linguistics_ by Pei and Gaynor (Littlefield, Adams, and
Co.; 1975) we find: mutative. See factive.
Under factive we find: A declensional case in certain languages (e.g.
Japanese, Finno-Ugric languages, etc.), denoting the idea of becoming
or turning or being transformed into something. (Called also
'mutative' or 'translative'.)

-Kurt Godden <goddengmr.com>

On John Batali's inquiry about machine-readable Roget. A recent posting on the
Humanist bulletin board had a list of electronic dictionaries. Roget's
was among them. Since the list is too long to post here, I'll send it
separately to Batali. If anyone else wants the list, contact me directly.

Bill Frawley

"Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 132. Friday, 12 Apr 1991" includes a posting of 
mine on the relation between "mother of X; the mother of all battles" and 
"motherfucker (of an X); a motherfucker of a battle". (My name, by the way, 
is Mark Mandel; several of us at Dragon Systems use the same mail address, and 
the Linguist List processor persistently strips off my signature lines.) In 
reference to all the discussion that we've seen here on the subject, I 
remarked that "we've all (myself included) been missing the biggie." 

In response to that posting, Adam Kilgarriff (adamkas 
written to me: 

> A little acknowledgement please! Maybe you didn't read my message from a
> couple of dats afte the `mother' debate started, but this was precisely the
> point I made, as below
>
> From Adam Kilgarriff Mon Mar 11 15:51:19 GMT 1991
>
> Mark Turner's piece was very interesting. One aspect of `mother' 
> allusions he did not refer to but which must play a role in the 
> catchiness of Saddam's phrase is its use in `motherfucker' and 
> derivatives. Calling a thing a `mother' in American English is very often 
> a display of anger and frustration at it. The conceptual link with the 
> mothers that bore us is attenuated, but the surface-language link with 
> Saddam's phrase is direct. A US soldier says `this is a mother of a 
> battle', while Saddam says `this will be the mother of all battles'. The 
> `motherfucker' association clearly plays a role in our responses, 
> throwing dollops of ambiguity, irony and general-purpose perversity into 
> the concoction of associations that Mark Turner documents. Perhaps it's 
> this twist that particularly appeals to the journalists, the politicians, 
> and all of our postmodern sensibilities? 

Adam certainly did get the biggie. I did not see that day's email, and I 
apologize to him for unwittingly failing to acknowledge his contribution, 
in which he made most of the points that it took me another month to hit upon.

 Sincerely,
 Mark A. Mandel (let's see if you can digest that, you signature-eater!)

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 136]