LINGUIST List 2.226

Wednesday, 15 May 1991

Qs: IPA, Orthography, Summer schools, Hawkins, and more

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , IPA Reference Query
2. Margaret Fleck, Phonology and Orthography
3. , summer schools
4. Koenraad De Smedt, reference to John A. Hawkins
5. , Teo Chew Tone Sandhi
6. Peter Gingiss, Houston and words like it
7. , V-3

I would like to purchase a copy of the latest edition of "Principles of the
International Phonetics Association." Can someone give me the relevant
bibliographic information? Is 1967 the latest edition? I have been told that
there may be a 1989 or 1990 version.

Also, where can I purchase back issues of the Journal of the International
Phonetics Association?

Many thanks,

Diane L. Olsen
Multilingual Development
Xerox Corporation
dolsen.osbu_northxerox.com

... Alphabetic writing is a historical development from mora-based
semitic syllabaries, in which vowel distinctions were written
concatenatively. It is worth pointing out here that the extensive
spread of alphabetic writing in subsequent millenia owes more to
nonlinguistic factors such as religious and political considerations
than to any linguistic motivation. -- John Coleman

I can see how you might make a case that syllabaries came earlier than
alphabets and probably not just in the Mediterranean basin. However,
there are several aspects of your specific claim that I don't
understand:

 -- Exactly which syllabaries and descendent alphabets are you 
 referring to?
 -- On what basis do you believe them to be mora-based? It has been
 an awfully long time since I last looked at Akkadian (the only
 semitic syllabary that comes immediately to mind), but I thought
 that spellings such as bat and ba-at were in free variation. Or, at
 least, that no firm connection with vowel length had been established.
 Is this a new development?
 -- Why do you believe that greatly reducing the number of characters 
 to learn (by a factor of 10 or so) and easier extension to new
 languages (fewer new characters to be improvised) played little or 
 no role in the spread of alphabets? 

Margaret Fleck

Information about summer schools would also be welcome, as well as about
field schools. e.g., SIL and other such summer programs. We are expecially
interested in knowing about undergraduate-level programs. Thanks.

Can anybody give me a reference to published work by John A. Hawkins
(USC) on syntactic weight versus information structure in word order
variation?

Koenraad de Smedt

Teo Chew Tone Sandhi

I have an Honours undergraduate student investigating 
tone sandhi in her own dialect of Teo Chew (Chao-Chou, 
etc.), a near relative of Hokkien. As a first step we 
need some basic description of the tones and where to 
find them. Apart from a few somewhat less than edifying 
primers, we have tracked down the following dissertation 
references which may (or may not) be worth looking at. 

While I collected these references from the
University of California catalogue I am loathe to shell 
out the cash having them shipped in microfilm to the 
wilds of Western Australia (we might be the centre of the 
email universe, but sadly not smail) unless critically 
valuable.

Lin, Jocelyn Su-Fung
Tone sandhi in the Chinese dialects
April 1988

Shih, Chi-Lin
The prosodic domain of tone sandhi in Chinese
September 1986

Lien, Chinfa
Coexistent tone systems in Chinese dialects
March 1988

Hung, Tony T.N.
Syntactic and semantic aspects of Chines tone sandhi
October 1988

Wright, Martha
A metrical approach to tone sandhi in Chinese dialects
1983 (U.Mass.)

If anyone out there knows any of the authors and how I 
can best contact them for the relevant pages (in hard 
copy or electronic form) I would be most grateful for
your assistance.

And of course any other info on Teo Chew (like how many 
contrasting tones am I supposed to be hearing - we seem 
to be staring down the barrel of 8 contrasting tones) 
would be welcome too. Thanks,

Alan Dench
A_DENCHfennel.cc.uwa.oz.au

Department of Anthropology (but we're really linguists)
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, WA 6009

I am interested in the pronunciaton of words like "huge" and "humid." I plan
to get down to serious research this summer. In "Youston," Texas there are a
few natives who pronounce these words with just the /y/(at least some of the
time), but I have yet to discern a pattern. Seems to be around 10% or so. I
know that in the East, one hears these words with just the /y/ sometimes. I
would appreciate folks keeping their ears open, and giving me their
impressions.

I would be interested in any discussion, examples, or references
on the subject of V-3 constructions. Peter Hook and I have written
on V-3 in Kashmiri, and I just encountered a kind of V-3 in Dutch
during a recent trip there that I had not noticed before, e.g.

 Al is de leugen nog zo snel, de waarheid achterhaalt haar wel.
 Although is the lie still so fast, the truth overtakes her indeed.
 'No matter how fast the lie, the truth catches up with it'

While this is some kind of proverb, I encountered several normal
examples in the newspapers.

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 226]