LINGUIST List 2.325

Tuesday, 25 June 1991

Qs: Conversation, Thompson article, Quotation

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1. Kingsley Morse, Conversation
2. Brian Teaman, Ian Thompson article on Japanese and English intonation
3. Laurie Bauer, Query for LINGUIST

	I've developed an algorithm which learns by example, and I'd like
to train it to translate a conversation between two people. So, I'm looking
for a text file that contains a dialog between two people, with everything
each person says in two languages. See Appendix A for an example. If you
don't have such a file, can you direct me to someone who does?
	Also, I'm looking for a file that contains a dialog between two people,
but with the entire conversation in English. Again, If you don't have such a
file, can you direct me to someone who does?
	Or, I've seen similar work by Eiichiro Sumita at Kyoto University
in Japan, and Hitoshi Iida at the ATR Interpreting Telephony Research Labs.
Does anyone have their email addresses? (I would like to ask them for a copy
of ATR's linguistic database of spoken Japanese with English translations.)
	Finally, does anyone have email addresses for anyone at:
 ATR Interpreting Telephony Research Labs
 or
 Center for Machine Translation at Carnagie Mellon University
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			Appendix A.
	This is a translation between English and Filipino-Tagalog. Any pair of
languages will do, but I would prefer it if one were English. Ideally the
file will be from 10,000 to 100,000 bytes long.
Speaker # 1 in English: "Hello".
Speaker # 1 in Filipino : "Kumusta."
Speaker # 2 in Filipino: "Anong oras na?"
Speaker # 2 in English: "What time is it?"
Speaker # 1 in English: "Noon".
Speaker # 1 in Filipino: "Tanghali"
Thanks,
Kingsley

I'm looking for the following paper:
 Thompson, Ian (1982). Japanese lexical tone and intonation,
 and correspondence between Japanese particles and
 English sentence-stress and intonation. Presented at
 the BAAL seminar on intonatin and discourse, April 5-7,
 1982. Universty of Aston in Birmingham.
Thanks for any help you can give me in tracking this down.
Brian Teaman
Linguistics, Univ. of Penn.

Can anybody provide me with an accurate source for the quotation which says
something like 'If we can't spell the way we pronounce then we will have to
pronounce the way we spell'? It's the sort of thing someone ought to have said
pithily, and sounds vaguely Shavian, but I can't trace it.
While we're on the subject, does anyone have a precise source for the line from
(?) Voltaire about etymology being the science where the consonants count for
very little and the vowels for nothing at all?
Thank you!
Laurie Bauer
BauerLmatai.vuw.ac.nz
Wellington, New Zealand