LINGUIST List 2.473

Sat 07 Sep 1991

Disc: Responses

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Julian Bradfield, "Just in case"
2. "Michael Kac", Re: Flaming and Colorless Green Ideas
3. , Responses: reflexives, standard language, dialect
4. "MICHEL, ProfesseurE

I was interested in this query, since one of my ex-supervisor's
idiosyncrasies is the use of "just in case" to mean "iff". He's a
computer scientist, formerly a philosopher, and says he picked the
usage up from Dummett. Perhaps Dummett is the originator?

Possibly redundant historical note:
A poem by John Hollander published in *The Night Reader* (Atheneum 1971) en-
titled 'Coiled Alizarine' goes as follows:
Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
 While breathelss, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
This poem appears as an epigraph to *On Noam Chomsky, Critical Essays* edited
by Gilbert Harman (Anchor Books, 1974) and it bears a dedication to Chomsky.
Michael Kac

 In re: a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
 Herbert Paper told me that he had heard this analogy from
Weinrich (the father). I searched briefly but unsuccessfully
for it in his history of Yiddish. His son Gabriel (the physicist)
told me it sounded like something his father would say but he
had no specific recollection of it.

Yes, Quebec is more concerned with fairness in titles than France is. This
is a most interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon since it shows that
culture as much as language is at issue. The French still argue that
titles cannot be changed -- while the Quebecers have long since done it.
Just read the job section of a Quebec newspaper like LA PRESSE to see the
many different solutions to the definitely difficult issue of gender and
sex in French.
For scholarly and semi-scholarly references on this topic see:
Andre Martin & Henriette Dupuis
	La feminisation des titres et les leaders d'opinion...
	Gouvernement du Quebec, 1985
Office de la langue francaise
	Titres et fonctions au feminin: essai d'orientation de l'usage
	Gouvernement du Quebec, 1986
"Titres et fonctions au feminin"
	[journal entitled] La francisation en marche, vol. 5, no. 5
	October 1986
[Office de la langue francaise, 800 place Victoria, Montreal H4Z 1G8]
I need hardly point out that French newspapers all call French Prime
Minister Edith Cresson, "Madame LE ministre".
Michel Grimaud
P.S. I'm French, not from Quebec... so this message is _not_ pro domo...