LINGUIST List 2.629

Wed 09 Oct 1991

Misc: Responses

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Larry Davis, The Irish Connection
2. Eric Schiller, Re: 2.606 African Font Encoding
3. Leslie Barratt, IPA fints
4. Ellen Prince, Re: 2.611 Responses
5. BROADWELL GEORGE AARON, example numbering in WordPerfect
6. Ellen Prince, Re: 2.614 Queries
7. bert peeters, What Chomsky does and what he says he does...

For what it's worth, Irish also came to North American as overseers on the
large rice plantations along the eastern seabord.
Larry Davis

Message 2: Re: 2.606 African Font Encoding

Returning to some previous debate about UNICODE, I would like to respond to
J. Knappen re African font coding. We prefer to use floating diacritics
here (Univ. of Chicago linguists) because one can support a broad range of
phonetic characters within the confines of the 256 characters supported by
most available software. It would be really nice if we could get together
on some standard codings!
Eric Schiller
University of Chicago
schillersapir.uchicago.edu

Many thanks to everyone who wrote in with advice about IPA fonts. I was amazed
at how fast I could get information from such a wide number of sources with
e-mail. This list should be required reading for all graduate students in
linguistics!

Message 4: Re: 2.611 Responses

>Date: Wed, 02 Oct 91 07:20:45 EDT
>From: Peter Cole <AXR00786UDELVM.BITNET>
>Subject: Microsoft Word
>
>There are two features that would be very useful: 1) autorenumbering of examp
l
>es as in Renumber; 2) an automatic backup save as in Mac Word Perfect. The la
t
>ter feature creates a backup which is deleted when you close down normally.
>But if the system goes dead etc., the backup is there when you reboot. I don'
t
>like normal autosave because I may have messed something up and be on the verg
e
>of abandoning the change when the save takes place, but the WP backup save doe
s
>not do that. It is only there when things go wrong.
ah, but word has just what you're looking for already--click 'commands' in
the edit menu. you'll get a list of a zillion possible commands in alphabetical
order. scroll down to MAKE BACKUP FILE and click the 'add' button. the
next time you open word, you'll have MAKE BACKUP FILE on your FILE menu (that's
the default--you could have put it on any menu). if you want a file backed
up automatically, click it. a check will appear. from then on, for that file,
every time you save, it will keep the pre-saved version with the title 'backup
of <filename>'. the only thing you have to remember is to click it once for
EACH file you want backed up. frankly, i think it's better than what you
describe for wp--the backup doesn't delete itself when you close down--i like
that since sometimes **i** mess up, not the mac, and i want the previous
version. (of course, it does delete/write over the previous backup.)
there are also things like SHADOW, a piece of software that runs in the
background and makes backups at whatever time interval you specify. you tell
it where you want the backups to go. of course, you have to invoke it each
time you open a file, which is annoying, but it works pretty well. (however,
i stopped using it since i discovered the MAKE BACKUP FILE command in word,
and i've made it a habit to save after every paragraph or so. mustn't lose
those words of wisdom...)
what i'd really like is what i have on the mainframe i'm on, a checkpoint
feature that makes a backup at whatever CHARACTER interval you specify, and
it does it for EACH emacs file, without you ever having to do anything except
put the appropriate line in your .cshrc file. if anyone knows how to do that
with word, i'd like to hear about it.

	Some people who use WordPerfect may not be aware that there is
an easy way to do automatic example numbering within the program.
	What you use is the Outline function (Shift-F5) and select
Paragraph numbering. I have written a simple macro that indents,
inserts the paragraph number, and changes to single spacing, and that
makes example especially easy.
	You can refer to examples through the Cross-Reference function
(under Mark Text, Alt-F5), and these references change as examples
are added and deleted.
******************************************************************************
Aaron Broadwell, Dept. of Linguistics, University at Albany -- SUNY,
Albany, NY 12222 gb661leah.albany.edu
"Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. Twice
would have been quite enough." -- Confucious
******************************************************************************

Message 6: Re: 2.614 Queries

>Date: Wed, 2 Oct 91 15:49:19 -0400
>From: gb661csc.albany.edu (BROADWELL GEORGE AARON)
>Subject: trema?
>
>
>A recent post on coding schemes for African languages referred to a diacritic
>called a `trema'. Can anyone tell me what this is?
>******************************************************************************
>Aaron Broadwell, Dept. of Linguistics, University at Albany -- SUNY,
>Albany, NY 12222 gb661leah.albany.edu
>"Chi Wen Tzu always thought three times before taking action. Twice
>would have been quite enough." -- Confucious
>******************************************************************************
'trema' is french for 'diaeresis', the two dots over a second vowel to indicate
that the two vowels do not constitute a diphthong, as in the french spelling
of naive or in older spellings of cooperate/cooccur, etc. (it looks like an
umlaut but has a different function.)

> Date: Wed, 2 Oct 91 00:43:27 -0400
> From: lojbabgrebyn.com (Logical Language Group)
> Note that the occasionally emotive
> arguments in this latter discussion shows that even linguists may to
> some extent assume what they claim they don't.
This made me think of what I read quite a while ago in Esa Itkonen's *Causality
*Causality in linguistic theory* (Croom Helm, 1983), p. 13, n. 4:
	"I am interested in what Chomsky does, not in what he says he does"
In my review (*Studies in language* 10, 1986, pp. 208-213), I pointed to
similar "succulent observations" on pp. 140-141 and 262, where it is made
clear that (I quote from my own review, p. 212) "ce clivage entre le faire
et le dire n'est pas caracte'ristique de Chomsky seul".
Cf. also Raimo Anttila, "Causality in linguistic theory and in historical
linguistics" (Review article of Itkonen 1983), *Diachronica* 5, 1988, pp.
159-180, p. 169:
	"One of his [= Itkonen's] tenets is to study what linguists actually
	do, not what they say they do (140-141, 262; favorably commented on
	by Peeters [1986:212])."
Dr Bert Peeters Tel: +61 02 202344
Department of Modern Languages 002 202344
University of Tasmania at Hobart Fax: 002 207813
GPO Box 252C Bert.Peetersmodlang.utas.edu.au
Hobart TAS 7001
Australia