LINGUIST List 2.796

Sat 16 Nov 1991

Qs: hiatus; Spanish; Italian; MAC; pidgins; pronouns

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Geoffrey Russom, Re: 2.780 Clicks and R-Linking
2. Michael Newman, query on Spanish
3. Salvatore Attardo, Italian gender assignment and paragraph structure
4. mark l louden, Do what?
5. , any suggestions on displaying Chinese characters on Macintosh?
6. , inquiry on the conventionality and syntax of names
7. , Re: 2.788 Are Segments Universal?
8. Geoffrey Russom, Re: case and relative pronouns

Message 1: Re: 2.780 Clicks and R-Linking

It seems to me that if the vowel in "a, the" is schwa, only a glottal
stop could prevent hiatus in your cited phrases "a apple, the apple."
Does anyone know of other possibilities (not necessarily restricted
to those viable in English)? In general, what SORT of sound is
introduced to prevent hiatus? One thinks of liquids, nasals, and
glides first, but of course there's the glottal stop as perhaps the
unmarked hiatus-preventer....

In most Spanish dialects questions with explicit 2 person pronouns involve
inversion (e.g. Que quieres tu?)--pardon diacritics and lack of initial inter
rogatives). However in Antillian (i.e. Cuba, P.R. and Rep. Dom.) at least, you
most frequently get the form Que tu quieres? Does anyone know of any studies
on this phenomenon. either from a dialectological or a formally syntactic per-
spective?

I would appreciate pointers to published or unpublished works on
gender assignment and paragraph structure in Italian. Contrastive
analyses welcome.
In order to avoid cluttering the list, I'd suggest e-mailing me. I
will summarize and acknowledge.
Salvatore Attardo
p5omace.cc.purdue.edu

Greetings to all--
Seeing a recent posting update on 'might could' reminded me of another
regional (?) expression that was recently pointed out to me by some of
my students, namely the question 'Do what?' for std.'What?' Is there anyone
who is familiar with this idiom and its distribution?
Thanks!
Mark Louden

Does anyone have experience/suggestions on presenting common Chinese
characters on a Mac? I have a student planning a psycholinguistic reading
experiment involving Chinese. We know about Macs and have Chinese informants
but I'm wondering if there are existing character sets or anything like
"stroke" fonts or any lore on legibility etc. Send any ideas to me and I'll
be happy to relay them to others interested. Thanks! John Limber

I have two questions about names that some of you probably can answer. The first
concerns the conventionality of surnames. Are there still language cultures
where surnames are not for the most part conventional? (It would be foolish,
for example, for anyone to infer from my name "Limber" that I am particularly
agile or that Drs. Head, Brain and Pons interest in neurology had anything to
do with their names.) I'd appreciate any examples.
	The second question is to what extent are names in languages more or
less "syntactic"--that is participate or not in whatever formal structures
other NPs do? Again, I'd appreciate any examples or references on this.
Thanks in advance.
				John Limber

Message 7: Re: 2.788 Are Segments Universal?

This is a query concerning Frank Anshen's response to 2.777 A phonological
Query. There he states that Bahasa Indonesia developed from a pidginized
Malay used as a Lingua Franca,i.e., presumably modified in ways that make
minimal acquisition easy. (endquote).
I don't know much about Indonesian, but I am very interested in such cases
of pidginization. Is it really true that Bahasa Indonesia developed from a
pidginized Malay? I have the impression that B.I. is very close to
Standard Malay, with a few phonological differences, but not much in the
way of simplification. It seems to me that there was a conscious effort,
in the elaboration of B.I., to keep it very close, though distinct from
Malay. There have always been good speakers of Malay in what is now
Indonesia, even though the majority would speak a pidginized variety,
i.e. Bazaar Malay. So I guess there was always a feeling that B.I. should
look like proper Malay, because no good speaker of Malay, or even bad
speakers of Malay, would ever take something close to Bazaar Malay seriously.
A similar case would be Afrikaans, said to have developed from a Dutch pidgin;
clearly, this is an oversimplification, since modern Afrikaans has very few
creole features, even though it is simpler than Dutch. Even though must have
been Dutch pidgins around, and there still are nowadays varieties of
Afrikaans that look very pidgin-like (there's a thesis by Dennis Makhudu, U.
of Illinois-Urbana, I think), there must have been a conscious effort to
prevent Afrikaans from becoming a full-fledged pidgin, later a creole. I
presume these voorrekkers all carried their Dutch Bibles in their ox-wagons.
I'd really appreciate an Indonesianist/Malayist's opinion on this.
(Erratum: I mean voortrekkers)
I don't mean to open a big debate about where Afrikaans came from; but I am
really curious about similarities between that situations and the elaboration
of the Indonesian language. I know for a fact that Afrikaans has borrowed a
lot from Dutch over the years, with slight phonological adjustments. I
suppose a similar thing has happened for Indonesian. Also, the desire to keep
Indonesian separate from Malay, seems to be very similar to the efforts to
keep Afrikaans separate from Dutch.
Willem de Reuse
Department of Anthropology
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

Old English personal pronouns can (according to received wisdom) also
serve as relative pronouns. Sometimes they act like relative
pronouns even when they have a case appropriate to the main clause rather
than to the relative clause (e.g. they have zero stress, which is
characteristic of clause-initial rather than clause-final position;
I do not think enclisis is involved). Does anyone know of similar
phenomena in other languages?
-- Rick