LINGUIST List 2.81

Tuesday, 19 Mar 1991

Disc: Stress,Finnish,Freq,Database,Quechua,Mother of,Heidelberg

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Curious Stress Patterns
2. Richard Ogden, Finnish
3. Mark Mandel, German Word Frequency Lists
4. , CHILDES data base
5. Dan I. Slobin, Re: Responses: Databases
6. , Thanks for Quechua info
7. Monica Macaulay, Quechua
8. "Hartmut Haberland, Roskilde University"HARTMUTjane.ruc.dk, RE: Heidelberg
9. Larry Gillick, Mother of all Battles
10. , mother of

Does anybody know of a language in which syllables with long
vowels are "heavier" than those that end in a consonant, which
in turn are "heavier" than those that end in a short vowel? Sinhalese
is like this (I seem to be the first person to report this). In
particular, a sequence of short-vowel syllables is stressed on
the first. Likewise a sequence of closed syllables. However,
if case both kinds appear, the leftmost closed syllable is stressed.
So, closed is heavier than open. But a sequence of all long-vowel
syllables the rightmost is stressed (so, closed and long-vowel
syllables behave differently). And, finally, when you have
both closed (short-vowel) syllables and long-vowel ones, the rightmost
long-vowel one gets stressed. 

I am working on a non-segmental phonology of Finnish, based on close 
observation of Finnish phonetics. Is anyone else working on Finnish
phonology, morphology, phonetics or the history of Finnish? If so I
would be keen to hear from you.
I can be contacted at:
 rao1uk.ac.york.vax

--- Richard Ogden

In Linguist V.2 N.0072, Kurt Godden asks about word frequency lists for 
German. I know of at least two:

Hochfrequente deutsche Wortformen, edited by Wolf Dieter Ortmann; subtitled
"7995 Wortformen der KAEDING-Zaehlung, rechnersortiert in alphabetischer un 
ruecklaeufiger Folge, nach Haeufigkeit und nach Hauptwortarten". (I have 
replaced umlauts with e's for safe transmission; the AE in KAEDING is in the 
original.) "Herausgegeben vom Goethe-Institut / Arbeitsstelle fuer 
wissenschaftliche Didaktik / Projekt Phonothek / Muenchen 1975" 
This is a four-volume work based on texts analyzed by Friedrich Wilhelm 
Kaeding, starting around 1891 and covering nearly 11 million words (tokens) of 
running text from a dozen or so genres in uneven proportions. Ortmann's 
analysis is limited to those words (types) with an absolute frequency of 101 
or more in Kaeding's data. The machine processing does not distinguish case,
umlauts are replaced by "E", and "ess-zett" becomes "SS"; hence "essen" and 
"Essen" both become "ESSEN", and our re-spelling programs produced errors such 
as "p<o-umlaut>sie" for "Poesie". The data are evidently offset-printed from 
a rather uneven line-printer output; our OCR scanner frequently mistook E for 
F, B for R, and so on. The existence of alphabetical and reverse-alpha 
listings as well as the frequency-rank listing made it easier to correct these 
errors, but the job is tedious. (All three of these lists appear in the first 
volume, along with other material; vols. 2-4 contain other types of analysis.) 
Of course the vocabulary is often rather bizarre, with high frequencies 
accorded to such words as Artillerie, Prinzessin, and Ferdinand, while 
Fernsprecher (not to mention Fernsehen or Computer!) does not appear at all. 
(Discussion of the usability of this list gave rise to a new verb here: 
entkaisern.) 

More useful is Ein Frequenzwoerterbuch der deutschen Zeitungssprache / Die 
Welt / Sueddeutsche Zeitung, by Inger Rosengren, CWK Gleerup, Lund Sweden, 
Copr. 1972. The two newspapers are covered for the one-year span from 1 Nov. 
1966 through 30 Oct. 1967. (Hmm, why did they skip Hallowe'en / All Hallows' 
Eve?) The lists are separate for the two. Numbers (1.), the ampersand (&), 
names (Paul), and abbreviations (AG, UNO) are all included in place. The 
words are counted separately in several subject areas (Meinung, Politik, 
Feuilleton...) and in total, with several statistical manipulations. The 
print, again, is all uppercase, but ess-zett becomes "SZ" and capitalization 
is represented by a suffixed asterisk. (Our scanner has other troubles here, 
taking A-umlaut as X, O-umlaut as U, and U-umlaut as O!) Vol. 1 treats the 
words as tokens (Wortformen), Vol. 2 as lexical items (Wort und Lemma).

(From Mark Mandel, one of many readers at dragon.isi.edu.) 

In response to Carol Georgopoulos' suggestion regarding the CHILDES data 
base, anyone who is interested should contact Brian MacWhinney at 
brian+andrew.cmu.edu. He can also put those who are interested on the 
info-childes network, which is dedicated to any information that has to do 
with first-language acquisition.
Ginny Gathercole

For information on CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange
System), contact Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie-Mellon:
brian+andrew.bitnet OR brian+andres.cmu.edu

-Dan Slobin (slobincogsci.berkeley.edu)

Thank you to all the responses on Quechua, my friend appreciates all the help.
He is starting grad school at U Illinois this fall and plans to study Quechua,
so he wanted to look over what he could find before he started.
 Thanks
Barry Waid
Auburn University
bwaidducvax.auburn.edu
or
jimgducvax.auburn.edu

IU (Indiana University-Bloomington) has a Professor of Quechua (!),
whose name is Janis B. Nuckolls. I think she's officially in the
Anthropology department, and I don't know if she has an email
address.

Linguists at heidelberg:
Try Hubert Lehmann (lehdhdibm1.EARN or leh%dhdibm1.Bitnetcunyvm.cuny.edu,
whatever works from your site). He'a linguist, a nice chap, and works for
IBM in Heidelberg.
Hartmut Haberland

>From Mark Mandel at dragona.isi.edu:

Please note that all of us here at Dragon Systems share a single mail address. 
Something, somewhere, is attaching Larry Gillick's name to our mailings and 
deleting signature lines!

In Linguist V.2 N.0072, Joe Giampapa responds with a question to my comment 
(in N.0070, mislabeled as from my co-worker Larry Gillick) on Turner's 
analysis of "mother of all battles". No, sorry, I am not working on any 
aspect of Arabic cultures; and Jed Roberts is not a linguist or Arabist at 
all, but our chief software engineer, who was in my office while I was 
composing the posting.

I completely agree with the latest response on this topic,
by Robert Hoberman, from which it follows that in the context,
'mother of battles' meant 'the greatest or most important battle'.
Ipso facto, I am puzzled by some of the speculation in the
earlier contributions on this topic.