LINGUIST List 2.88

Friday, 22 Mar 1991

Disc: MS, Maltese, Kikongo, Mother of

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. "Hartmut Haberland, Roskilde University"HARTMUTjane.ruc.dk, RE: Multilingual Scholar
2. Henry Polard, Re: Maltese
3. Joe Giampapa, Maltese
4. , Re: Maltese
5. Jacob Hoeksema, Re: Queries And Responses
6. , Kikongo and Maltese
7. John Goldsmith, Re: Kikongo
8. "don l. f. nilsen", MOTHER-OF METAPHORS
9. , The granddaddy of all headaches
10. , Once more, mother of all battles
11. "JOHAN ROORYCK", French introduction to linguistics

Correct Subject: Multilingual Scholar
I have a FAX number in Denmark (the int'l prefix for Denmark is 45) which
gives you information about Multilingual Scholar:
 86161288
and can probably direct you to an US dealer (or elsewhere).

> Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 17:09:37 CST
> From: GA3704%SIUCVMB.BITNETCUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: Maltese
> 
> Is there anything like "Maltese Made Easy"? or other relatively
> accessible teaching grammar of Maltese around in English? A
> friend of mine will be there on a Fulbright next year and is
> trying to get ready.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions/information...
> Margaret Winters <ga3704siucvmb.bitnet>
> Southern Illinois University - Carbondale

There was, and may still be, a book in the Teach Yourself...
series entitled, "Teach Yourself Maltese." Sorry, I don't know
the publisher's address.
Good luck!
--Henry Polard 

> Date: Tue, 19 Mar 91 17:09:37 CST
> From: GA3704%SIUCVMB.BITNETCUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
> Subject: Maltese
> 
> Is there anything like "Maltese Made Easy"? or other relatively
> accessible teaching grammar of Maltese around in English? A
> friend of mine will be there on a Fulbright next year and is
> trying to get ready.
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions/information...
> Margaret Winters <ga3704siucvmb.bitnet>
> Southern Illinois University - Carbondale

The only Maltese person I know speaks Italian (from its geographical location)
and English (from being an ex-British colony). I do not know if there is a
Maltese dialect, but I will ask my friend the next time I see her.

-Joe Giampapa
garofsixcom.it
garof%sixcom.ituunet.uu.net (from US Bitnet sites)

About Maltese: try the Teach Yourself ... series. They do a really
surprising number of languages, and most of the books I've used have
been good (but I've used them for data, not learning to speak the
language). They are published in the US by David McKay Co. Inc., 
2 Park Avenue, New York NY 10016. They'll send a complete list of
Teach Yourself titles on request.

Carol Georgopoulos

Re Maltese grammar:

There is Teach Yourself Maltese
by Joseph Aquilina
(I have a 1965 edition, and
don't know if there's a more recent
print.)

--Jack Hoeksema
University of Groningen

Ingo Plag asks about Kikongo. I recommend Alexis Takizala as a
resource. He is a native speaker with a Ph.D. in Linguistics from
UCSD. Here is the most recent address I have for him (from March
1986): Dr. Alexis Takizala, P. O. Box 1592, Lubumbsdhi, Zaire.

Margaret Winters asks about Maltese. Although he hasn't
written anything pedagogical, I would ask Bernard Comrie (USC Ling.)

Paul Chapin

Solikoko Mufwene speaks and has written on Kikongo, including the
areas raised in the note. His address is
smufweneuga.bitnet
John
Goldsmith

LINGUIST SUBSCRIBERS:
 On March 16 the ARIZONA REPUBLIC picked up an ASSOCIATED PRESS
article on MOTHER-OF METAPHORS. It mentions, among other things:
 Johnny Carson opened a recent show by promising "the mother
of all monologues." His fill-in, Jay Leno later reported that "even Saddam Hus
sein's mother is mad at him: 'You called it the WHAT of all battles?'"
 A recent flash of bright light in the Pennsylvania sky brought no
talk of UFOs; instead, a pilot quickly cited it as "the mother of
all meteors."
 In the NCAA playoffs a North Carolina booster posted a sign that
promised, "The Tar Heels will defeat the Great Satan Duke in the
mother of all Atlantic Coast Conference tournament games."
 Pat Oliphant suggested that Saddam is now the owner of "The
Mother of All Junkyards.
 Saddam Hussein has been proclaimed the "father of the mother of all cliche
s in U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT.
 And finally, Queen Elizabeth's pet corgis bit her on the hand when she att
empted to interfere in the "mother of all dog battles."
Don Nilsen

 Since the Mother of All Battles has generated such excitement,
I felt obligated to draw attention to a parallel phrase
in apparently indigenous English: the granddaddy of all headaches.
 There seems to be no direct Arabic or Koranic influence here.
You may see it documented
in Liz Hamp-Lyons and Ben Heasley, _Study Writing: A Course in Written
English for Academic and Professional Purposes_ (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 64. It is quoted from an article in the
(London?) _Sunday Times_ magazine, by a polio victim describing the first day
of her illness:
 "I was being distracted by the 'granddaddy' of all headaches.
It felt as though someone was thumping the back of my head and neck
with a sledgehammer".
 I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what "granddaddy"
means here.
---------
Lee Hartman -- Southern Illinois University -- ga5123siucvmb.bitnet

 For those who have not yet succumbed to the mother of all boredom
with the "mother of" phenomenon, here is yet another viewpoint:
 Let's look at the phrase in English for a moment, not as an example of
picturesque Arabic rhetoric, but as a phenomenon of journalistic translation.
We know that two conflicting goals of a translator are (1) to duplicate
faithfully the words of the original and (2) to duplicate faithfully the
effect-on-reader of the original. If the news-media's translators had
aimed for the latter goal, they might have chosen a phrase like
"our great battle"; they might even have combed the rhetoric of some
Western leader, such as President Bush, for the present-day equivalent of
a great battle in a just war inspiring patriotism, etc.
 But by translating literally instead, the news media were able to
enhance the 'otherness' of the enemy, to make perhaps an eloquent orator
(I frankly don't know Saddam Hussein's reputation in this regard) seem
to the average American news consumer like a bombastic fool.
Those who see the semblance of a conspiracy by the (U.S.) news media
to render service in the propaganda war against Iraq will see in the
'mother' translation yet another case of the media's assisting the U.S.
administration to 'demonize' President Hussein. Many readers, no doubt,
will remember the allegations that circulated to the effect that the
news media too willingly helped recent U.S. administrations to demonize
(in reverse chronological order) Noriega, Ortega, Khaddafy,....
 I hope that in the foregoing I have not offended anyone's sense of
the subject-matter limitations inherent to Linguist -- language is often
put in the service of political goals, and that use of language should
be fair game to linguists, I would argue.
 A final note on language and otherness: we hear much about the
average American's ignorance about Islam, but many persons-on-the-street
could tell you "they worship Allah" (I saw a TV interview with a U.S.
soldier in Saudi Arabia who had acquired a copy of the Koran in English,
in order to "find out how Allah is different from God").
The answer, of course, is "much the same way that Dieu is different
from God -- i.e. a non-English-speaking person is referring to Him(/Her/It)".
Was I informed correctly that Arabic-speaking Christians also worship "Allah"?
---------------
Lee Hartman, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, ga5123siucvmb

For Margaret Winters
For an introductory course to French phonology, I think Albert
Valdman's introduction to French phonology and morphology is still the best
introduction because of its contrastive French - English approach.
For morphology proper, there is not really a good textbook that I know of.
I make up a general introduction myself, and then I use large portions
of Sergio Scalise's generative morphology book which can be easily
adapted to an undergraduate audience (at least in part). Moreover, it has
nice overviews of issues such as Blocking in French inspired by Zwanenburg's
work. For compositional morphology, I adapt an article by Philippe Barbaud
(UQAM), (to be) published in the proceedings of the LSRL conference 1989 in 
Columbus. The article allows one to introduce X' theory, and to show the 
distinction between X' theory in the morphology and in the syntax
(presence vs. absence of functional categories). For syntax proper at the
undergraduate level, a very good and pedagogically interesting
book is Annie Delaveau and Francoise Kerleroux book (in French, I can't
recall the exact title, something like introduction a la linguistique...)
It introduces a certain number of topics in generative grammar without
presupposing too much theoretical background: raising vs control,
complementizers, 'en', interrogatives and relatives. 
Of course all of this is for an undergraduate level course with 
students who have no previous knowledge about linguistics.
For a graduate course curriculum, I would advise you to contact Laurie
Zaring, also at Indiana University, who developed one semester
syllabi for respectively syntax, morphology and phonology for
students who have had (the equivalents of) Kenstowicz and Kisseberth
and Radford (1981, 1988).
I hope this may help you somewhat,

Johan Rooryck
Department of French and Italian
642 Ballantine Hall
Bloomington IN 47405