LINGUIST List 3.54

Tue 21 Jan 1992

Disc: Case Systems, Typology, Primes

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1. "LLOYD HOLLIDAY, LA TROBE UNIV, EDUCATIOEDULHlure.latrobe.edu.au, Re: 3.45 Queries: Grad Schools, World Languages, Typlogy, Syncope
2. , Re: inflectional development
3. "Randy J. LaPolla", database systems for typology
4. , Well- and ill-defined sets

Message 1: Re: 3.45 Queries: Grad Schools, World Languages, Typlogy, Syncope

Dear Susan Fischer:
Try Dr Jan Branson, School of Education, La Trobe University, Bundoora Victoria
3083, Australia, who has interests in Auslan and women in Third World education.
From
Lloyd Holliday
edulhlure.latrobe.edu.au

I can't remember who posted the original query, or I would have
responded directly. If someone is looking at origins of inflectional
systems, the Case systems of the Finno-Ugric languages might be of
interest. There's an old paper floating around discussing the
development of Case systems from a postpositional systme in a number
of language families:

Kahr, Joan Casper (1976) "The Renewal of Case Morphology: Sources and
Constraints". it's vol 20, pp 107-151 of the Working Papers on
Language Universals from Stanford University.

Hope this helps.

Jonathan Bobaljik
MIT

Martin Haase asks "Has anybody some experience with using a database system for
research in language typology?"
In our work on the Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary (James Matisoff, P.I.),
we tried a number of different database programs (on our Macintoshes), and found
for example Oracle and Fourth Dimension slow and limited. We eventually settled
on Foxbase (Think Technologies, Inc.) software. Ours was a lexical project, so
I'm not sure whether Foxbase will be the best for a typological database, but I
am planning to use the same software for a Tibeto-Burman morphology database.

Randy LaPolla
Institute of History & Philology
Academia Sinica

I continue to be inundated by e-mail accusing me of claiming
that there are only finitely many primes, whereas I have twice
said that it is the set of primes I know (i.e., those which
primes which I, Alexis Manaster Ramer, know and know to be
prime) that is finite and moreover ill-defined. The fact
that Euclid found a way of constructing an infinite set of
primes (as well as the facts that I believe in the existence
of an infinite set of primes) is not relevant. I am really
quite sure that I only know a finite number of primes, and
also that there are numbers about which I am unsure whether
they are primes. So the set (or collection) in question
really is finite and ill-defined.