LINGUIST List 3.553

Mon 06 Jul 1992

Qs: Accents, Kay CSL, Taboo Words, Afar

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1. Victor Raskin, No accent allowed!
2. Ellen Broselow, kay csl
3. mark, list of English taboo words
4. Mike Hammond, Afar

Has anybody else seen a weird piece in a newspaper (I read it Sunday
morning in the local Gannett paper and promptly misplaced it) about a
measure taken by the Greek mayor of a small Massachusetts town with a
very ethnically mixed population to prevent people with foreign accents
to be employed as grade school teachers?

Besides killing my own chances of ever teaching grade school over
there, is this measure also nonsensical linguistically? Am I right in
assuming that children do not typically get "infected" by foreign
accents? The exploits of my bilingual daughter were already mentioned
on this list or around it, but her experience with English (one of her
two native languages) pertains to my query. For the first 3 or 4 years
of her life, her English exposure was primarily to my wife's and my
(different) foreign accents and our housekeeper/nanny who spoke rather
a radical Upper Peninsula Michigan dialect, complete with "warsh" for
"wash," etc. Sarah never acquired any of that.

To refocus the query, is it possible for a 5- or 6-year-old to be
influenced by the foreign accent of his or her grade school teacher?
--
Victor Raskin raskinj.cc.purdue.edu
Professor of English and Linguistics (317) 494-3782
Chair, Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics 494-3780 fax
Coordinator, Natural Language Processing Laboratory
Purdue University
W. Lafayette, IN 47907 U.S.A.

I would like to hear from other users of the Kay CSL system, to determine
whether anyone else has run into the same bugs that I've hit. Please reply dir
ectly to me (broselow at sbccvm.bitnet or ccvm.sunysb.edu).

Does anyone have a reasonably large list of English taboo words,
preferably in machine-readable form? I am interested in the
classic "four-letter words" and their thematic relatives, as
well as any other words that "shouldn't be used in polite
company", such as ethnic or religious slurs. Slang per se is NOT
of interest.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA

I have a student (Lee Fulmer) working on morphology in Afar. She
is trying to get ahold of the following dissertation.

Hayward, Richard J. (1976) "Categories of the Predicator in
Afar, with Especial Reference to the Grammar of Radical Extensions",
SOAS, University of London.

Is there somebody out there who has this and would allow us/her
to copy it? Does anybody out there know if Hayward is reachable
via email?

Thanks much,

Mike Hammond