LINGUIST List 3.579

Wed 15 Jul 1992

Qs: Body-parts; IPA, IRIS; Alphabet-Songs

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1. John Cowan, Query: body-part metaphors
2. "NAME " William Marslen-Wilson "", IPA, IRIS
3. Takashi Matsuzawa, Alphabet songs/verses?

Could any of you who have them on tap send me body-part metaphors, of
the type "river mouth", "head trip", "nose for news", and the like? I am
interested in non-English examples, preferably non-Indo-European, and in
breadth rather than depth. The language name, the word or phrase, and a
gloss will suffice. As always, ignore the address above and reply to
<cowansnark.thyrsus.com>. Thanks.

--
cowansnark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.

Two technical queries:

1. I've followed with interest the various postings about IPA
fonts, but unless I'm mistaken there still does not exist a readily
available IPA font which I can use in conjunction with Word for
Windows 2.0, running under Windows 3.1, so that I can paste IPA
characters into manuscripts either by using Keyfinder or the ALT +
code method. If I'm wrong about this, I would be grateful for
information about whether such a font exists and how I can get hold
of it.

2. We have a Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation in our
laboratory, and for obvious reasons (good graphics, built in audio
capacity) would like to use it for speech analysis and speech editing.
The UK dealership is not expert in this area. Does anyone have any
experience of using the IRIS for speech work? Has any software
been ported to the IRIS? I heard that WAVES was going to be, but
have no confirmation on this. I guess any speech software that runs
on UNIX boxes would be a candidate here. It would be especially
useful to get responses from any actual users of analysis and editing
software on the IRIS.

Please reply to me directly -- I will summarise any useful
responses for the net.

William Marslen-Wilson
Birkbeck College
Univesity of London
Malet St.
London WC1E 7HX

Email: UBJTA38cu.bbk.ac.uk

Here is a diversion for you :-) I apologize if this list is not
appropriate for this particular purpose. Note I don't subscribe
this list.

Do you know have any knowledge about "alphabet songs" in various
languages??

Well, why I am asking this here is that I would like to gather the
sample texts of the world-wide languages to include them in a forth-
coming software package. We are currently beta-testing a variant
of GNU Emacs editor called "Mule", a Multilingual Emacs. Just
like GNU Emacs itself, it will be available to the world without
fee, whent it is released.

I do not go into the technical discussion here, but the multilingual
editor currently supports most of the European languages, as well as
Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Symplified, Traditional.) We, the beta-
testing people are like kids with their new toy now... I thought
a collection of the above kind of poems would be a fine example of
the editor's ability to handle multiple languages.

As for the alphabet song, in Japan we have a traditional poem called
"Iroha Uta", which is a poem consist of 47 Japanese characters (using
every kana character without duplication), arranging them to have some
philosophical (?) meaning. It could be an interesting sample of a
traditional Japanese poem.

Your poem may not have such format, but for example I think we can call
an ode every stanza begin with alphabets (a, b, c, ...) "alphabet song."
I think what important is that it is specific to your the native language,
popular and beautiful.

Please include the diacritical marks or whatever that are found in
your written languages. If your equipment is not designed for it,
then literal expranation of them is helpful. We will reproduce them
in our sample texts, as long as we can find appropriate character
code and/or fonts for your toungue. (Believe me, I am a computer
engineer.) Your local PC data is acceptable as long as the Internet
e-mail route does not break your character codes. It could be safer
to encode them into ASCII plain texts.

Of course, folklore is welcomed. Since the editor is a "free-software"
that is freely distributed, we would not like to be involved with copyright
issues.

If you are familiar with UNIX: Please uuencode them for transmission,
with the description of the character code used, if it is necessary.

Note I am just a beta-tester of the software. If you are interested
in Mule, please drop us a line to mule-abroadetl.go.jp (mailing list
for English discussion) and muleetl.go.jp (for Japanese discussion)
To join the Mule mailing list, drop a line to
mule-abroad-requestetl.go.jp or mule-requestetl.go.jp, respectively.

Thank you for your kind cooperation.

PS. We have already gatherd several poems, but I believe there should
be much more "alphabet songs" in the world.

---
Takashi Matsuzawa
Japan SDO, APPO, Hewlett-Packard Company
TEL: +81 3-3335-8220 ex. 800-5847, HP-Telnet: 364-5847
FAX: +81 3-3335-6454, Internet: mzw_tyhp.hp.com / mzw_tyhp.co.jp