LINGUIST List 3.74

Fri 24 Jan 1992

Disc: Verlan, Synaesthesia

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Pierre Auger, Re: 3.36 Queries: Computer Transcription, Wordstar, Verlan
2. Victor Raskin, Re: 3.065 Not, Big Time, Synaesthesia
3. "Don W.", Naissances latentes

Message 1: Re: 3.36 Queries: Computer Transcription, Wordstar, Verlan

Concerning Hilary Sachs request on popular litterature on VERLAN, the Magazine
LIRE no 192 (september 1991) presents a nice dossier on the topic of MODE and W
ORDS (in French), a few sublanguages are also presented in this article : VERLA
N, ARGOT des etudiants...etc. This article is very well presentated and written
 in a language that can be understood by non-linguists. Pierre AUGER, professeu
r, Departement de langues et linguistique, Universite laval, Quebec.
N.B.LIRE is a French monthly magazine dealing with litteratures and new books i
n the French world.

Message 2: Re: 3.065 Not, Big Time, Synaesthesia

>Subject: 3.065 Not, Big Time, Synaesthesia
>Date: Fri, 17 Jan 92 20:36:56 EST
>From: JAREAUKCC.uky.edu
>Subject: synaesthesia
>
>There is a lyric by the French poet Arthur (sic) Rimbaud called 'Voyelles'
>('Vowels') which has troubled critics and those interested in synaesthesia
>(a perhaps intersecting class). It begins,
>
> A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
> Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes....

Stunned by that very poem in my early teens, primarily because the
colors contradicted my own strong intuitions, I conducted formal and
informal experiments with my classmates, friends, and later students
in my own classes at Moscow State University, asking them to tell me
what color the Russian vowels a, i, o, u, e were. The degree of
uniformity was impressive, hovering around 95%, no less, the total
accumulation of informants over 350. Naturally, the experiments were
not tightly controlled, so the results should not be taken at face
value. The uniformity, however, cannot be easily dismissed. The colors
were red, green, white, purple (violet), and yellow respectively.
Obviously, the difference from Rimbaud's may be explained away by the
difference in the physical qualities between the Russian and French
vowels. He could have also had a non-standard intuition too--hardly
anything about him was standard.
--

Victor Raskin raskinj.cc.purdue.edu

The story goes that a literary historian -- presumably --
was going through Arthur Rimbaud's papers and came across
a coloring book that the poet had used as a child. In it
was the alphabet. Sure enough, the A was black, the E was
white, the I was red... And the "bateau ivre" (drunken
boat) may have had its own "naissance latente" in a rowboat
that the young Rimbaud used to enjoy. As one scholar notes,
he would stand on the shore, play out the mooring line and
let the boat drift into the river. Then he would draw it
back. "The parallel between the boat's fetters and his own
could hardly escape him"

Colorful tidbits, anyway...

Don W. DonWebbCSUS.EDU