LINGUIST List 5.1305

Wed 16 Nov 1994

Qs: Canadian American, IPA-fonts for DOS, Genre analysis, IE

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1. , canadian vs american accents
2. clements, DOS-compatible IPA fonts
3. Farzad Salahshoor, Genre analysis of lingiustics textbooks
4. , Why Indo-European

I was wondering whether anyone had references for the differences
between Canadian and American accents. I know there are, but I got
stuck the other day when someone asked me to give him specific
examples of such differences. Thanks a lot in advance for your help.

Could someone suggest phonetic symbol (e.g. IPA) software that is
DOS-compatible and can be run with WordPerfect? Thanks in advance for
your responses.

Clancy Clements
Indiana University
Clementsindiana.edu

Dear List members,

I am in the course of collecting and analysing my data for my Ph.D thesis,
which is a genre analysis of introductory applied Linguistics textbooks
(mainly textbook chapters on Lingusitics and Language Teaching
Methodology). These books should meet the following prerequisites in order to
be included in my corpus:

1. They should be written mainly to be used as textbooks for undergraduate
 courses
2. They should be published between 1980-1994.
3. They should have distinguishable chapters of moderate size

A typical example I have found is Yules' ( 1985) The study of Language'.
Could anyone so kindly provide other references? I would be much obliged for
your help.

Farzad Salahshoor
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
UK

e-mail salafressex.ac.uk
Tel. UK code+206+872227

I am wondering if anybody has noticed that in the recent
attacks on hypotheses such as Nostratic, Amerind, or even
Altaic, the critics almost always keep changing the criteria
for demonstrable language relatedness in ways calculated to
make Indo-European the sole standard or model of a genuine
language family. I have in mind, for ex., the insistence
on morphological paradigms being reconstructed before
we accept the validity of a proposed family, or the
insistence on "complicated" and "unnatural" sound changes
(such as *dw -> rk), for example. Nor is it sensible to
defend this practice on the grounds that only IE is well-
known enough, since there are many many well-established
language families besides IE. Moreover, IE is very atypical
because of the antiquity of preserved texts (Vedic, Hittite,
Mycenean) and the resultant fact that it is a very young
family (because the time gap between Proto-IE and the oldest
texts is very small as such things go). Thus, a family like
Uto-Aztecan or Austronesian would be a much better model.
Wouldn't it?