LINGUIST List 5.1430

Sun 11 Dec 1994

Qs: Japanese-English, REA test, Sumerian initial CCs

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1. Michael Carr, Query: "Grasshopper Mind"?
2. , REA
3. Wolfgang Behr, QUERY ON Sumerian initial CCs

 Are you familiar with the English collocation "grasshopper mind"?
I first saw it listed as a translation equivalent to _utsuri-gi_
'fickleness; caprice' in Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary
(4th ed. 1974), and then found it exemplifying adjectival _grasshopper_
'frivolous' in Kenkyusha's New English-Japanese Dictionary (5th ed. 1980).
 Since grasshopper figuratively means a 'flighty, improvident person',
"grasshopper mind" is a metaphorically apt free combination (occurring
three times in the CobuildDirect on-line corpus), but is it a standard
collocation requiring lexicographical treatment? None of the English
monolingual dictionaries I checked enters this combination; the closest
is The Oxford English Dictionary's (2nd ed. 1989) "My mind travelled up
... and grasshoppered" usage example. However, Roget's Thesaurus (Longman
1982) includes "grasshopper mind" s.v. _changeable thing_ and _inattention_.
 Do other English language reference works enter "the grasshopper mind"?
When was it first recorded? Is it a varietal or dialectal term? Are there
analogous "grasshoppery" words in other languages? If you can answer any
of these questions, please contact me directly and I will post a summary
to LINGUIST.

Michael Carr, Otaru University of Commerce, Otaru 047 Japan
EMAIL carrcanal.otaru-uc.ac.jp FAX 81+ 134-22-0467

Could somebody out there help me get my hands on a simple
dichotic listening tape (test) that could be used to test
for Right Ear Advantage (or Left Ear Advantage as the case may
be) of linguistic stimuli? I'm not asking for this for free,
of course, but I have had problems finding a good one around
here (in the Boston area).

Looking forward to hearing from you

Hoskuldur Thrainsson
Department of Linguistics
Harvard University
77 Dunster Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

tel. (617) 495-4006, e-mail "thrainssfas.harvard.edu"

Dear fellow subscribers!

In two recent articles Claude Boisson (BSL 84.1, 1989: 201-233) and
Manfred Schretter (Acta Orientalia Hafn. 54, 1993: 7-30) have argued
for the possibility of positing (tautosyllabic) initial consonant
clusters for the reconstructed level of Sumerian, basing themselves
mainly on the so-called "Proto-Ea" syllabary glosses of Sumerian
logographs. Does anybody know if there have been earlier/other attempts
to reconstruct CCV(C) syllables in Sumerian or attempts to use "multiple",
i.e. "phonetic transfer" readings of Sumerian logographs for purpos-
ses of reconstruction, in the fashion of what Sinologists commonly
reconstruct in Old Chinese on the basis of "jiajie-", "xiesheng-"
"yidu-" readings of Chinese characters.
Any pointers & references on this subject would be highly appreciated.

Best regards, Wolfgang
Wolfgang Behr
Sinologie, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universit t, Frankfurt/Main
Dantestr.4-6/VI, Postfach 111 932
60054 Frankfurt/Main, FRG
fax: 069/798-2973; tel.(o): 069/798-2852