LINGUIST List 5.1478

Mon 19 Dec 1994

FYI: Fonts, Applied ling library, UNM home page, Mac/grammar

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1. debashish banerji, Re: South Asian language fonts
2. , Applied Linguistics 'virtual library'
3. F5JTL aka WX3W, UNM Linguistics Dept
4. Linguistic Instruments, RE: Announcing Grammar Laboratories for the Macintosh

For the information of all interested in South Asian Language fonts, there
is a set of excellent (very elegant)Devnagari and Bengali fonts developed by
Dr. Prasun Kr. De of Los Angeles, teacher of Sanskrit at the Sri Aurobindo
Center of Los Angeles and of Bengali at the Vedanta Center. The specs. on
the fonts are:

AUTHOR: De, Dr. Prasun K.
LANGUAGES: Sanskrit: "Devnagari"; Bengali : "Bangalekhon";
 Transliteration : "Vedalipi".
PRICE: $100 per font; $65 for students working with South Asian
 languages (further need-based concession possible) - proceeds
 are donated to non-profit spiritual organizations.
OPERATING SYSTEM: Macintosh, Windows 3.1 and above
COMMENT: These are TrueType and Postscript scalable laser fonts that
 work with any Macintosh or Windows application in all
 available styles and are very pleasing (artistic) in printed
 form. Keyboard is mapped using a scheme that makes for ease
 and facility of operation and learning. The keyboard mapping
 follows these principles:
 1) Frequency of character occurence is related to finger
position so as to optimize finger movement.
 2) Swalpaprana and Mahaprana consonants share the same key and
 are typed using normal and (shift) modes resp.
 3) The set of first-consonants in-use among all possible
conjunt consonants are standardized, fully in "Bangalekhon" and
partially in "Devnagari" into a smaller-size representation and
share, in the Mac the same key as their larger consonantal double,
being obtained by using (option) and <shift><option> modes. Under
Windows, the present version, designed using a font-editor that
allowed incomplete access to (alt.)<char> combinations, relies on
the (alt) key used with numeric keypad combinations to obtain
 first-consonants in conjunct consonants.
 4) Function keys are mapped to special and special conjunct
characters - such as Om, jna, ksha, nna, tra, etc.

 I realize on re-reading that all this is rather abstruse so if
 you are interested, I could have Dr. De send you (snail-mail)
keyboard layout, documentation and sample output using his
fonts. Please specify Macintosh or Windows.
INFORMATION: For further information, contact Debashish Banerji
through e-mail at hal_computerearthlink.net

l.selinkerapp-ling.bbk.ac.uk

I want to thank colleagues for responding to my message of last week
on how to access the new Applied Linguistics 'virtual library'.
Several of you asked me about the 'Current Papers' section. My idea
is that if this works out, it'll be a new way to work, making papers
available to colleagues and students before publication to 'work the
bugs out' of the argument. Also, if, as I intend, there will be for
each person listed, several current papers; then this will be a way to
follow a colleague's work in a new way as well.

Right now, we have links to the following papers:
- - a paper by Marjorie Perlman Lorch on people discriminating between
 languages they don
t know
- - a paper by me comparing native speaker competence with interlanguage
 competence,
- - Liverpool papers in applied discourse analysis, and
- - CALL reports by the NLLIA.

Again, I invite comments on the organization of the 'virtual library'. To
answer another question, we have decided to interpret the term 'applied
linguistics' in an open way, wishing to be as flexible as possible.

The URL again is:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/Departments/AppliedLinguistics/home.html

For technical information, please message:
Alex Nunes (Central Computing Services, Birkbeck College),
alexccs.bbk.ac.uk

Best, Larry Selinker

UNM Linguistics Dept has its home page:

http://www.unm.edu/~bvanb/lingdept.html

Laurent


 /// /// ///
 (. .) (. .) (. .)
 +oOO-(_)-OOo--------------------oOO-(_)-OOo--------------------oOO-(_)-OOo+
 | Laurent D. Thomin Email: F5JTLUNM.EDU |
 | Department of Linguistics Ham Radio Callsigns: F5JTL ** WX3W/5 |
 | University of New Mexico |
 | |
 | WEB Home Page: http://www.unm.edu/~f5jtl/wx3w.html |
 | |
 | "We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we |
 | try to fight it" |
 | C.S. Lewis |
 +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Sorry for messing up the demo distribution of the grammar laboratories
the way we did. A lot of people complained that they were not able to
de-hex the files that they downloaded from hjelmslev.ling.gu.se .

For those who did not succeed, we now would like to recommend
downloading the laboratories from hjelmslev.ling.gu.se again (rather
than from info-mac, since the hjelmslev.ling.gu.se archive has been
updated slightly).

The earlier distribution did also have a problem on the AV Macs, that
was pointed out to us. The distribution that is now downloadable from
hjelmslev.ling.gu.se has corrected that problem, so that the programs
do now run as they should, *except* that, on an AV Mac, the Generator's
speech option cannot be checked, or else the machine will bomb. We will
of course try to fix the speech disorder on the AV Mac as soon as possible.

Once again sorry for the inconvenience we might have caused you.

Best regards,

Bjoern Beskow
Torbjoern Lager
Linguistic Instruments

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 ***** Grammar Laboratories *****
 for the Macintosh

 by

 ***** LINGUISTIC INSTRUMENTS *****

 A Campus Company at the
 Department of Linguistics
 Goteborg University

Linguistic Instruments is a small company specializing in research
instruments and teaching programs for linguists. In our series of
*Grammar Laboratories* for the Macintosh we currently offer four
packages:

 - Phrase Structure Grammar Laboratory
 - Definite Clause Grammar Laboratory
 - PATR Laboratory
 - Categorial Grammar Laboratory

The Grammar Laboratories are systems for writing grammars in a form
that may be manipulated by a computer. They are designed as aids for
students to explore formal grammars for natural language. They help
the student understand the relationship between strings, rules, and
trees, to grasp the concepts of parsing and generation, the notions of
syntactic ambiguity and recursion, as well as other important concepts
of general and computational linguistics.

For the researcher, although the grammar laboratories should not be
regarded as full-fledged grammar development environments, they are
nevertheless useful for testing out ideas, in a quick and simple
way. Moreover, the programs are able to display analysis trees and
feature structures graphically, the graphics can be formatted in all
sorts of ways, and subsequently exported to other applications.

Each program has two tools, a parser and a generator. The Parser tool
parses sentences and graphically displays the corresponding categories
and trees (if any). The Generator tool accepts as input a start symbol
and a specification of a maximal tree depth, and (randomly or
systematically) generates any combination of a string, spoken
utterance, category symbol, or tree.

The Grammar Laboratories form an integrated package with a generic
design. Nevertheless, each laboratory has some distinguishing
features:

 - PSG Laboratory: A useful tool for introductory courses. It
 directly supports the standard notation for
 (context-free) phrase structure grammar,
 including conventions for optional and
 alternative constituents.

 - DCG Laboratory: An environment for Definite Clause Grammar
 supporting variable categories, left-recursive
 rules, and a limited use of escape to Prolog.

 - PATR Laboratory: Over and above the standard PATR formalism, this
 system supports list-valued features and feature
 structure variables. The graphical display of
 feature structures is enhanced with colour coding
 for reentrancy.

 - CG Laboratory: Grammatical analyses can be displayed either in
 ordinary phrase structure trees or in the special
 kind of annotated proof trees characteristic of
 categorial grammar.

The Grammar Laboratories are *real* Macintosh applications, with all
the functionality and user-friendliness that you have learned to
expect from Macintosh programs. Each package comes with printed
documentation in the form of a 20 pages booklet, as well as a
collection of sample grammars.

Fully functional versions of the Grammar Laboratories, freely
distributed for evaluation, can be retrieved by anonymous ftp from
the following site:

 hjelmslev.ling.gu.se/pub/li/psg-laboratory-11.hqx
 dcg-laboratory-11.hqx
 patr-laboratory-11.hqx
 cg-laboratory-11.hqx

The Grammar Laboratories are *shareware programs*. This means that if
you use them, you should pay for them. For further information, please
contact:

 Linguistic Instruments
 Dept of Linguistics
 Goeteborg University
 S-412 98 Goeteborg
 Sweden

 E-mail: liling.gu.se
 Fax: +46-31-773 48 53