LINGUIST List 5.456

Wed 20 Apr 1994

Qs: U.S. Person, Phonetic inventories, Romanian, Correctness

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Directory

1. , Word for 'Person from the U.S.'
2. Suzanne E Kemmer, phonetic inventories, prosody
3. Angus Grieve-Smith, Q: Summer Romanian
4. , Q: Language "Correctness"

I just got an interesting question from a student working for our University
newspaper, which I couldn't answer but thought I would pass along:
In Spanish-speaking countries of North and South America, there has long
been some resentment of people in the US appropriating the continent name
as the name for their country. So there are words in Spanish roughly
equivalent to 'United Statesian', which can be used to refer to people from
the US, while retaining the right of people from the NOrth and South American
Continents to refer to themselves as '(North or South) American'. The question
is this: Has there ever been an attempt in American English to come up with
a word for our citizens other than '
'American'? If anyone knows of any attempt that has ever been made to introduce
or use a term like 'USA-er', 'United Statesian' etc., which would allow the
term 'American' to be used for any citizen of this hemisphere, please
let me know. Thanks. I will post a summary of any responses.

Peggy Speas
speascs.umass.edu

Can anyone help with the following query from a linguist
working in the computer industry? (I'll summarize any responses
and post to the list) --Suzanne Kemmer (kemmerruf.rice.edu)

"I am working on a large project involving automatic language identification.
Right now, we are compiling a document that will list "the major languages
of the world" with some of their identifying characteristics. These
characteristics will be segmental phonetics (like front rounded vowels
in Swedish), but our main interest is actually prosody (syllable-timed
vs. stress-timed vs. mora-timed; stress location, etc).

Do you know of any books/papers that I should look at for this type of
information? Especially anything that compares different groups or
families of languages in terms of their prosodics?

Thanks for any info you have on this."

 Does anyone know of a college/university offering a course in
Romanian this summer? In a bizarre turn of events, the American
Council of Learned Societies approved a grant for me to study the
language at Indiana University, but denied a grant for Indiana to
teach it.

--
 -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
 grvsmthuchicago.edu

Years ago Bloomfield published a wonderful paper about
language "correctness" in an nonliterate Amerindian
language, observing that the speakers had very similar
ideas of better vs. worse language as we do. I was
wondering if anybody of any other such work.