LINGUIST List 5.593

Sat 21 May 1994

Qs: Chinese/Korean; Letter frequency; Prescription; Italian

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. ABE Hideko Nornes, Language and Gender in Chinese and Korean
2. Penni Sibun, Re: 5.548 Letter frequency information
3. Michael Newman, Attacks on Prescription
4. Gregory Ward, informants sought

Hello. I would be grateful if anyone could suggest to me references on
gender differences in Chinese and Korean languages. I will be teaching a
course on Japanese language and gender, and I would like to include some of
other East Asian languages on this topic. I will appreciate if you can
send the information directly to me (hnabecolby.edu). Thank you very
much.

ABE, Hideko Nornes
East Asian Studies
Colby College
ABE Hideko Nornes --- 16 Brooklyn Ave., Waterville, ME 04901
Phone/FAX: (207) 873-9566

Message 2: Re: 5.548 Letter frequency information

The frequency counts for characters in the multilingual corpus from
the ECI are interesting, but they raise several encoding questions.
with three exceptions (e-acute-accent, a-dieresis, a-small-circle),
all the character codes listed are ascii (which is a proper subset of
ISO Latin 1), so i don't think the encoding confusion is due simply to
characters not making it through mailers.

1. what is the significance of the characters "/" and ":"?
presumably they are not punctuation (it would be hard to imagine that
german text really has a "/" every 50 characters).

2. are diacritics, such as umlauts, encoded consistently throughout
the corpus? if diacritics are (sometimes) encoded as additional ascii
characters, alphabetic or not (eg, "o:" or "oe" for o-umlaut), then
this will have an impact on character counts.

3. surely, "^J" (linefeed) is artifactual and not relevant to the
text in the corpus (though it would be interesting if it were).

thanks for any clarification of these interesting data.

 --penni

Penelope Sibun
Research Staff
Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory
3400 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto CA 94304

sibunpal.xerox.com

I'm writing an article on standard language and presription that in part
proposes that prescriptive grammar is like a linguistic zombie--dead but
still lumbering around causing trouble. To make my point, I'm surveying
critiques of prescriptive grammar written by linguists for nonlinguists:
i.e., either other academic audiences or the general public. So far I know
of:

Fries, 1927/1940: What is good English?
Hall, 1950/1960, Leave your language alone/linguistics and your langauge
Labov, 19xx, The logic of nonstandard Engish
Newmeyer, 1978 Prescriptive grammar a reappraisal
Bolinger, 1980, Language the loaded weapon
Nunberg, 1982, The decline of grammar
Pinker, 1994 "The language mavens" chapter in The language instinct.

Is anyone aware of others to add to that list. I'm not interested in any
attack on prescription, just those by people who could be considered
linguists specifically targeted at audiences outside the profession, not
something one might find in an introductory text or somesuch.

Thanks
Michael Newman
Dept. of Educational Theory & Practice
The Ohio State University
MNEWMANMAGNUS.ACS.OHIO-STATE.EDU

I'm looking for native speakers of Italian in the Chicago area to
assist with a research project on Italian discourse.

Grazie!

Gregory Ward
Northwestern University

tel: (708)491-8055
email: g-wardnwu.edu