LINGUIST List 5.771

Sat 02 Jul 1994

Qs: Malagasy, French-English MRD, World Wide Web, Discourse

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Directory

1. , malagasy phonology
2. Eneko Agirre, bilingual french-english MRD
3. "James K. Tauber", Q: Language Descriptions on World Wide Web
4. Gwyn Williams, Query: Discourse Strategies of Street Vendors

 I'm going to write a doctoral dissertation on the phonological analysis
of a southern dialect in my country (Madagascar) called Masikoro and I would be
interested in knowing about studies done or under way on that dialect or on
other Malagasy dialect (Merina, Sakalava, Antandroy, Antaifasy, Antaisaka,
Bezanozano, Betsileo etc.). I read fluently French and English so you can send
your message in either language. I would greatly appreciate any contribution
anyone can give. Thank you very much.

I am searching for a bilingual french-english machine readable
dictionary. I have tried in the usual places (CLR, OTA, LDC) and have not
found anything. Does anybody know of such a MRD?

eneko

Eneko Agirre
Informatika Fakultatea tel: (34) 43 218000
649 p.k. - 20.080 Donostia fax: (34) 43 219306
Euskal Herria / Basque Country email: jibagbeesi.ehu.es

It has occurred to me recently that the World Wide Web would provide an
excellent means for disseminating language descriptions. People doing work
on individual languages could provide vocabulary lists, glossed
sentences, digitized samples of speech, etc. Language families would then
have their own page which would include general information about the
family as well as links to the individual language descriptions on the WWW.

I appreciate that this could very well be an area where lots of work has
already been done, but I have yet to come across any large-scale effort
to make language descriptions available on Internet.

What do people think about this kind of thing?

James K. Tauber, Undergraduate Student ``Perplexed but not
Centre for Linguistics, UWA, Australia despairing''
E-mail: jtaubertartarus.uwa.edu.au - Paul (2 Cor 4.8)
WWW: ftp://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/pub/jtauber/WWW/index.html

 I have been asked to co-supervise an M.A. thesis in linguistics on
the topic of stall vendors' English in a popular backpackers' area in
Bangkok, Thailand. The thesis will be in Thai. Having just had a long
discussion with the student, it appears that her interest lies in
communicative strategies or coping strategies, ie., devices that
non-native speakers (vendors) use to cope with their lack of ability
in the target language. Such strategies include paraphrase, explanation,
coining new words, transfer, generalization, gesture, silence, etc.

 We would greatly appreciate any references available on "vendor talk"
in general, and communicative strategies in comparable contexts, in
any country. Thanks in advance.

 [cross-posted to LINGUIST, TESL-L, SLART-L]

(Mr.) Gwyn Williams <gwynipied.tu.ac.th>
Department of Linguistics
Thammasat University