LINGUIST List 5.795

Mon 11 Jul 1994

Qs: Mathematical models, akuna matata, Ye gods, Corpus

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Directory

1. "Mark Johnson", Mathematical models of language diversity?
2. , akuna matata
3. mark, Ye gods and little fishes!
4. Jody Underwood, Corpus for Phrase Extraction

Can anyone recommend any work on _mathematical_ models of language
change or diversity, spatially and/or temporally? I'm not so much
interested in reconstructing languages as I am in understanding the
interplay of factors that drive language change.

I'm asking this question for a non-linguist friend. This is not my
field, so even basic references would be helpful.

Thanks in advance,

Mark Johnson
Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, Brown University.

Please post the following query:
What language is being sung at the beginning of _The Lion King_? I
presume it is also the language of the phrase "akuna matata" that is
the title of another song in the movie.

Betty Phillips
Dept. of English
Indiana State University
Terre Haute, IN 47809
EJPHILLROOT.INDSTATE.EDU

Someone who is not on the Internet has asked about the origin of
the interjection "Ye gods and little fishes!". Her mother, who
grew up in the Midwest, used it, as does she, but it is unknown
to her children and was not used where she grew up (Connecticut).
The querent is in her early 50's.

 Mark A. Mandel
 Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200
 320 Nevada St. : Newton, Mass. 02160, USA : markdragonsys.com

Could someone point me to a location where there is a large
collection of online texts in ascii format? I've seen some, but they
are mostly in postscript format.

I will use this corpus to extract commonly used phrases to help with
language learning. I prefer a corpus in a single technical field to
limit the phrases that will be found.

Thanks,
Jody Underwood
jodytechunix.technion.ac.il