LINGUIST List 6.1050

Sat Aug 5 1995

Qs: French, Japanese Processing, Game of Kings

Editor for this issue: T. Daniel Seely <dseelyemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. "Dr. Word", Q: help with French translation
2. "Christian Kissing", Q: Processing of Japanese text/database; word frequencies
3. Uri Bruck, Q: Chess -Game of Kings? (english)

I need help with the translation of the French word "barine". From the
context (a song by Augusta Holme`s, including the lines "Je suis Ivan,
fils du barine") I infer that it's some member of Russian nobility, but
have been unable to find it in 4 dictionaries. Please e-mail responses
directly to me, as this can't really be of wide interest. THanks.
Susan Fischer

I am posting this on behalf of a colleague who is not on the list. She is
going to perform psycholinguistic experiments on Japanese Morphology and
needs a number of things for her preparatory work.

First of all she needs to find dictionaries or (preferred) lexical databases
which contain reliable and _recent_ information on word frequencies (her main
emphasis will be on verb morphology); we already know of one dictionary but
this is at least forty years old.

Can anyone on the list point us to such dictionaries or databases? - If not,
is anyone aware of machine-redable corpora of Japanese texts of everyday use
(papers, magazines) from which she could extract the desired frequencies?

Our next problem is to find WINDOWS (TrueType or atm)-fonts of kanj and kana
alphabets (kana would be the more important), because these are input to the
software that handles the experiments. We are aware of NJSTAR for DOS and
"JWP", a 'Japanese Word Processor' for WINDOWS, which would suffice as a word
processor as such, but it uses an internal font format to which our onversion
tool has no access. Besides of that having TrueType fonts would make building
our own databases a lot easier, because we would be able to use WINDOWS
standard-software, so far we have only been informed of a rather adventurous
way of feeding the output of a DOS database into NJSTAR to print index cards
in a library.

By the way - I have heard of a Japanese edition of ALDUS' PAGEMAKER -does it
come with fonts?

We would be grateful for any hint and we promise to post a summary.
Thanks in advance
Christian

**************************************************************************
Christian Kissing
Dept. of Linguistics
Universitaet Duesseldorf home:
Universtaetsstrasse 1 Neusser Strasse 17

D-40225 Duesseldorf 50670 Koeln

Tel.: +49+211/311-4797 0221/779061
Fax.: +49+211/311-5180

eMail: kissingling.uni-duesseldorf.de
**************************************************************************

While proofreading a translation of a text into English I found a reference
to chess as "the game of Kings". This expression is a literal translation
of an equivalent Hebrew expression. The English sources I know use the term
"The royal game" (which may well be the source for the Hebrew expression,
King and Royal being derived from the same root). In English "game of kings"
sounds a bit off to me. I would be grateful if anyone could tell me whether
one of those expressions is preferable to the other.
Thanks
Uri Bruck
bruckactcom.co.il