LINGUIST List 6.1360

Thu Oct 5 1995

Qs: Language of Flowers, Writing Systems,Data Software

Editor for this issue: Annemarie Valdez <avaldezemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Julian O'Dea, The Language of Flowers
2. John Clews, WRITING SYSTEMS AND MULTILINGUAL EMAIL
3. Venetia Moschovou, software for qualitative data analysis

Does anybody know anything about the "language of flowers"?

This was a 19th Century thing mainly, I think. It involved people (often
lovers) sending flowers to each other. Each flower had a special meaning
and, supposedly, quite complex messages could be conveyed.

Does anyone have any info, know of any relevant books, articles, personal
experience, etc?

How did each variety of flower acquire its individual meaning? Were there
different '"dialects" of the language or did each flower always mean the
same thing around the world? Was there any "syntax"?


Julian O'Dea
Canberra
Australia
jodeamailhost.dpie.gov.au

I have always been surprised, when looking through the linguistics
literature, at how little writing systems feature, although these have such a
major part to play in our language communication, and our exposure to them
also affects the way our spoken use of the language, especially when starting
to use new words.

I would be grateful for any suggested references that any Linguist List
readers may be able to offer on Writing systems, beyond Florian Coulmas's
book on the subject.

Readers swho are interested in this field may also be interested to hear of
SEDIT - a "language layer" to enable multilingual database, word processing
and spreadsheet provision. The MS-DOS version is now available for the most
heavily used most non-ideographic scripts, and a Windows version is being
developed in parallel.

The email enhancement also allows transmission and receipt of any text
without loss of information, to cover all non-ideographic scripts (i.e. all
outside of China, Japan and Korea) without users having to be using the same
code pages or text processing software, which MIME requires, for example.

The current version provides for all languages which use accented Latin
script, Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian and Armenian and all Indian scripts. It has
been tested for usability with users in all these languages, and takes
account of the views of registered users in providing updates to the software.

A version for Hebrew and Arabic scripts is nearing completion, and a version
for Southeast Asian scripts is at the advanced planning stage.

Further information is in the document SEDIT.INF which contains up to date
information on how the SEDIT package enables the multilingual editing,
display, printing of text, as well as enabling transmission and receipt of
any text without loss of information.

If you (and/or other users that you may like to forward this to) want to get
further information, including how to obtain the software, please simply
reply to seditsesame.demon.co.uk with this message:

GET SEDIT.INF - INFORMATION SOURCE: LINGUIST

Although this resembles a listserver command, Seditsesame.demon.co.uk is NOT
a listserver that only responds to a limited number of preset commands.
A human being is at the other end, which means that you can simply reply using
the GET SEDIT.INF command (upper or lower case) AND/OR send normal email
correspondence/queries etc., which will receive a human reply.

Please feel free to forward this to any other users who may be interested.

-
John Clews

I am working on conversational data employing a combination of conversation
analysis (on a micro level) and a more general politeness-oriented approach
(on a discourse-chunk level). Does anyone know of a software that is
capable of coding (items or strings), as well as sorting and retrieving
coded categories? The kind of software I am looking for should also be
sensitive to nested and overlapping codings. Any pointers to relevant
software and/or sources, or literature, or people who have used such
packages would be greatly appreciated!

Please e-mail your replies directly to me, and I will summarise for the list.

Thanks in advance!

Venetia.