LINGUIST List 6.1545

Fri Nov 3 1995

Misc: Lg & dialect, Women in ling, Self-cen, Binary

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

Directory

1. Keith Goeringer, dialect v. language
2. MARC PICARD, Women and linguistics
3. Alexis Manaster Ramer, The Utility of Queries on Linguist
4. Alexis Manaster Ramer, Summary: Binary Compan

Greetings, linguists.

I am posting this as something tangentially related to the on-going
discussion of language v. dialect. This is from an article on the Bosnian
peace talks taking place in Dayton, OH, and is from the 11/1 San Francisco
Chronicle. In a section named _About the peace talks_, there is a
subsection called _The language barrier_:

 "The room for the ceremony has a round table covered with a blue
cloth. Microphones have
 already been placed on the table for participants. Booths have
been installed for simultaneous
 translation <sic> into Russian, English and French, as well as
Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian and
 Croatian.
 Although each side in the conflict claims to have a
separate language, all three were
 considered to speak the same before Yugoslavia's breakup in 1991."

I'm surprised they didn't insist on having an interpreter for Hercegovinian
as well...

Keith


Keith Goeringer
UC Berkeley
Slavic Languages & Literatures
kegviolet.berkeley.edu

 While were on the topic of women and linguistics, could somebody
explain to me why there are virtually no women in the field of Indo-European
(and Nostratic doesn't look like it's going to be any different)? Just check
out the JOURNAL OF INDO-EUROPEAN STUDIES since its inception in 1973, and
you'll see what I mean. Could it be that women are instinctively reluctant
to go into an area populated by a bunch of old boys (I almost wrote 'old
farts') who haven't yet discovered the existence of the IPA?

Marc Picard

I thought it might be valuable to document the same by reference
to some very positive results I have had with LINGUIST queries.

In his 1988 book on the subject of loanwords in the domain of body
parts, Doerfer, who is a voracious reader of anything and everything
to do with linguistics, was unable to come up with even a single
example of a borrowed term for 9 out of the 11 most basic body part
terms. While I was able to do a little better before posting a query
on LINGUIST, it is only as a result of two or three queries that I
obtained clear examples of borrowing (accompanied by loss of the native
term) for all of these terms, most recently that for EAR, which was
the last one to fall into line While I will be posting a summary
as soon as I can get all the information digested and organized, I
thought it might be useful to make the general point separately.

I do not see how one could hope to obtain this kind of information
except through a resource like LINGUIST.

Alexis MR

I recently asked if anyone knew the origin of the idea that, when
trying to decide if a given set of languages or groups are related,
you should comre them pairwise (i.e., two at a time). I have
heard from Karl Teeter (as well as, privately, from two other
former students of Mary Haas), all of whom suspect that it was
a procedure which she had come up with, purely for practical reasons
and without making any kind of theoretical claims about this being
better or worse than any other method. If anyone out there knows
anything more specific (incl. any discussion of this is print,
any evidence of the use of this method beforeaas, or any discussion
of how it came to pass that some linguists started teaching this as
THE only method for this purpose), I would be very grateful.

Alexis Manaster Ramer