LINGUIST List 6.269

Wed 22 Feb 1995

Qs: Netese, Old Armenian, Shanghainese & Hokkien, Reviews

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , talking on the net
2. , Query: Old Armenian
3. David Gil, Seeking Shanghainese & Hokkien Speakers
4. Esa Itkonen, writing reviews

My husband is a heavy user of e-mail and laments that he does not
know of a good verb that means `conversing by e-mail'. `Talking'
implies that one does it in real time with an interlocutor, and
`writing' implies a letter.

Throwing down the gauntlet, he doubts that we linguists are clever
enough to come up with anything likely to be picked up by the general
electronic community, judging by the stultifying quality of our
professional jargon.

Any takers? Marcia Haag

Is there anybody who works on Old Armenian (esp. in the
context of Indo-European) who is on LINGUIST and would
not mind answering some queries?

Alexis Manaster Ramer

I am looking for speakers of Shanghainese, and of any
version of Hokkien / Xiamen / Amoy. I have some relatively
simple judgements that I would like to elicit from native
speakers. Please contact me at

ELLGILDNUSVM.BITNET

Many thanks,

David Gil
National University of Singapore

Reading Susan Steele's review of B. Heine's book Auxiliaries (Language
4/1944) prompted a number of questions. If the reviewer's reputation
stands ofr falls depending on how well (s)he is able to discredit the
book under review (or if, at any rate, the reviewer atcs as if this were
the case), why should the task of reviewing the book have been assigned
to her (or him) in the first place? If the central criticism consists
consists in drawing a line between 'descriptive' concepts and
'theoretical' ones (with the understanding that only the latter ones
produce 'interesting' results, - although probably the majority of
linguists find such results utterly uninteresting and without any
recognizable link with data), why should such a criticism be published
unrevised and unqualified? Have the Editors no longer any responsability
or control over what gets published in their journals? - These are just
some of the questions that immediately come to mind. Feel free to add to
this list.

Esa Itkonen