LINGUIST List 6.452

Mon 27 Mar 1995

Qs: Baraba Turkic, Swiss German, Turanian lgs, Arabic MT

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1. Alexis Manaster Ramer, Q: Baraba Turkic
2. MARC PICARD, Laterals in Swiss German
3. , Turanian languages
4. Gabriel Amores, Arabic MT

Does anybody know (I have already checked the standard sources)
about Baraba Turks and esp. about the possibility that they
once spoke a Finno-Ugric language which was replaced by Turkic
in the 18th century?

Alexis MR

 Can someone tell me whether or not syllable-final /l/ is velarized
in Swiss German?

Marc Picard

Begging the pardon of all the Nostratic and genetic theorists, but is there
anybody on the net that has expanded on the Turanian family of Max Mueller's
old classification?

When last this was in vogue, the Sumerian, Basque, Amerindian languages and
the agglutinative languages of Africa, among others, had been added to Mueller
's original classification making up a family that dwarfs any of the "super
families" of the Nostratic school.

While Mueller had his faults and prejudices, I still believe he was a much
better linguist than any of the modern lot. He deserves to be called the
Panini of the West, and he strongly influenced great linguists like Bloch and
Chatterji. Greenberg knows language but he and his followers bring up the
old Semitic proverb, "strain at the eye of the needle, swallow the camel!"
 There are thousands of languages, many existing only among small tribes,
that have resisted centuries of exposure to the West and maintained their
morphological and phonological structure. Yet they have swallowed up lexicon
insatiably. It is only a matter of time before more and more examples are
brought out to poke holes in the Swadesh 100 word list.

Probably all the old loyalists to the Turanian school are too busy studying
what really makes languages tick, rather than concocting pseudo-mathematical
arguments on material too subjective for statistical analysis. Fortunately,
Ringe and others have attacked some of the weaknesses of this methodology.
 All clandestine Turanianologists contact me at the address below.

Paul Manansala
polkekaiaol.com

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Query:
Could someone point me to commercial systems and/or research
systems involving Arabic-English Machine Translation systems
(preferably English into Arabic)

Thanks
gabyfing.us.es

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Gabriel Amores
Departamento de Lengua Inglesa
Universidad de Sevilla
Palos de la Frontera s/n
41004 Sevilla. Spain.

Tel. +34-5-455.15.88/15.06
Fax: +34-5-455.15.16