LINGUIST List 6.470

Thu 30 Mar 1995

FYI: Proverb Studies, 8-bit characters, Morphology, Latin

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. , Electronic journal of paremiology
2. Ted Harding, Re: 6.437 FYI: 8-bit characters, ...
3. "Robert Beard", Re: 6.440 FYI: WWW server, Spanish, African ling, Panel on Borr
4. Deborah D K Ruuskanen, Re:Elvis in Latin, JAZZ in Latin, Nuntii Latini

Dear Colleagues,

 I have just published the first electronic journal of paremiology
(proverb studies) on the Web and two books with a proverbial
content. Subscription is free of charge.

) Some sketchy notes on the two ventures:
)
) 1. "De Proverbio: An Electronic Journal of International Proverb Studies",
) Volume 1 - Number 1 - 1995 (ISSN 1323-4633) is edited by Dr. Teodor Flonta
) at the Department of Modern Languages-Italian (University of Tasmania,
) Australia) (email: Teodor.Flontamodlang.utas.edu.au) and it is a scholarly
) refereed journal. The first issue contains articles on a variety of issues
) concerning paremiology (proverb studies) ranging from the perception of
) proverbiality to proverb use in Hitler's 'Mein Kampf', which can be of
) interest for non scholars also.
)
) "De Proverbio" can be viewed at the following URL
) http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/
)
)
) 2. "De Proverbio: An Electronic Book Publisher" is located momentarily in De
) Proverbio Database of "De Proverbio: An Electronic Journal of International
) Proverb Studies", Volume 1 - Number 1 - 1995. Two books are published
) there already: 'Lettera in proverbi'-ISBN 1 875943 01 3 -
) written in the sixteen century by an
) Italian humanist (edited by T. Flonta) and a second edition of
)"English-Romanian
) Dictionary of Equivalent Proverbs"- ISBN 1 875943 00 5 -
) (T. Flonta).
)
) "De Proverbio" can be viewed at the following URL
) http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/
)
) For "Lettera in proverbi", the complete URL is
) http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/DP,1,1,95/letter.html and for
) "English-Romanian Dictionary of Equivalent Proverbs
) http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/DP,1,1,95/dictionary.html
)
) Teodor

Teodor Flonta Tel. (002) 202321
Department of Modern Languages (Italian) International +61 02 202321
University of Tasmania Fax. (002) 207813
GPO Box 252C International +61 02 207813
Hobart TASMANIA 7001
Australia
 e-mail: Teodor.Flontamodlang.utas.edu.au
 URL: http://info.utas.edu.au/docs/flonta/

Message 2: Re: 6.437 FYI: 8-bit characters, ...

Re: the following

) LINGUIST List: Vol-6-437. Sun 26 Mar 1995. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 176
[skipped]
)
) plain "n", etc.). The real trouble arises when you wish to send a more
) polished document such as a paper, an abstract, a conference posting, a
) bibliography, a draft of a thesis to a distant supervisor, etc. In most
) of these cases the spelling norms *are* crucial. The obvious solution is
) the coding of 8-bit characters as sequences of 7-bit characters. I think
) that this has become a common practice, but I don't know whether there
) is a standard for these conversions.

There is no standard, though there are several common practices.
There is not even "the" IBM extended character set: there are several
in use (the "codepages"). 8-bit characters do not suffice for everything
(maximum 256, in practice maximum 224). And they depend on the
receiver's terminal being encoded correctly: you would have trouble
if one mail message was in Hebrew and the next in Cyrillic.

Some proposals call for 2-byte characters (16-bit), e.g. UNICODE,
but (a) this would totally disrupt current email norms and the
capabilities of normal word-processing software; (b) UNICODE is
not yet standardised anyway.

Don't forget that anything whatever can be sent in 7-bit ASCII
provided sender and receiver agree on how to interpret the message.
By and large it is a matter of "signalling" certain combinations of
ASCII characters as representing something else. The text-formatting
packages TeX (and variants) and troff do this routinely: e.g.
Greek lower-case gamma is \gamma (TeX) or \*a (troff). The principle
is that the "\" character signals that what follows (terminated
by agreed rules) represents something else. You need something
when you really need "\" as such, so it is of course "\\".
The "\" is an "escape character", and something like "\*a" is
an "escape sequence".

If anything, troff conventions (since about 1970) and TeX conventions
(since about 1980) have been standard amongst an increasingly large
community. But you can adopt you own conventions so long as sender
and recipient agree. And of course these escape sequences can be
sent over standard 7-bit email with no problem whatever. And you can
make your own definitions or extensions, so there is no limit
to what you can represent. You can also send special typograhical
symbols: e.g. (troff) \(dd is the "double-dagger" used for footnotes
and the like, \(Po is the UK currency "pound" sign, and so on.

Now comes the point: any text-editor worth mentioning can search
for an ASCII string and replace it with something else. So search
for "\*a" or "\gamma" and replace it with whatever would be generated
by the key-presses you use for Greek gamma, and there you are.
So if you want to send a smart document with all the real characters,
you can do it this way.

Lest you think that a Cyrillic text implies an awful lot of typing
of escape sequences, don't forget either that you could define (e.g.)
"\(CYkniga y min\(ya\(cy meaning "switch to Cyrillic mode; Russian for
"my book" wih the right chaacters (note the "\(ya"), switch out of Cyrillic".
However, at this level it is getting beyond the capability of simple
search-and-replace.

Of course it is "encoded" (but no more so than by 8-bit or whatever),
and an encoded message is only useful when the receiver knows how to
decipher it. But this problem already exists (how may of you can
handle incoming 8-bit code off the top of your heads?). Give it some
thought. These days it is the TeX community who are flourishing
(we troff types are obsolescent, though you type about 80% less
in troff), and there are newsgroups etc about using TeX for
"international" purposes.

Not forgetting, of course, that if you want to send a really nice
document to your supervisor you can compose the lot in Tex or troff
with full document-formatting codes etc, which the person at the
other end can just print out using the appropriate standard
software.

Ted. (Ted.Hardingnessie.mcc.ac.uk)

Message 3: Re: 6.440 FYI: WWW server, Spanish, African ling, Panel on Borr

 This is to announce another WWW server, this one on
morphological theory. The LMBM pages contain an outline of my own
version of a lexeme-based morphological theory, called Lexeme-Morpheme Base
Morphology for its stringent distinction of lexemes and grammatical
morphemes. The address is:

http://www.bucknell.edu/~rbeard
Robert Beard Bucknell University
Russian & Linguistics Programs Lewisburg, PA 17837
rbeardbucknell.edu 717-524-1336
For morphology on Internet, try: www.bucknell.edu/~rbeard

For all those interested in Latin as a "living" language,
the Finnish Broadcasting Company has a roundup of News in Classical
Latin aired each weekend on shortwave, in North America at 21:24 EST
(New York) on Saturday at Galaxy 5 (3.820 GHz/6.8 MHz) and 09:53
 (a.m.) on Suunday at 15400 kHz/19 m) and 17740 kHz/16m) with a
rebroadcast on Sunday at 10:23 (a.m.) on Galaxy 5.
Local stations or audio networks may also carry Nuntii Latini as part of
their feeds of Radio Finland or World Radio Network.
There is also a marvelous recording of traditional jazz with Latin
lyrics, Variationes Horatianae Iazzicae, which has to be heard to
be believed: the Roman Empire extended to Louisiana????
Those interested in this CD are advised to contact the International
Information Department of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE,
PO Box 10, FIN-00241 Helsinki, Finland. For YLE Nuntii Latini, write to
YLE Radio Finland, Box 78, FIN-00024 Yleisradio, Finland.
 Fax: +358 0 148 1169. Internet: rfinlandyle.mailnet.fi

Salve (and I don't mean ointment),
 kela
 --
Deborah D. Kela Ruuskanen \ You cannot teach a Man anything,
Leankuja 1, FIN-01420 Vantaa \ you can only help him find it
druuskancc.helsinki.fi \ within himself. Galileo