LINGUIST List 6.62

Mon 16 Jan 1995

Qs: German; Jakobson; Revived languages; Gemination

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1. Margit Hippelein, german business letters
2. Dietmar Zaefferer, Query: Jacobson reference
3. , Revived languages
4. Claude Boisson, Query: Cons. gemination (syntactic)

In my PhD project I'm working on information extraction from german
business letters. In this context I'm interested in :

1. Any references on articles, books, etc. dealing with the structure
of german business letters

2. A corpus of german business letters

Thanks,

Margit
---
Margit Hippelein margitims.uni-stuttgart.de
 Institut fuer masch. Sprachverarbeitung
 Universiteaet Stuttgart

The following is, I believe, a more or less literal quote from Roman Jakobson:

Languages differ less in what you can express in them than in what you must
express in them.

Does anybody out there have the exact reference?

Dietmar Zaefferer
Institut fuer Deutsche Philologie
Universitaet Muenchen
Schellingstr. 3
D-80799 Muenchen
Germany

Phone: +49 89 2180 2060 (office)
 +49 89 36 66 75 (home)
Fax: +49 89 2180 3871

I'm curious about the sociolinguistics of nations and communities speaking
revived or reconstructed languages -- the degree of prescriptivism,
protectionism, attitudes toward neighboring or colonial languages that once
may have nearly squeezed them out, the status of loanwords in these
languages, etc. I've personally observed how the Czech language community
functions, and would like to know if anyone knows of any other such
situations.

James Kirchner

So far I know of only 3 languages where consonant gemination is=
 "syntacticaly" determined, namely:
(1) Italian, with the "raddoppiamento sinttatico", under certain conditions.=
 For instance, "a casa" =3D /akkasa/.
(2) Biblical Hebrew, where C- is geminated after the definite article=
 (except for some C's). For instance "the horse" /ha ssu:s/
(3) Phenician, at least if we can trust one Punic inscription.

Do you know of other languages showing such a phenomenon?