LINGUIST List 8.1488

Wed Oct 15 1997

Qs: Historical Ling, Syntax, le Verlan

Editor for this issue: Martin Jacobsen <martylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Guido Mensching, Qs: "Archaism" in historical linguistics
2. Daniel =?iso-8859-1?Q?Ria=F1o?=, syntactical annotation of Classical texts with a computer
3. Melonie Alspaugh, le Verlan

I am looking for definitions of and/or critical comments about
"archaic", "archaism", etc. as used in historical linguistics. I am
referring to a concept of "archaism", in which a language X1
(e.g. Spanish) is compared to its genealogical basis X (e.g. Latin)
and to other languages X2, X3, ... derived from the same basis
(e.g. Italian, French ...). Usually, linguistic dictionaries do not
show this meaning of "archaic" / "archaism". So far, I have found only
one dictionary (Johann Knobloch, ed., "Sprachwissenschaftliches
Woerterbuch"), where "archaism" is defined (not very elegantly) as "an
old-fashionedness which the more conservative languages conserve from
their base-language" ("eine Altertuemlichkeit, die die konservativeren
Sprachen aus der Grundsprache bewahren"). The background of my
interest in this subject is that I have observed that, at least in
"Romance Philology", "archaism" is mostly used without any theoretical
reflection. In addition, many authors mix up various concepts of
"archaism". I will be grateful for any indications to dictionaries,
textbooks, etc. Of course, personal opinions will also be welcome.

=======================================================================
Guido Mensching -- Linguistic Data Processing -- University of Cologne
menschspinfo.uni-koeln.de -- Tel. 49-221-4704430 -- FAX:
 49-221-4705193
=======================================================================

	I would be interested in hearing about anyone who's working on
the syntactical annotation of Ancient Greek or Latin texts with a
computer. I would like to know specially:

1. What kind of tags you are using for the syntactical analysis,
2. The depth of this analysis,
3. What kind of editor you use to parse the sentences,
4. What kind of texts you are working on, and how many words do you
	have parsed,
5. The computer platform you are using,
6. The model of syntactical description you are applying,
7. Whatever you think it's worth to know about it.

Please e-mail me to the address below:

___________________________________________________________________
	Daniel Rian~o Rufilanchas
	c. Santa Engracia 52, 7 dcha.
	28010-Madrid
	Espan~a
	e-mail: danielrrmad.servicom.es

Hello, I am a graduate student doing research on Verlan--the French
code language/language game--and am seeking recent articles which have
sociolinguistic pertinence (in English or French). I am especially
interested in the sociologial/anthropolgical significance of Verlan
and its current state in relation to Standard French. Any advice or
suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Melonie Alspaugh
Department of French and Italian
The University of Texas at Austin
melonieamail.utexas.edu