LINGUIST List 9.275

Tue Feb 24 1998

Qs: Bahasa Passive, Gay Lang, Vietnamese, Amistad

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

Directory

1. Joubert, Jean-Francois, Bahasa Passive
2. Macintosh User, Attitudes towards Gay Men's language
3. margaret albers, Generative Studies on Vietnamese Syntax
4. Dan Maxwell, SLA in Amistad

I would like to know if anyone is working, or has worked on the
passive in Bahasa Indonesia? More specifically the di- prefix.

Thanks for any help

Jean-Francois Joubert 
<jeanfjmicrotec.net>

I am a graduate student at the University of Pittsburgh in the French
and Linguistics Depts and I am currently conducting research on gay
men's attitudes towards the manner in which gay men speak. I am
primarly attmpting to prove that gay men consider effeminate speech
undesirable and unattractive. If anyone has any insight into this
topic that they would consider useful I would greatly appreciate any
assistance. Please send any comments to pmkst14+pitt.edu

I am doing a cross-linguistic study of verb movement in second
language acquistion and would like to know if anyone knows of any
generative studies of verb movement in Vietnamese grammar. I haven't
been able to find anything except traditional descriptive stuff. I
have also received conflicting information on whether or not
Vietnamese allows word order with an adverb between the verb and the
object as in: He finished completely the work. I would really
appreciate any help in this area. Thanks in advance. Margaret Albers
albers_mhccs.cc.tx.us

I recently saw the film "Amistad". At least for linguists, an
interesting aspect of the story is the communication problem between
the Africans, who have arrived against their will in the states in
1839, and the natives (no, not real indigenous native Americans; they
don't appear in this film).
 The two natives trying to help the Africans try to learn Mende, but
it is evident even before their course that the knowledge of their
teacher is fairly limited. They are shown trying to learn the numbers
from one to ten. But when they try to use this knowledge in practice,
the Africans not only don't understand, they apparently don't even
make an attempt to understand. Either what they learned is wrong, out
of date, mispronounced, etc., or the Africans are so convinced that
real communication is impossible that they refuse to try.

My question is: was the state of Second Language Acquisition in the
states at that time so bad that a supposed expert didn't even know the
basic numbers, even though he thought he did, or was there some other
cultural problem which kept communication from taking place, even
though the natives did have some rudimentary knowledge?

Anyone who knows some Mende might be able to make some sort of
judgment about the accuracy of the knowledge demonstrated here.
Another point is that we might know even less about the differences
between present-day Mende and the Mende of 1839 than we know about the
corresponding differences in English.

The hostory of SLA and the history of languages like Mende are probbly
fairly specialized topics, so I don't expect many answers, but I'll
summarize any that I do get.

Dan Maxwell