LINGUIST List 9.875

Sat Jun 13 1998

Qs: Yiddish/Cockney,Names,NLP,SOV Adverbs

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

Directory

1. Gaby Charing, Influence of Yiddish on Cockney
2. Juan Carlos Azkoitia, Names translations
3. Sun Honglin, Qs: What does "ontology" mean in NLP?
4. Thomas Ernst, SOV Adverbs

In British English, "The boy done good!" is a cliche usually
attributed to football managers.

"Done" instead of "did" is cockney (i.e. London working class)
English. But this sentence doesn't mean "The boy did good" (as in
good works). It means "The boy did well".

I have always believed that that this construction is an example of
the influence on cockney of Yiddish. Does anyone know if I'm right?

Gaby Charing
London, UK

Concerning the articles about translating names, mostly royalty names,
is there any research about this topic? And about toponyms, and the
apparently arbitrary tendency to translate ones and not others?
Beijing but Moscow,Varanasi but Prague...? Translation seems to happen
mostly among toponyms rather than among names. Where do this
translations tend to come from?

Juan Carlos Azkoitia
Barcelona, Spain

 The word "ontology" is often used in NLP field recently,but I
don't know what's the exact meaning of it.For example,in the following
sentence:

**********************************************
The design of the envisioned NLU module will
involve deciding what existing technology can be used (e.g., for
robust parsing), extending and modifying components as necessary, and
constructing appropriate linguistic knowledge sources such as
grammars, lexicons, and ontologies.
*******************************************
Please help me.
Thank you in advance.

 Sun Honglin
E-mail:sunhlblcu.edu.cn

A quest for references:

	I would like to find references for material describing the
distribution of manner adverbials, and/or arguing for their base
position(s), in SOV languages (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Turkish). I
will post a summary if there is sufficient interest.

Tom Ernst
ternstrci.rutgers.edu