LINGUIST List 13.1108

Sun Apr 21 2002

Sum: 'Quinto Lingo' Magazine

Editor for this issue: Marie Klopfenstein <marielinguistlist.org>

Directory

  • Karen S. Chung, Quinto Lingo

    Message 1: Quinto Lingo

     Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2002 00:27:52 +0800
    From: Karen S. Chung <karchungccms.ntu.edu.tw>
    Subject: Quinto Lingo


    Eleven people responded to the 'Quinto Lingo' post of 4/7/02 (archived at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-953.html#1). As I suspected, _Quinto Lingo_ was somewhere in the life of some of the real live linguists around us.

    Two respondents hadn't heard of the magazine, but wondered if one could still subscribe (sorry, no - it's been defunct since the 1980s), and if somebody might start it up again.

    A more modest idea might be putting all the back issues online at some point - if anybody is interested, has the Web space, and can resolve the copyright problems. Of course starting it up again, or a similar publication, would be great. I don't know what kind of a profit _QL_ ever made, but at this point I can only imagine it as being a labor of love, and publishing it mainly or solely online. There are so many linguistics journals these days; what was special about _QL_ was that it was *leisure* reading in linguistics, not always as rigorous as one might like, but really lots of fun to read, and full of fascinating bits useful in filling in the background knowledge of a linguist in any specialty.

    Well, in any case, my curiosity has been satisfied. Below follow the responses (or excerpts thereof), in order of receipt. Many thanks to:

    Suzette Haden Elgin oclsmadisoncounty.net Yehuda N. Falk msyfalkmscc.huji.ac.il Lorna Feldman lfeldmanlagcc.cuny.edu David Gil gileva.mpg.de Kathy H. kaylynnkathyhotmail.com John E. Koontz John.KoontzColorado.edu Simone Mueller Simone.Muelleranglistik.uni-giessen.de> Dwan Shipley Dwan.Shipleywwu.edu Jennifer Spenader jenniferling.su.se Gary H. Toops gary.toopswichita.edu Lynell R. Williams sktutorcisu.edu

    Regards,

    Karen Steffen Chung National Taiwan University karchungccms.ntu.edu.tw

    Phonetics and more at: http://ccms.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung

    (1) Dwan Shipley Dwan.Shipleywwu.edu

    I am one who really appreciated my subscription to Quinto Lingo as a kid. I was either in Junior High or High School and I thoroughly enjoyed them. I was greatly disappointed when it went defunct. I don't know what happened to my copies but I'm sure I don't have them. We have moved around so much.

    (2) Yehuda N. Falk msyfalkmscc.huji.ac.il

    Quinto Lingo. Now there's a name I haven't heard in years. For reasons unbeknownst to me, my parents had a subscription to it. It may have been for my benefit, as I have always been interested in language, but I don't know for sure. I don't remember the ads, but many of the articles were fascinating. I, too, learned the name Mario Pei from Quinto Lingo, and when I was in high school in the 1970s I read some of his more pop-science oriented books. How much of a role did it have in my becoming a linguist? I honestly don't know.

    Yehuda N. Falk Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel Personal Web Site http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~msyfalk/ Departmental Web Site http://atar.mscc.huji.ac.il/~english

    (3) Lorna Feldman lfeldmanlagcc.cuny.edu

    How nice to find that someone else knows about Quinto Lingo! I think I still have all the copies from my subscription which I had during junior high. The magazine certainly was an influence on my decision to go into linguistics, but I subscribed to it because I already loved studying languages. One thing I remember was folding the pages so I wouldn't be tempted to read in English. An interesting side note: Quinto Lingo was published by Rodale Press, which also published Prevention Magazine.

    (4) Suzette Haden Elgin oclsmadisoncounty.net

    I'm one of those who was crazy about _Quinto Lingo_ , although I was an adult before I came across it; I also shared it with my kids.

    (5) Jennifer Spenader jenniferling.su.se

    My piano teacher gave me a set of Quinto Lingo's from the 60's or 70's when I was about 12. I still remember that they had one article called "What is it exactly that linguistics do?" or something to that effect. I remember reading that and thinking "I am going to be a linguist". So I would say Quinto Lingo had a great effect on my life. ... It was fun to see your question on the internet because it reminds me of what got me here. Fun to see that so many other people were also influenced as well!

    (6) David Gil gileva.mpg.de

    Yes, I subscribed to it as a 14-16 year old kid, for the two years during which I lived, with my parents in the US.

    David Gil Department of Linguistics Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Webpage: http://monolith.eva.mpg.de/~gil/

    (7) Kathy H. kaylynnkathyhotmail.com

    I used to subscribe to Quinto Lingo a long time ago. I guess it was around 1970. My issues are long gone now. I do still have a few pages that I tore out before I threw them away, information that I wanted to keep. One of them is on the Russian alphabet. I think I used information from an article on Chinese in a report that I wrote in 9th grade, which would have been the 1970-71 school year (USA).

    (8) John E Koontz John.KoontzColorado.edu

    I had a subscription, that my father got for me. I think I was older, perhaps 12-14 or so. I'm not sure where the magazines went. My dad's something of a packrat. He may still have them somewhere, but most likely they were discarded at some point. I don't think I have them myself, though I have box or two of items from that stage of my life that I haven't looked in recently. I seem to remember an article on Tahitian that inspired an interest in Polynesian, and that must have been seminal in my interest in language, though I didn't end up working with Austronesian. My father also took me on occasion to the U of Denver and U of Colorado libraries specifica lly so that I could look at the language sections, and he once let me enroll in an evening class in Mandarin at the U of Denver while I was in high school. I don't recall if he suggested the class, or I picked it myself. I think the latter. He also started my subscription to Language and sent me to the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute in 1976. He's not a linguist himself, but he always encouraged me in it. Not that he didn't encourage other things. I remember a subscription to the bimonthly Edmund (?) Scientific Company's kits, and we were all taken regularly to the public library. He also showed us the HP minicomputers at his school and encouraged our interest in them, back before the days of PCs. Other influences: Mario Pei's popular books - my Dad had his Dictionary of Linguistics on the shelf; Lancelot Hogben's The Loom of Language, found in the Littleton Public Library; L.R. Palmer's The Latin Language, found in the Englewood Public Library; five years of Junior and Senior High School Spanish; a set of English verb paradigms handed out by my 9th grade English teacher; diagramming sentences in 7th grade English; my Dad's collection of grammars and dictionaries of Latin and Greek from his college days at the Saint John's College - a small liberal arts program in Annapolis, Maryland - and my mother's college German grammar. I'm not sure if Quinto Lingo itself was that much of an influence, but my father certainly was!

    (9) Gary H. Toops <gary.toopswichita.edu>

    I subscribed to Quinto Lingo as a teenager in the late 1960's and perhaps in 1970 as well. One of my letters to the editor was published in an issue that I have found in the stacks of the library here at Wichita State (I lived in Newport News, Virginia, at the time). I stopped subscribing to the magazine once I realized that the translations were not very good. In one French translation, the translator had used the indicative rather than the subjunctive form of the verb after the conjunction "bien que". I wrote to ask that the error be corrected, but my letter was ignored. In another French translation of an article dealing with the Pan-African Union, the translator claimed that the cognate term "panafricaine" did not exist in French, and so translated the title of the article as "Union de toute l'Afrique". A few weeks later I received a letter from a French-speaking penpal in Algeria who "amazingly" used the supposedly nonexistent term _panafricaine_.

    Gary H. Toops, Professor Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Wichita State University Wichita KS 67260-0011 USA http://mcll.wichita.edu/russian

    And the responses from people who hadn't heard of Quinto Lingo but were intrigued by the idea:

    (10) Simone Mueller Simone.Muelleranglistik.uni-giessen.de>

    Until your email on Linguistlist, I had never heard of Quinto Lingo - but it sounds interesting! Is it still published? I tried to find it on the web, but without success. Are the same articles published (i.e. translated) into the five languages or different ones? I bet the five languages are English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, right? Is it still possible to subscribe to it?

    Simone Mueller Institut fuer Anglistik Justus-Liebig-Universitaet Giessen GERMANY

    (11) Lynell R. Williams <sktutorcisu.edu>

    I have never heard of _Quinto Lingo_ before, but I think the idea is fabulous. I cannot devote the time at this juncture to reviving such an enterprise, but if you do get it up and going I will definitely subscribe.