LINGUIST List 2.796

Sat 16 Nov 1991

Qs: hiatus; Spanish; Italian; MAC; pidgins; pronouns

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

  • Geoffrey Russom, Re: 2.780 Clicks and R-Linking
  • Michael Newman, query on Spanish
  • Salvatore Attardo, Italian gender assignment and paragraph structure
  • mark l louden, Do what?
  • , any suggestions on displaying Chinese characters on Macintosh?
  • , inquiry on the conventionality and syntax of names
  • , Re: 2.788 Are Segments Universal?
  • Geoffrey Russom, Re: case and relative pronouns

    Message 1: Re: 2.780 Clicks and R-Linking

    Date: Wed, 13 Nov 91 09:47:32 EST
    From: Geoffrey Russom <EL403015brownvm.brown.edu>
    Subject: Re: 2.780 Clicks and R-Linking
    It seems to me that if the vowel in "a, the" is schwa, only a glottal stop could prevent hiatus in your cited phrases "a apple, the apple." Does anyone know of other possibilities (not necessarily restricted to those viable in English)? In general, what SORT of sound is introduced to prevent hiatus? One thinks of liquids, nasals, and glides first, but of course there's the glottal stop as perhaps the unmarked hiatus-preventer....

    Message 2: query on Spanish

     Date: Wed, 13 Nov 91 23:09:10 EST
    From: Michael Newman <MNEHCCUNYVM.bitnet>
    Subject: query on Spanish
    In most Spanish dialects questions with explicit 2 person pronouns involve inversion (e.g. Que quieres tu?)--pardon diacritics and lack of initial inter rogatives). However in Antillian (i.e. Cuba, P.R. and Rep. Dom.) at least, you most frequently get the form Que tu quieres? Does anyone know of any studies on this phenomenon. either from a dialectological or a formally syntactic per- spective?

    Message 3: Italian gender assignment and paragraph structure

     Date: Thu, 14 Nov 91 09:56:07 -0500
    From: Salvatore Attardo <p5omace.cc.purdue.edu>
    Subject: Italian gender assignment and paragraph structure
    I would appreciate pointers to published or unpublished works on gender assignment and paragraph structure in Italian. Contrastive analyses welcome. In order to avoid cluttering the list, I'd suggest e-mailing me. I will summarize and acknowledge. Salvatore Attardo p5omace.cc.purdue.edu

    Message 4: Do what?

     Date: Wed, 13 Nov 91 23:43:15 -0600
    From: mark l louden <loudenbongo.cc.utexas.edu>
    Subject: Do what?
    Greetings to all-- Seeing a recent posting update on 'might could' reminded me of another regional (?) expression that was recently pointed out to me by some of my students, namely the question 'Do what?' for std.'What?' Is there anyone who is familiar with this idiom and its distribution? Thanks! Mark Louden

    Message 5: any suggestions on displaying Chinese characters on Macintosh?

     Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1991 10:33:37 -0500 (EST)
    From: <J_LIMBERUNHH.UNH.EDU>
    Subject: any suggestions on displaying Chinese characters on Macintosh?
    Does anyone have experience/suggestions on presenting common Chinese characters on a Mac? I have a student planning a psycholinguistic reading experiment involving Chinese. We know about Macs and have Chinese informants but I'm wondering if there are existing character sets or anything like "stroke" fonts or any lore on legibility etc. Send any ideas to me and I'll be happy to relay them to others interested. Thanks! John Limber

    Message 6: inquiry on the conventionality and syntax of names

     Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1991 10:51:03 -0500 (EST)
    From: <J_LIMBERUNHH.UNH.EDU>
    Subject: inquiry on the conventionality and syntax of names
    I have two questions about names that some of you probably can answer. The first concerns the conventionality of surnames. Are there still language cultures where surnames are not for the most part conventional? (It would be foolish, for example, for anyone to infer from my name "Limber" that I am particularly agile or that Drs. Head, Brain and Pons interest in neurology had anything to do with their names.) I'd appreciate any examples. The second question is to what extent are names in languages more or less "syntactic"--that is participate or not in whatever formal structures other NPs do? Again, I'd appreciate any examples or references on this. Thanks in advance. John Limber

    Message 7: Re: 2.788 Are Segments Universal?

    Date: Thu, 14 Nov 91 13:23 MST
    From: <WDEREUSEccit.arizona.edu>
    Subject: Re: 2.788 Are Segments Universal?
    This is a query concerning Frank Anshen's response to 2.777 A phonological Query. There he states that Bahasa Indonesia developed from a pidginized Malay used as a Lingua Franca,i.e., presumably modified in ways that make minimal acquisition easy. (endquote). I don't know much about Indonesian, but I am very interested in such cases of pidginization. Is it really true that Bahasa Indonesia developed from a pidginized Malay? I have the impression that B.I. is very close to Standard Malay, with a few phonological differences, but not much in the way of simplification. It seems to me that there was a conscious effort, in the elaboration of B.I., to keep it very close, though distinct from Malay. There have always been good speakers of Malay in what is now Indonesia, even though the majority would speak a pidginized variety, i.e. Bazaar Malay. So I guess there was always a feeling that B.I. should look like proper Malay, because no good speaker of Malay, or even bad speakers of Malay, would ever take something close to Bazaar Malay seriously. A similar case would be Afrikaans, said to have developed from a Dutch pidgin; clearly, this is an oversimplification, since modern Afrikaans has very few creole features, even though it is simpler than Dutch. Even though must have been Dutch pidgins around, and there still are nowadays varieties of Afrikaans that look very pidgin-like (there's a thesis by Dennis Makhudu, U. of Illinois-Urbana, I think), there must have been a conscious effort to prevent Afrikaans from becoming a full-fledged pidgin, later a creole. I presume these voorrekkers all carried their Dutch Bibles in their ox-wagons. I'd really appreciate an Indonesianist/Malayist's opinion on this. (Erratum: I mean voortrekkers) I don't mean to open a big debate about where Afrikaans came from; but I am really curious about similarities between that situations and the elaboration of the Indonesian language. I know for a fact that Afrikaans has borrowed a lot from Dutch over the years, with slight phonological adjustments. I suppose a similar thing has happened for Indonesian. Also, the desire to keep Indonesian separate from Malay, seems to be very similar to the efforts to keep Afrikaans separate from Dutch. Willem de Reuse Department of Anthropology University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 85721

    Message 8: Re: case and relative pronouns

     Date: Thu, 14 Nov 91 12:39:35 EST
    From: Geoffrey Russom <EL403015brownvm.brown.edu>
    Subject: Re: case and relative pronouns
    Old English personal pronouns can (according to received wisdom) also serve as relative pronouns. Sometimes they act like relative pronouns even when they have a case appropriate to the main clause rather than to the relative clause (e.g. they have zero stress, which is characteristic of clause-initial rather than clause-final position; I do not think enclisis is involved). Does anyone know of similar phenomena in other languages? -- Rick