Conference thebay::joyoflex

I doubt that this blunder is committed in England, but not necessarily
because they know better.

It seems the English 
would also say "Digital have really exaggerated
the importance of ..." -- the concept of a collective noun is stronger
there.  In American usage, we recognize something like "the English"
as a collective noun and use the plural conjugation of a verb.  We
would consider "Digital" to be a personification rather than a collective
noun and use the singular conjugation.

"Media" gets plural conjugation because the word is actually a plural.  The
singular conjugation in the previous sentence was correct, for another
reason.

I forgot to mention "criteria". I've heard "The criteria for successful
completion is" so many times I can't count them. I'm starting to hear
"criterias".

-John

Here's another one:  We are going to hold several forums next week...
Who out thare knows what the plural of forum is?  I just discovered
it's "fora".

  That reminds me of "symposias" and "this symposia", often heard at DECUS.

--Simon

  This "phenomena" is driving me crazy.

It's all fora one or one-third dozen of another. 

Next time you go out for a steak dinner, try ordering it 
media-rare and see what happens!

beck

In some other group of notes, I observed a reference to some Digital
employee's "opuses."  Were they not his "opera"?

And, of course, the plural of "condominium" is ...

"Florida."

...which reminds me of Firesign Theater's explanation to David Susskind,
who wondered where they got their rather unique perspective:

	"We're from a different space/time condominium."

               -mg_

What about the news?  Is it singular or plural?

A news broadcast a few months ago described how an editor kept 
repeating that the news was plural.  ("The news are good.")

At one point he wrote to a correspondent to ask if there were any 
news.  The correspondent replied,

"Nary a new."



Ben Howard

re: Condominium - I always thought that condominium was the plural form  
                   of condom....

No, it's a mineral formed from from petrified condoms. It's rather like
copralite. 

	Jon

I've not looked in this file before (what have I been missing?), but
having just read in VNS about "a bacteria which has just been released ...",
I sought out this very note.

I don't know what the situation is in the U.S., but in the U.K. the inclusion
of Latin in the school curriculum is sadly a thing of the past.

In my view, a knowledge of Latin, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Greek,
is essential to an understanding of, and correct usage of, the English language.
                                         
What are the views of the other readers of this file?

Contrary to John Covert's view of us, I disagree with the "collective noun"
usage:  I cringe whenever I hear on the News (sing.) that 'the Government
are <doing something>'.  Or maybe John is correct, and I'm fighting a losing
battle.

Jeff.

	Condominimum - the smallest size?

Did David Susskind (referred to in 7.9) really say "rather unique?"

    .8, .9, .11 reminded me of a cartoon that a coworker had on his
    wall back in the days when I worked in the housing business.  It
    showed a teenager in a drug store, timidly looking up at the pharmacist
    and asking, "May I have a package of condominiums, please?"

    re: 7.7 about "opuses" and "opera"
    
    I should let this one rest in peace, but since I'm new to this
    conference (how did I live without it?) -- 
    
    I presume they were his opera only if he was the guy who wrote Media.
    

    Re .1: I think there is an implied "Equipment Corporation" after
    Digital, therefore the verb should be singular.
    
    Re .13: I disagree with Jeff: a bit of Latin, maybe, but only a year.
    My second year of Latin was concerned mostly with irregularities
    (gerunds et al). I think a much better idea is to teach children
    the structure of languages and how to learn languages. Then they
    will be able to expand their horizons in adult life.

    I also disagree about the desirability of learning Latin.
    The argument for it is specious. The idea is that by learning
    Latin, one learns the roots of many English words, and thus
    can derive the meaning of an unfamiliar word (assuming that
    it's derived from Latin, of course). But I say that the time
    spent learning Latin could be put to use learning the unfa-
    miliar English words, and save a step.
    
    Though I've had some French in elementary school, and took
    Spanish and German in high school and college, I've never had
    a Latin class, and haven't had much trouble. Many Latin words
    and phrases I've assimilated over the years anyways.
    
    Besides, sometimes knowing Latin can get you into trouble. For
    example, you might end up with the exact opposite meaning of
    the word "decimate".
    
    --- jerry

    DECimate is one of our word processing systems. I've got one at
    home. (Didn't need Latin to tell me that!)
    
    Since the underlying grammatical structure of the English language
    is German rather than Latin in origin, learning Latin can give one
    some entirely misleading conceptions about what English is and what
    it ought to do.
    
    For instance, the rule against "splitting infinitives" derives from
    the fact that in Latin the infinitive is a form of the verb, a single
    word, and hence it is not possible to split the infinitive.  Pedants
    of the eighteenth century, who discovered that the to-form of an
    English verb corresponds to the infinitive form of the Latin verb,
    decided that since it wasn't possible to split a Latin infinitive,
    one ought not to split an English infinitive.  This even though
    native writers of English had been saying "ought to not split the
    infinitive" for hundreds of years.
    
    It's interesting to note that many African languages do exactly
    the same thing -- add a negative or an adjective to the infinitive
    form of the verb -- only since it's written as a single word, linguists
    call it "infixing" (as opposed to prefixing and suffixing) and consider
    it a legitimate grammatical structure.
    
    --bonnie

    I don't think it is accurate to say that the underlying grammatical
    structure of the English language is German.  It is true that modern 
    English and modern German (along with Dutch and a few other languages)
    have a common ancester and the group of languages is usually called
    'Germanic'.  The grammars of modern English and German, however, seem 
    to me quite dissimilar.
    
    Bernie

    Actually, the language closest to English is Frisian.
    
    --- jerry

    Re: .20 (last point).
    
    Portuguese does similar things. It _declines_ the infinitive,
    to form something called 'o infinito pessoal': this gives, e.g.,
    
    	andar	to go
    
    	andares 	for you to go
    	andarmos	for us to go
    	andardes	for you (familiar plural) to go
    	andarem		for them to go

    Portuese also breaks up single-word verbs and sticks an object
    pronoun in the middle: e.g. faria [he would do] becomes fa-lo-ia
    [he would do it]. The only analogue for this in English, as far
    as I can see, is jocular: e.g. 'abso-bloody-lutely'.
    

    Re: what this dicussion is supposed to be about
    
    Jerry was right: the argument that you've got to learn Latin
    to help learn other languages is specious (attractive but wrong
    - L 'speciosus'). I've got lots of other reasons for believing
    that people should learn Latin: not to learn other languages,
    or to find out etymologies, or to sort out medical and legal
    jargon, but to learn to think straight and to express thoughts
    clearly. Cogito ergo sum, I think.
    
    Bob

    re: 22 -- Right, Jerry . . . 
    
    re: .21 -- More correctly, I should have said "Germanic" rather
    than "German," since German does imply more similarity with the
    modern language and both languages have evolved differently from
    their common ancestor.  
    
    However, the basic statement remains true -- the so-called "deep
    structure" of English is astonishingly similar to the deep structure 
    of even modern German and bears almost no resemblance to that of the
    Romance languages (those descended directly from Latin).  
    
    Latin and the "germanic" tree do share a common ancestor some five
    thousand years back, but Old English and Old German (and Old Norse and
    Frisian and Jutish) were still similar enough that travellers from one
    country to another could understand each other as recently as 800-900
    years ago.  (This according to evidence from various sagas.) 
    
    --bonnie

    MLNOIS::HARBIG
                  I had always thought that although the words
                  in German came from a different source than
                  the romance languages that it was very akin
                  to Latin in its grammatical structure e.g.
                  prepositions are contained in the declentions
                  of a noun.
                  German is the only modern language I know of
                  that is closely related to Latin in this respect.
                  Or am I completely wrong ?
                                             Max  

    Re: .24
    
    What do you mean by "deep structure?"
    The grammars are not at all alike, English sentence structure is
    not as flexible as German, and German, unlike English, is
    pronounced phonetically.  What are you saying other than that they
    have a common ancester?
    
    Bernie

    mlnois::harbig
                   Re .26
                   The obvious sometimes escapes us (at least me):-).
                   The biggest difference between English and many 
                   other languages is of course that English is not
                   phonetic.
                   With Italian for example once you know how a letter
                   is pronounced it never varies and there are none
                   of those traps like bow,bough etc.
                   I noticed this particularly when my daughter was
                   learning to read, after a month or so she could
                   read quite fluently any article in a daily newspaper
                   even though she did not know the meaning of the 
                   words.
                   How many English kids could read and pronounce
                   correctly at that level knowing only the alphabet?
                   Only since learning a phonetic language have I begun
                   to really appreciate how difficult it is for students
                   to learn to speak English and in fact DEC Europe
                   is full of people who have no difficulty at all in
                   reading and writing English at a fairly advanced
                   level but have difficulties in conversation.
                                                   Max

    MLNOIS::HARBIG
                  Just to confuse the issue even further there was
                  reference in a previous note to "Romance Languages
                  desecended directly from Latin" but according to
                  what I have read the Classical Latin which we know
                  today was a formal, literary, religious and "official"
                  language and that the modern romance languages are
                  derived from the Vulgate which was the everyday spoken
                  and commercial language e.g. private letters etc from
                  Roman times, not epistles destined for publication
                  were not written in classical Latin but in Vulgate.
                  Take horse for example:-
    
                            Latin           =      equus
                            Vulgate         =      caballus
                            Italian         =      cavallo
                            Spanish         =      caballo
                            French          =      cheval
    
                                                           Max
                   

    re: 28 -- true, but rather nit-picking since Vulgate Latin and
    so-called classical Latin are basically class variations on the
    same language.  It's like saying that English as spoken by black
    teenagers in US inner cities is not the same language as the English
    spoken in the White House -- perhaps they are different, but in
    general they are enough the same that a speaker of one can understand
    a speaker of the other, albeit with some effort.

    You do, however, bring up the important point that language changes
    take place in the spoken version of the language, not the written,
    which can lag behind the spoken language by several hundred years. 
    
    re: 26 -- German and English are not the same.  I never said they
    were.  I only said that the Germanic languages are more similar
    to English than English is to Latin and the other romance languages.

    I'll try to explain more clearly how this works -- I'm summarizing from
    L. M. Myers' The Roots of Modern English. 
    
    English, Latin, German, and several dozen other European languages
    are all part of what is called the Indo-European family of languages.
    Linguists believe that all these languages descended from a common
    ancestor that developed about 5000 years ago somewhere in eastern
    Europe or western Asia.  While archaeologists haven't discovered
    any single tribe or civilization that embodies this language, a
    lot of things can be traced back to them and no farther.  
    
    [An aside on origins: "While we cannot pinpoint the area from which all
    these waves went out, there are good reasons for thinking it was inland
    and not too far south.  In the various languages we find related words
    for such animals as wolves and bears, but no such related words for
    lions, tigers, or camles.  In the same way we find common words for
    trees of the temperate zone, but not for tropical ones.  And there are
    no common words for the sea or anything closely connected with it.  It
    therefore seems very nearly certain that the area was well inland and
    too far north for subtropical flora and fauna." -- Myer, p. 48 ] 
    
    This Indo-European language was what linguists call a _synthetic_
    language -- that is, one in which the relations of words are shown
    primarily by their inflectional forms.  (Greek is a modern example 
    of a primarily synthetic language.)  It was also a fairly evenly
    stressed language, with the primary stress moving from syllable
    to syllable depending on the word's inflection.  
    
    The Germanic languages broke off this common root beginning in
    roughly 1600 b.c.  Two major changes mark the difference:
    
    1.  Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k), preserved as such in
    Latin and most other I-E languages, shifted to become fricatives
    in Germanic.  At the same time the fricatives (f, theta, chi) shifted
    to voiced stops, and voiced stops (b, d, g) shifted to voiceless
    stops.  (This is a grossly oversimplified summary, but the main
    idea is clear enough and accurate enough.)
    
    2. The Germanic languages developed a heavy primary stress that
    almost always falls on the first syllable of a word.  It tended
    to remain on the first syllable even when there was a prefix.  The
    other syllables were pronounced so weakly that they tended to weaken
    and drop off entirely.  Hlafweard (hlaf-way-ard, roughly -- the
    guardian of the loaf) thus shrank to hlaford and lavord before it
    became lord.  
    
    English split off the Germanic branch still later, beginning in around
    450 a.d. and continuing to the present.  The main trait distinguishing
    English from the other Germanic languages is that English developed
    from being a synthetic language to being a primarily _analytic_
    language -- one in which differences in word form mean relatively
    little, and relations are shown mostly by word order, supplemented by
    such "function words" as perepositions and auxiliary verbs. 
    
    German (high and low German, Dutch, etc.) is also less inflected
    than its ancestral languages, though more inflected than English.
    The heavy stress on the initial syllable contributed to this loss
    of inflection -- prefixes and suffixes indicating inflections were
    being considered less important at the same time they were being
    pronounced less.  
   
    Consider the sentence:  "Him I saw."  If you apply the rules of a
    synthetic language, the meaning is still plainly "I saw him" since "I"
    is in the subjective case and "him" is objective.  The word order is
    secondary.  But for an average American speaker, this simple sentence
    requires us to decide if someone has made a grammatical mistake or is
    futzing with word order.  If your three-year-old says it, he probably
    means "He saw me," and that's how most of us would interpret it in
    ordinary circumstances.
    
    The usage of "they" and "their" without regard to the gender or
    number of persons referred to is simply continuing a trend that
    has marked English for hundreds if not thousands of years.

    It's probably also worth noting that English has always been considered
    an ambiguous language, highly prone to multiple interpretations. At
    various times this characteristic has been considered a weakness, for
    which people tried to prescribe grammars and use alternate language
    such as the formal and dead Latin, or a strength, the source of great
    resonance, power, and the possibility of symbolic combinations that are
    difficult to achieve in languages with more inflected words.
    
    --bonnie
    

    There have been some red herrings doing the rounds in this topic.
    
    The statement that English and German are different in that one
    is pronounced phonetically and the other isn't, is irrelevant in
    a discussion of the origins of, and relationships between languages.
    The peculiarities of English spelling are new comers on the linguistic
    scene for one thing and are only poorly chosen but now generally
    accepted ways of representing sounds, and it's the sounds that are
    important, hence the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet
    in all linguistic texts worth their salt. Using IPA to represent
    the words "bough" "cough" "trough" "enough" and "dough" produces
    no ambiguities whatever. 
    
    German does not embed prepositions in nouns. There are still some
    nouns which have different endings when used in different cases,
    but the preposition is distinct. There are still some agglutinative
    languages  in Europe - in which meaningful syllables are added to
    words, either internally or at the end (Finnish, for example, which
    is not, however, an Indo-European language, but a member of a language
    family which came originally from what is now Siberia) but the
    syllables added to German words are not essential to the meaning
    and may well disappear eventually.
    
    I don't see why learning Latin will teach you anything special other
    than how to speak Latin. Learning German or Russian is just as exacting
    a discipline, with different demands in each case, and more practical
    use. Clear thinking is required in all languages to produce clear
    meanings. You can speak gibberish in Latin quite easily.
    
    Sic erat ludicrum vitriol, qua vitriol speciosum est.
    
    Keep going, Bonnie, you're dead right.
    
    Phillip

    MLNOIS::HARBIG
                  re .29
                  I don't really think it was nit-picking and I don't
                  think that an analogy between what is basically a
                  deformation of the spoken language in your example
                  is applicable to the differences between the Vulgate
                  and Classical Latin since the Vulgate as I stated
                  was not merely a spoken language but also a written
                  language and some Italian authorities that I have
                  read even advance the hypothesis that Classical Latin
                  was an "invented" or "court" language and that most
                  of the orations that have come down to us were in
                  fact delivered in the Vulgate and translated into
                  Classical Latin for publication and that over the
                  centuries the proportion of the population that could
                  understand Classical Latin much less express themselves
                  in it became more and more exigious and in fact upper
                  class Romans learned Latin at school basically as
                  a "foreign" language.
                  I think that a more apt example is that of India where
                  for political reasons the "official" language is English
                  although the "real" main languages of the country
                  are either Urdu or Hindi.
                  This situation of an official language which is foreign
                  except to a very small proportion of the population
                  has also existed in relatively modern times and in
                  fact a government census carried out in Italy in 1880
                  stated that "only circa 2% of the total population of the
                  of the Peninsula is able to understand, read, write
                  and express themselves in the language known as Italian"
                  We tend to get the idea that Classical Latin was the
                  root because it was conserved by the Church and
                  "fossilized" and also because examples of literary Vulgate of
                  the Classical period are much rarer and are only now
                  beginning to be studied seriously and not necessarily
                  considered as a low level derivation but as a parallel
                  language with its own grammatical structure etc.
                                                        Max 
                                                  Max

    For an old topic, this one's pretty active.
    
    Re: spoken Latin
    
    When I was studying Vulgar Latin it was called Vulgar Latin. The
    Vulgate was a translation of the Bible.  I appreciate that 'Vulgate' in
    that translation's name was used adjectivally, but I'd never seen it in
    any other context until I saw it here. Elcock's _The_Romance_Languages
    said 'Vulgar Latin', and that's good enough for me. One of the
    few reliable things about the little Que-sais-je book that finds
    its way into so many reading lists is the title: 'Le Latin Vulgaire'.
    
    But the Vulgate wasn't written in Vulgar Latin; nothing can have been
    written in Vulgar Latin, since Vulgar Latin was spoken. The Vulgate was
    written in some kind of 'Latin' influenced by the translator's speech
    and grammar (which were probably vulgar).  That sounds like a fairly
    nit-picky sort of distinction, but I think its a useful and important
    one.

    
    Re: gibberish
    
    True (about speaking gibberish in Latin).  But the inflexions tell you
    which bit of gibberish refers to which other bit of gibberish. Maybe my
    'Latin helps you think clearly' (or whatever I said) should have been
    'learning an inflected language in a formal way imposes the discipline
    of formulating your thoughts clearly before you start writing, and
    trying to work out how the words of a foreign sentence fit together
    before you start trying to work out what the whole sentence means '. In
    order to be taught with the relevant sort of formality, a language has
    to be dead. Apart from Classical Greek, the only candidate - as far as
    I can see - is Latin. 

    That's my 2 denarii worth.
    
    bob

    Could you expand, Bob, on what you mean by "relevant sort of formality"
    and why it can only be a dead language which has it? I agree with
    you that inflected languages do require a certain formulation of
    thoughts in advance (at least for non-native speakers), but why
    does Russian, which is heavily inflected, require this any less
    than a dead language? (This is not arguing with your point, I'm
    just not with you yet.)
    
    Phillip

    MLNOIS::HARBIG
                  re .30
                  "I don't think that learning latin...etc"
                   Even though it may  mean destroying a widely
                   diffused linguistic legend I have to agree.
                   Having studied Latin did not help me with either
                   my French or Italian, as far as I am aware, apart 
                   perhaps, from the fact that I was able to apply
                   some of the basic studying techniques I had learned
                   which are probably applicable to learning almost
                   any foreign language and the purely psychological
                   reassurance that having learned one no matter how
                   difficult the current one seems to be it cannot be
                   totally impossible for you.
                                              Max            

    I am acquainted with someone who used to teach Latin in Oklahoma
    City.  She told me how, each year, in the spring, she and the
    other teachers of Latin, would go into the ghetto junior high
    schools and urge the disadvantaged students to sign up for Latin.
    
    There were two reasons why they urged this:
    
    1.  The disadvantaged students would be starting even with the
    advantaged ones.  None of them could pronounce or understand a
    single word when they began.
    
    2.  It was possible for the disadvantaged students to come out
    knowing three languages, not just two.  She gave an example:  ~One
    of my students lost track of what language she was reading [out
    loud], and said "girl" [using Standard American Pronunciation
    rather than Ghetto English Pronunciation].  And she stopped, and
    got this startled look on her face as she realized that she could
    say this word either way -- as she usually did, at home, and this
    other way, on a job interview.~
    
    So, when you think about the usefulness of learning Latin, do not
    think of only what it means to Caucasians, or to middle- and upper-
    class students.
    
    							Ann B.

    re: .35 --
    
    I used to teach writing to kids from the inner city; I only had success
    when I started teaching standard English using the English-as-a-second-
    language techniques I learned from friends who were teaching Cambodian
    refugees, who knew no English at all.  So I know how well your friend's
    technique must work.  I suspect that Latin has some advantages in
    making educationally disadvantaged kids really believe they can do
    something difficult and abstract, but I wouldn't be too surprised to
    hear that learning any scholarly language had the same effect. 
    
    re: the distinction between classical and vulgar Latin, and the
    derivation of Romance languages --  
    
    This is an interesting discussion in its own right, and probably more
    closely related to the base topic (wait a minute, does anybody remember
    what the base topic was?) than the discussion of the derivation of
    English.  I called it a nit in the sense that the details of how the
    latinate languages developed has little bearing on the issue of whether
    English is more closely related to the germanic than to the latinate
    branch of Indo-European.  I did not mean to imply that the difference
    was unimportant to the development of modern Italian.
    
    re: 32 -- 
    
    Bob, I think I see what you're getting at.  I had something of the same
    experience from studying Greek, though I never arrived at anything
    approaching a knowledge of Greek.  I learned a much better
    understanding not of my own language as such, not from any analogies of
    grammar, vocabulary, or structure, but from gaining a different way of
    looking at the entire process of communicating an idea. 
    
    A language is part of a culture.  It develops out of a certain mindset,
    but also contributes to the further development of that mindset -- an
    interactive process, if you will.  (I won't.)  The kind of mental
    attitude that produces and derives from the use of a heavily inflected
    language is far different from the mental behavior that produces and
    uses an analytical language. 
    
    Classical Latin and Greek, being divorced from their cultural context,
    teach someone whose mindset is 'analytical' in the grammatical sense to
    think in the inflected mode, to plan thoughts and sentences farther
    ahead, to put more effort into understanding what the sentence actually
    says instead of what it was intended to say.  But they don't require
    you to learn the extra cultural context and dynamics that a living
    language carries with it.  

    From an inflected language you learn precision.  From English you
    learn the power and incredible resonance of ambiguity.
    
    --bonnie

        I don't agree that inflected languages are somehow inherently more
    "analytical" than languages that require the use of word order.  All
    languages have rules, and all require a certain amount of thinking
    ahead for precise self-expression.  I can accept the view that learning
    languages that are significantly different from one's native tongue
    requires some analytical thinking, particularly in order to understand
    the grammar; but in that case, it is the differences in the languages,
    and not anything inherent in them, that is involved.  Thus, I would
    argue that learning a living, non-Indo-European language, such as
    Japanese or Arabic, would be more beneficial to a native English
    speaker than even Latin--with the added benefit that people still speak
    them.
    
    Imagine Roman citizens attempting to learn 20th century English--they
    might just find that it helps *them* learn how to think analytically!
    All human grammars, when properly used, are capable of expressing
    precise ideas.  None is inherently more analytical than any other. 
    
    -- Mike

    Re: .29
    
    >I merely said that the Germanic languages are more similar to English
    >than English is to Latin and other Romance languages.
    
    You said more than that.  I agree with the quoted statement.  What
    I had trouble with was the statement that the underlying structure
    of English is germanic.  The only clear meaning I could give to
    the statement is that they share an ancestor.  I still do not see
    how any other meaning has been attached to the statement.  You also
    said that their "deep structures" are the same, but I still don't
    understand what that means except in the context of the common
    ancestor.  If you feel you have explained your meaning clearly and
    there is no room for doubt, then I'll assume that the concepts are
    beyond me.
    
    Re: .30
    
    The fact that German is pronounced phonetically and English isn't
    IS a difference between the languages.  I have no idea how significant
    that difference is; I was merely making the observation that their
    differences seem more apparent than their similarities and, therefore,
    could not understand that bit about underlying structure.
    
    In fact, it seems to me that if English and German are both germanic 
    languages (i.e., have a common ancester), then it makes as much sense to say
    that the underlying structure of German is germanic as it does to
    say it of English.  What am I missing?
    
    Bernie    

    MLNOIS::HARBIG
                  Bonnie,
                         It's been over ten years since I read
                         that stuff on the parallel language to
                         classical latin and so I pulled out the
                         book last night and discovered that I 
                         had completely forgotten a paragraph at
                         the start which quoted someone in the
                         1st century AD to the effect that there
                         was a danger that "the prevalent distortion
                         of pronunciation of the language of our
                         ancestors, even among educated men, and the
                         introduction of barbaric words has even
                         begun to debase the orthography and grammar
                         to the extent that there is widespread use
                         of scribes who being mainly Greek can only
                         corrupt the tongue of the Roman people"
                         So you were right in that "il latino volgare"
                         (I translated this as Vulgate in another moment
                          of madness) did start off as a spoken corruption.
                          Sorry about that must be the heat.
                                                        Max     
                         some of the things that you and others
                         had written made me feel 

    Re: .33
    
    Caught me question-begging again.
    
    A dead language has a fixed corpus of vocabulary and a fixed
    grammar (rules that aren't subject to change any more, although
    different writers may well have re-interpreted them - and indeed
    wrote something long before any rules were formulated). With a
    language like that to teach, teachers can't set essay titles like
    'What I did at the sea-side.' That's what I meant by 'relevant sort
    of formality'.
    
    (In fact I think some schools - since my day - tried to teach Latin in a
    down-home way.  I think this was a mistake, and I wouldn't be
    surprised if it was the last nail in the coffin of Latin-teaching
    in English schools.)
    
    ps
    
    I only mentioned Latin and Classical Greek as 'candidates'; I meant,
    of course, 'realistic candidates for teaching in English and North
    American schools'. I've no doubt there are several other dead languages
    that I would regard as worth learning in a formal way.

    
    Re: analytical
    
    This was used (can't remember who by) in a particular academic sense:
    'I have eaten' is analytical because it breaks down the idea into
    several words; 'edi' (Latin) doesn't.
    
    Re: 'deep structure'
    
    I'm not surprised that Bonnie avoided defining this one! It took
    Chomksy several books, and he's still trying.
    
    Re: nomenclature
    
    I went back to that Elcock book last night.  He said there was a
    growing tendency to use the term 'Proto-Romance' to refer to spoken
    Latin.  If it was growing in 1960 (when the book was published), that
    tendency may well have grown up by now. Any recent scholars out
    there? 
    
    The use of a term like Proto-Romance has a lot going for it, especially
    in view of the flexibility with which different Romance Philologists
    (long before this file was created) have used the term 'Vulgar Latin'
    ('il latino volgare'). But if we're talking about spoken Latin (I mean
    the language that Caius Brutus used when he was in the corner shop
    asking for bread and circuses), it was used long before there was a
    Roman Empire, which seems to me to rule out any reference to 'Romance'. 

    Time I did some work.
    
    Bob
    	

    You may accuse me of being pedantic, but in the study of language
    it is very important to realise what constitutes the language and
    what doesn't, what is essential to it and what isn't.
    
    English spelling is not essential, the language developed before
    the visual representation of it, it is acquired by children who
    have no idea of the vagaries of English spelling and spoken by many
    adults who are illiterate. To say English is not pronounced
    phonetically is a linguistic nonsense. English is not spelled
    phonetically, German is. End of story, big deal. If the scratchings
    we make to represent language become the important factor how can
    we compare English and Russian - both are Indo-European, both have
    many cognate terms, but Russian uses (for example) one character
    to represent the two sounds we represent by "shch". Now there are
    two phonemes there, English and Russian both pronounce them both,
    yet they represent them in idiosyncratic, arbitrary ways which don't
    use two signs. German, the touch-stone of phonetic spelling, would
    use how many? And what does that tell us about the relationship
    between the three languages or the behaviour of those phonemes in
    any of the languages. Zilch.
    
    Spelling should be banned.
    
    Fylyp 

    Bernie -- 
    
    Let's see if I can confuse things still farther. 
    
    I was trying to back off the deep structure argument because I was
    getting in over my head.  I'm not a linguist, just a student of the
    history of the language, and I was trying to explain what happened
    without getting into the deep structure.  (Also,I was mainly addressing
    Max's argument about the descent of Latin and was referring back to my
    original contention way back when that if you want to learn Latin, you
    should do it for the Latin, but you shouldn't expect to learn more
    about English grammar because English grammar doesn't follow the same
    rules as Latin grammar. Yes, it's because English and German share a
    more recent common ancestor than do Latin and English (first cousins as
    opposed to third cousins once removed), but the rest was supporting
    evidence, not a primary contention. 

    No, my explanation of deep structure isn't sufficient that anyone
    should be able to understand it.  I don't understand more than a
    handful of rudiments. I'm not sure anyone except Dr. Chomsky and a few
    other top linguists really understand the full implications and meaning
    of how grammars work.  
    
    Is anybody reading this better versed in the dynamics of language than
    I am (or have a good text handy)?  Or should I have a stab at trying to
    explain it the best I can? 
    
    --bonnie     

    Re dead languages:
    
    The advantage of studying an ancient ("dead") language is the very
    obviousness that it's got a frozen structure.  And one therefore
    expects only certain things of it.
    
    A [related] digression:  when I was in high school, I was in a class
    where both Spanish and French were being taught (to different sets
    of students -- this is hard to explain, but picture an old Colonial
    country school as an analog).  We who were learning Spanish were
    reading stories about El Cid.  One concerned the Cid putting a lion
    in the courtyard of his palace for one of his sons to encounter
    so as to test his bravery.  At the same time, the kids studying
    French were learning about Uncle Henri going to the park, checking
    out certain things in his newspaper, and other daily activities.
    The SPanish students envied those studying French because the latter's
    stories related to real activities.  The French students envied
    us because instead of those mundane things, _we_ were getting stories
    of adventure.
    
    The grass is always greener.
    
    I'm nibbling along with the study of the ancient Egyptian language
    via hieroglyphics.  A friend once asked me, "What possible use is
    _that_?"  I responded, "Well, it helped me sell an article to a
    magazine."  As good an answer as any for a "what use" question.
    
    Hieroglyphics is an interesting study, not only because of the
    language structure, but because each picture or picture-group has
    a phonetic sound equivalent.  If I said a standing feather had an
    "e" sound, that would tell part of the story, but just the surface.
     The result, though, is that there may be more than one "correct"
    way to spell a word.  Much as though "Quick" and "Kwik" were both
    equally valid spellings for the opposite of "slow."
    
    Steve Kallis, Jr.

    Re: .41
    
    >You may accuse me of being pedantic...
    
    OK. I hereby accuse you of being pedantic. :- )
    It's also ok by me that sounds rule.  It does, however, make perfectly
    good sense to say that a language is pronounced phonetically.  The
    term does refer to the relationship between spelling and
    pronounciation; it is a nit to insist on 'spelled phonetically'.
    
    >If the scratchings we make to represent language become the important
    >factor how can we compare English and Russian...
    
    They certainly aren't _the_ important factor.  They seem _a_ factor
    to me.  We do use those scratchings to compare languages (and
    everything else under the sun); without the scratchings all is oral
    (or is it oral is all?).
    
    It seems innocent enough to cite the fact that two languages differ
    in their relationships between their spellings and pronounciations.
    It may well be of slight importance in light of the titanic issues
    you are dealing with.  It is nevertheless a difference.
    
    Bernie
    

    Re: .43
    
    Thanks, Bonnie, I didn't know that "deep structure" was a technical
    term of Chomsky's.  We could enter rather a deep rathole (no offense
    to Noam) if we were to pursue that much further.
    
    Bernie
      

  As an analog???

    "Titanic issues", huh? Makes you wonder if it's worth it sometimes.
    
    Phillip

    I think our Titanic issues have just foundered on the iceberg of
    Chomsky's incomprehensibility.
    
    --bonnie

    As far as I can tell, given my limited linguistics background, Chomsky
    came up with the idea of context-free grammars to describe human
    languages; and when he then decided that context-free grammars were
    inadequate for that purpose, he invented "transformational grammars"
    (which was taught in my college linguistics class, not as theory, but
    as indisputable fact).  These translate a syntax from the deep
    structure to the surface structure (or was it the other way around?)
    So, by waving a magic wand, you get a context-free grammar after all.
    Though Chomsky is clearly a genius, this strikes me as the linguistic
    equivalent of a kludge. 
    
    -- Mike

    You get no argument from me.
    
    My linguistics professor always insisted that Chomsky's theory had
    a major flaw in it, but as I couldn't even comprehend the depths
    of the theory, I couldn't make much sense of the attack on the theory!
    
    My own feeling was that most really important theories, like
    relativity, are most notable for their elegant simplicity, so anything
    as complex and convoluted as Chomsky's work had to be wrong.  
    
    Or, as I mentioned earlire, maybe it's just that Chomsky is a lousy
    writer, or had a lousy translator -- I don't think he writes in
    English, does he?  Or am I mistaken there? 
    
    --bonnie

    re .51:
    
    No, Chomsky does not write in English. However, he does speak it. He is
    an American and a professor at MIT. Getting a translator for him would
    a marvelous idea. 
    
    	Jon

    Based on my two courses in generative grammar (the grammar of
    speaking as opposed to hearing) in the early 70's, expressed
    somewhat in compiler terms (my occupation since 1983):
    
    The context-free part is a description of the "tree" which is
    built in one's head, on the fly as one is deciding what to say.
    Nodes in the tree are operators or pointers to symbols.
    
    The (context-sensitive) transformations are how this tree is
    turned into a linear stream of words, which is itself turned into
    a stream of sounds (in parallel, of course).
    
    The context-free rules are _universal_, that is, they are the
    same for every human language.  The transformations are _particular_,
    specific to a particular language (and dialect/ideolect...).  Some
    transformations are obligatory, some are optional, and (worse yet),
    they come in two flavors: cyclic and ordered.
    
    Cyclic transformations can be applied again and again (e.g. pronoun
    replacement).  Ordered transformations can only be applied once,
    and they are internally ordered.
    
    The transformations do things like tense/person/case agreement,
    pronoun replacement, emphasis of some part of an utterance and
    conversion into commands and questions (changing the "mood").

    I have worked with a computerized grammar tester (which produced
    sentences given a grammar), and with what some person at MIT
    thought was _the_ grammar of English.
    
    Chomsky's claim (in the "hard" version) is that this mechanism is
    hard-wired in in the human brain.  We genetically have deep-structure
    (the context-free part) with one universal set of rules.  We
    genetically have a transformation engine, with a cyclic and ordered
    sub-engines.  Children learn thier native tongue by learning the
    local transformation set and dictionary.

    The "soft" version claims that the mechanism above is only a model
    of the human mechanism, and not necessarily close to the structure
    of the actual thing.
    
    Many people don't like the idea that language is hard-wired: it
    is part of the great nature/nuture debate.

        		-John Bishop
    			 BA, Linguistics, Brown Unversity 1975

        Chomsky's belief in "hard-wired", universal rules in humans has led him
    to the dogmatic conclusion that apes cannot therefore have any
    linguistic capability, such as when using sign language.
    
    By the way, in a fit of irony, one of the chimpanzee sign language
    researchers named his ape "Neem Chimpsky".
    
    -- Mike

    Re: .48
    
    Indeed.  Titanic issues are those of great size or power, like the
    Titans, or those of great import, like the effect of the Titans.
    
    Bernie

    re: .40
    
    > This was used (can't remember who by) in a particular academic sense:
    > 'I have eaten' is analytical because it breaks down the idea into
    > several words; 'edi' (Latin) doesn't.
    
    For 'I have eaten', shouldn't that read "edidi", my boy ? 
    If I'm not mistaken, that's the past tense of "edo" (in the active 
    mode, of course).
        
    	roger

    Re: .-1
    
    I had thunk 'edere' was irregular, with the perfect 'edi'.

    re: .54
    
        
>        Chomsky's belief in "hard-wired", universal rules in humans has led him
>    to the dogmatic conclusion that apes cannot therefore have any
>    linguistic capability, such as when using sign language.
    
 
    Sounds backwards to me.  One would think that if the rules are
    "hard-wired" (genetically determined), then our nearest living
    relatives would share some of the same circuitry.
    
    Julie

    Re .58
    
    It depends on how old language is.  Even if language-use is
    "old", starting a million years ago with the Australopithecenes,
    the great apes might not have the mechanism, as the minimum
    separation between ape and man I've ever read is three million
    years (by protein sequencing).  If language-use is "recent",
    coinciding with the use of complex tools (and thus the need
    for instruction in tool-making technique), it might only be
    a hundred thousand years old, and there are anatomists who
    put the human/non-human split fifteen million years ago.
    So there might be a BIG gap.
    
    Personally, I'm an "old" langauge and "recent" separation guy,
    but I don't think the great apes have our language mechanism.
    If they did, there would be no controversy--they would be
    talking unmistakably.
    				-John Bishop

    The plural of person is persons.  I have seen it too many times
    to believe otherwise.
    
    The Boston Globe is particurly egregious in this fault.  They will
    claim that 37 persons died in a bus wreck, while I know it was 37
    people.

    The rule I use is that if the group of humans can be considered
    as a group then they are "people".  If each member of the group
    is considered individually, then they are "persons".

    Re: .0
    
    Indeed, the plural of "person" _is_ "persons," and I agree with you
    that "37 people" is the better choice.  There seem, however, to be no
    iron-clad rules on this.  Bernstein, in _The Careful Writer_, says:
    
    	The only rule has to be a general one, its application often
    	dependent on the writer's ear: Use _people_ for large groups;
    	use _persons_ for an exact or small number.  At one end of the
    	scale "one people" is unthinkable, "two people" only a little
    	less so, and "fifty people" acceptable.  At the other end of
    	the scale, "millions of persons," although not unthinkable, is
    	hardly a common usage, but "4,381 persons" is quite proper.
    
    Personally, I think that "millions of persons" is unthinkable, "two
    people" is quite proper, and "4,381 persons" is dog puke.  The rule
    seems to be: if it sounds all right, then use it - but for God's sake,
    think about it first.
    
    Bernie

    So, how many of you know the singular of spaghetti?

    Hmmmmm.  If a function has two singularities, does it have a plurality?

Re .63

I'll guess it's 'spaghetto'.   Or maybe 'spaghetti' is one of those
grammatical oddities that has only a plural form.

Re .64

I give up.  What does 'sequiz' mean?

Dave C.

    re: .65  
    
    A sequel to the quiz?
    
    re: .63
    
    Spaghetti might have a grammatical singular in the Italian
    language, but in my house it appears to be a rather tangled
    collective noun referring to the platter of tomato-soaked strands
    spraying fine red dots all over the kitchen as my five-year-old
    insists on sucking it in one strand at a time.  
    
    --bonnie

    sequiz - a cross between a Canadian Redwood and an Araucaria?
    
    spaghetto - this is indeed the grammatical singular, but I can't
    imagine anyone except an interior decorator with pointilliste leanings
    using it.
    
    b

�               <<< Note 7.20 by WEBSTR::RANDALL "I'm no lady" >>>
�     form of the verb -- only since it's written as a single word, linguists
�     call it "infixing" (as opposed to prefixing and suffixing) and consider
�     it a legitimate grammatical structure.
    
    and
�       <<< Note 7.23 by MARVIN::KNOWLES "Pour encourager les auteurs" >>>
    
�    The only analogue for this in English, as far
�    as I can see, is jocular: e.g. 'abso-bloody-lutely'.
    
    It so happens that a few months ago, I was smacking my lips over the
    construction "unbe-makinglove-lievable" and asked a linguist friend
    about it.  She immediately named it as "expletive infixation" (a
    toothsome expression itself, IMHO) - it turned out to be more common
    than I expected.
    
    Ray-expletive-infixation-is-my-middle-name-Davis

    Several other words whose singular looks plural (if that is
    still one of the purposes of this note) are "kudos" and
    "congeries".
    
    It is very tempting to force the general rule upon these
    two exceptions and talk about a "kudo" or a "congery".  In fact,
    some "kudo"s have been seen in the great linguistic forest unattached
    to their tail "s"s.  Perhaps a mutation in the wilds have caused
    this evolution.  The "congeries" is a much rarer beast that is
    hardly ever heard.  My guess is that it lives in fear of exposure
    lest it be steam-rolled into a singularity (sort of a black hole).
    Freudians may argue that it is really a split-personality word
    that always refers to itself as "we", never "I".

    re:      <<< Note 7.68 by STAR::RDAVIS "O, an impossible person!" >>>
                            -< [Expletive infixed] >-
    
    Alas, VAX Notes does not let me attach a pointer a note in this
    conference the way it lets me attach a pointer to another
    conference.

>    Several other words whose singular looks plural (if that is
>    still one of the purposes of this note) are "kudos" and
>    "congeries".
    
    I thought the only purpose of any note in this file was to display
    our wit and erudition.
    
    --bonnie

    This isn't related to the topic actually discussed here, but is
    related to the base note. An associate of mine is the editor of
    an ANSI standard, and has received a public review comment that
    asks for an addition to the document's glossary. The requestor
    claims that the word "medium", as used to mean a place to store
    information, is a special technical use not in the common English
    language. Looking up medium (and media--rathole) in several
    dictionaries indicates that this is correct. It can be used to
    indicate a communication channel or a film to grow cells on, but
    not as an information storage location.
    
    Can anyone suggest a dictionary that proves this use of this word
    to be common English?
    
    Doug.

    Our own AHD has
    
    medium - 2. An intervening substance through which something is
    transmitted or carried on.
    
    I'd say "carried on" counts as "stored".
    
    							Ann B.

    Nope, won't do. Thanks, though...

    W9NCD lists among its definitions for medium the following:
    
    a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect.
    
    This is quite close, but still not exactly what's being looked for.

    NSOED:
    
    A pervading or enveloping substance
    
    An intermediate agency, instrument, or channel; a means

	_The Chambers Dictionary_ (1993; published in U.K):

	"any material, eg magnetic disk, paper tape, on which data is
	recorded"

    I guess the rarity of `medium' for disk storage is the reason for
    our beloved Corporate Style Guide's
    
    �
     Use media for both singular and plural forms with the
      singular verb form. For example:
    
      If your media consists of only one volume, mount that volume and
      proceed to step 2.
    
      If your media consists of two or more volumes, mount those volumes
      and proceed to step 3.
    
      The media is packaged in protective material.
    �
    
    Ho hum. I didn't say anything, honest.
    
    b

    Conclusion: This is not a "common use" of the term media, and will
    be added to the appendix of the document in question. Thank you for all
    your suggestions.
    
    Doug.

    The Seventh Edition (not the latest) of the Concise Oxford English
    Dictionary (the official English dictionary of ISO/IEC) gives "means by
    which something is communicated; material or form used by artist,
    composer, etc." This is the definition intended by, and consistent
    with, "magnetic medium" etc. The eighth edition, which I don't have
    handy, may be more explicit.
    
    A medium is the "stuff" on which the information is conveyed, whether
    it be "stuff" capable of holding printed matter, paint, or electronic
    impulses.
    
    -Tom