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There are 16 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1. Re: McD - I'm lovin' it (again)
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2. Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: Thomas Wier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3. (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: And Rosta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
5. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
6. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: Kit La Touche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
7. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
8. Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: Herman Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
9. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
10. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11. Re: Amerinds (was: Gallopavo (was: Re: fruitbats))
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
12. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: taliesin the storyteller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
13. Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
14. Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
15. Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
16. Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: Thomas Wier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 12:10:54 -0500
From: Roger Mills <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: McD - I'm lovin' it (again)
Chris Bates wrote:
> I recognise the bits after love as Tagalog, but what puzzles me is..
> isn't there a native word for love in the language? Surely there must
> be... I'm going to go check my Tagalog dictionary now.
>
I first thought it was some kind of weird Englishified Malay (with o for u
in "ku, (i)tu"), maybe, but Tagalog is right on. Yes, there must be a
perfectly good native word; my Tag. dictionary is Tag-Engl. only, so it
would take a while to find it...
Probably this is a good example of what's called Taglish :-)))
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 13:06:12 -0600
From: Thomas Wier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: caeruleancentaur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>"Ph.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Another example is "I will try and attend the meeting." Here, "and"
> > doesn't quite make sense. The expected word would be "to." (To me,
> > the use of "and" implies "I will try the meeting and I will attend
> > the meeting.")
>
> To me, this is just an example of poor English; there's nothing
> idiomatic about it. "Try" and "attend" are not equivalent terms to
> be joined by a co-ordinating conjunction.
The problem is that English, as a language, is filled with all sorts
of examples of such "poor English". For example, the normal way
to say that one is having difficulty in finding one's keys, for
every English speaker I've ever met, is "I can't seem to find my
keys", but that literally suggests that one is not able to appear
to find one's keys, rather than one seems not to be able to find
one's keys. And such logical mismatches are even more deeply
embedded, since a sentence like "Every man saw three dogs" has
(for the vast majority of English speakers) precisely two readings:
one where there is a set of three specific dogs which every man
saw, and one where for every man, he saw three dogs, but not
necessarily the same three dogs across the set of every man. So,
there's no use in complaining about mismatches in language; every
language has them.
Anyways, I would consider the "try and X" construction to be idiomatic.
Idioms are any construction whose properties cannot be predicted based
on the larger properties that are observed in other constructions.
==========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 02:13:27 +0000
From: And Rosta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
My copy of Word 2003 broke recently (after a sodding Automatic Update), &
rather than shell out shitloads for a new copy, I resolved to try to break my
Microsoft addiction, tho am not yet ready to abandon Win XP for Linux (but have
already ditched Outlook & IE). Initially I thought to switch to OpenOffice, but
then I got to wondering about (La)TeX, & would be very grateful for informed
advice on this score.
My question is: What is the best document preparation software for someone who
(i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
(ii) is a typography fetishist,
(iii) loathes the frustrations of trying to get complicated software to work
correctly or at all.
(iv) is reluctant to learn lots of elaborate & radically new ways of doing old
familiar things;
or, broadly speaking:
(I) is generally very happy with Word 2003 (bar the cost and the enslavement to
Microsoft) but
(II) would like something that gives typographically better results (e.g.
intelligent handling of ff fl fi ligatures; centring diacritics over m & w) and
that doesn't severely degrade when typographical demands start getting very
heavy
? Advice from experts or from people in a similar position to me is warmly
solicited.
--And.
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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:25:10 -0800
From: Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
As a general note, there is also the LaTeX for Conlangers mailing
list, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/latex-for-conlangers/.
Emaelivpeith And Rosta:
> (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
> (ii) is a typography fetishist,
LaTeX addresses both of these points, and and is especially well-known
for its superior typography. Your "ff fl fi" ligatures are correctly
handled with LaTeX. :)
> (iii) loathes the frustrations of trying to get complicated software to work
> correctly or at all.
> (iv) is reluctant to learn lots of elaborate & radically new ways of doing
> old familiar things;
These two points are where LaTeX may give you trouble. There do exist
WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX, which may help you feel at home with LaTeX.
The only one I've ever installed to take a look at was LyX
(http://www.lyx.org/). Installation instructions for Windows are here:
http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/LyX136. Note that it does require or
recommend that several other things to be installed first: MinSys,
Python, MikTex, Perl, Ghostscript, and ImageMagick.
For myself, I like using a plain text editor and the command-line to
do my LaTeXing, but that's just my own personal preference. :)
Good luck with whatever you choose!
--
AA
http://conlang.arthaey.com/
(Gmail WARNING: watch the Reply-To!)
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Message: 5
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 02:22:02 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
Hi!
Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> As a general note, there is also the LaTeX for Conlangers mailing
> list, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/latex-for-conlangers/.
>
> Emaelivpeith And Rosta:
> > (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
> > (ii) is a typography fetishist,
>
> LaTeX addresses both of these points, and and is especially well-known
> for its superior typography. Your "ff fl fi" ligatures are correctly
> handled with LaTeX. :)
I'm a bit puzzled about your answer (i) here: I admit to be a bit
behind cutting edge Linux and LaTeX technology as my normal system is
some four years old, but is it the case that LaTeX can use Truetype
and/or Unicode fonts these days and that it reads the input in
e.g. UTF-8?
> > (iii) loathes the frustrations of trying to get complicated software to
> > work correctly or at all.
> > (iv) is reluctant to learn lots of elaborate & radically new ways of doing
> > old familiar things;
>
> These two points are where LaTeX may give you trouble.
I never encountered much frustration with LaTeX. But maybe looking up
control commands can become frustrating -- you definitely need a good
book. LaTeX does not pretend to be Wysiwyg, so there is one layer of
complexity missing and it seldom behaves in seemingly incorrect ways.
And it never worked in unresolvably strange ways for me. And it does
not crash, does not accidentally overwrite your input file with
garbage, which I'd consider frustrating at the least, etc. etc. So
(iii) is a full pro-LaTeX point from my point of view. Furthermore,
*usually* LaTeX files that are ten years old still work perfectly.
Sometimes, though, I wish I had written the files in PlainTeX since
unnecessary style renamings happen with LaTeX.
Of course, (iv) is a problem when you're used to Wysiwyg. Although I
wouldn't call the new ways 'radically new'. Anyway, that's a matter
of taste, of course. I've always loved to see the control codes in
order to understand what the text processor does. But of course, I'm
a programmer. :-)
**Henrik
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Message: 6
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:19:43 -0500
From: Kit La Touche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
strictly speaking, i think LaTeX doesn't use truetype fonts, but its
own CM metric, which comes with a LaTeX installation. this is the T1
encoding that one uses generally. i, for conlanging, tend to use OT
encoding, which requires some poking at to get working nicely, but it
handles characters like edths and angmas nicely.
i love LaTeX, but if you want fine-tuned control over the layout,
it's probably not what you want. if you want consistent and nice
layout, and really good accented characters, it's for you.
kit
On Nov 15, 2005, at 8:22 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>>> (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
>>> (ii) is a typography fetishist,
>
> I'm a bit puzzled about your answer (i) here: I admit to be a bit
> behind cutting edge Linux and LaTeX technology as my normal system is
> some four years old, but is it the case that LaTeX can use Truetype
> and/or Unicode fonts these days and that it reads the input in
> e.g. UTF-8?
>
> **Henrik
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Message: 7
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 18:32:18 -0800
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
Warning--here be gmail.
Owing to the popularity of [La]TeX, I'm sure there are tools convert
truetypes to the TeX format.
On 11/15/05, Kit La Touche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> strictly speaking, i think LaTeX doesn't use truetype fonts, but its
> own CM metric, which comes with a LaTeX installation. this is the T1
> encoding that one uses generally. i, for conlanging, tend to use OT
> encoding, which requires some poking at to get working nicely, but it
> handles characters like edths and angmas nicely.
>
> i love LaTeX, but if you want fine-tuned control over the layout,
> it's probably not what you want. if you want consistent and nice
> layout, and really good accented characters, it's for you.
>
> kit
>
> On Nov 15, 2005, at 8:22 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >>> (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
> >>> (ii) is a typography fetishist,
> >
> > I'm a bit puzzled about your answer (i) here: I admit to be a bit
> > behind cutting edge Linux and LaTeX technology as my normal system is
> > some four years old, but is it the case that LaTeX can use Truetype
> > and/or Unicode fonts these days and that it reads the input in
> > e.g. UTF-8?
> >
> > **Henrik
>
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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 20:53:42 -0600
From: Herman Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
Thomas Wier wrote:
> one's keys. And such logical mismatches are even more deeply
> embedded, since a sentence like "Every man saw three dogs" has
> (for the vast majority of English speakers) precisely two readings:
> one where there is a set of three specific dogs which every man
> saw, and one where for every man, he saw three dogs, but not
> necessarily the same three dogs across the set of every man. So,
Isn't that just a problem with trying to read more into a sentence than
the words imply? You can't tell if all of the dogs were seen at the same
time and place or one after the other in different places. Why would you
expect to be able to tell if each man saw the exact same three dogs, if
this is unspecified? If it's a significant fact, it can be expressed as
"every man saw the three dogs", or to be extra clear, "every man saw the
same three dogs". English has many problems, but trying to find one in
"every man saw three dogs" when there are much more radical problems in
other areas seems a bit strange.
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Message: 9
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 19:22:08 -0800
From: Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
Emaelivpeith Henrik Theiling:
> I'm a bit puzzled about your answer (i) here: I admit to be a bit
> behind cutting edge Linux and LaTeX technology as my normal system is
> some four years old, but is it the case that LaTeX can use Truetype
> and/or Unicode fonts these days and that it reads the input in
> e.g. UTF-8?
T'ves emaelivpeith [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> Owing to the popularity of [La]TeX, I'm sure there are tools convert
> truetypes to the TeX format.
I know I've used them before, but I can't find the FAQ I used as
instructions back when I last did it. I know it is possible, though.
As for Unicode, I misread And's original (ii) as requesting Unicode
*characters*, no *fonts*. Like veritosproject, I suspect there must be
a way to use Unicode fontns, but I haven't done it myself. What I was
thinking of was that any Unicode characters you might want to write,
LaTeX can do.
Sorry for the confusion!
--
AA
http://conlang.arthaey.com/
(Gmail WARNING: watch the Reply-To!)
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Message: 10
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 15:04:25 +1100
From: Tristan Mc Leay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 02:22 +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Arthaey Angosii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > As a general note, there is also the LaTeX for Conlangers mailing
> > list, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/latex-for-conlangers/.
> >
> > Emaelivpeith And Rosta:
> > > (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
> > > (ii) is a typography fetishist,
> >
> > LaTeX addresses both of these points, and and is especially well-known
> > for its superior typography. Your "ff fl fi" ligatures are correctly
> > handled with LaTeX. :)
Also, your "ffi ffl" ligatures, and there's even support for "fj" and
"ffj" ligatures, but you need to load external packages. (Other fonts
also have "st" and "ct" ligatures, or ones more appropriate for
typesetting Gothic texts in an old-fashioned style like "ae", "be", "de"
etc. ligatures. All without even blinking an eyelid!)
Also, newer versions of pdftex have all sorts of freaky features like
allowing punctuation to hang into the right margin or stretching
characters marginally to avoid bad hyphenation. The stretched glyphs are
quite unnoticeable, from the demo files I've looked at! (Needs 1.21b or
later I think, but 1.30 is apparently better at it---but I still have
1.11a or something that comes with my distribution of TeX that comes
with my distribution of GNU/Linux, so I haven't used them.)
Really, TeX and LaTeX users are ten times the typography fetishist
you'll ever be, and there'll be a package or method on CTAN (the
Comprehensive TeX Archive Network) that will let you do it. Much of this
is in spite of, not because of, TeX's original design, so you might find
you don't actually run "tex"/"latex" to get something to work, but
another program that's based on tex. Donald Knuth wrote it to publish
his _Art of Computer Programming_, and was pleasantly surprised to find
that others wanted to use it, too!
> I'm a bit puzzled about your answer (i) here: I admit to be a bit
> behind cutting edge Linux and LaTeX technology as my normal system is
> some four years old, but is it the case that LaTeX can use Truetype
> and/or Unicode fonts these days and that it reads the input in
> e.g. UTF-8?
There are tools which will extract TeX font metrics from TrueType fonts
and tell you how to tell the various TeX-to-PDF converters (such as
pdftex or dvipdfm) how to insert the fonts. It's been a long time since
I've wanted to do this, though, so I can't remember the details. I'm
sure google can though!
LaTeX is set up to access all the fonts you ever want to use (i.e.
Computer Modern Roman and kin, and Palatino ;) and then some (e.g.
Times); or else the fonts you can get from CTAN are easily added to it,
such as TIPA (with Computer Modern or Times shapes) for IPA or Computer
Modern Tengwar.
As for Unicode, yes! You can have input as UTF-8. Try loading the ucs
package, then passing the utf8 option to inputenc (i.e. in this order
include these commands:
\usepackage[tipa]{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
The "tipa" argument to the IPA characters in Unicode into the respective
characters in the TIPA encodings. Note the word "convert"---this package
doesn't just give you access to code points about 255 in fonts, but
rather converts input in UTF-8 into the necessary commands that will
display it, so that if it sees the ə (schwa) character, it converts it
to \textschwa (or perhaps whatever \textschwa is converted to). Also
note that you can't do \'ə (that's backslash-apostrophe-schwa), you have
to do \'{ə} because as far as the TeX token parser is concerned, ə is
two characters still.
There's also the Omega, Lambda and Aleph projects. Omega gives TeX
native 16-bit support; Lambda is LaTeX-for-Omega, and Aleph is
e-TeX-for-Omega. For the moment, Unicode input is much easier via ucs
+inputenc then by touching these apparently unstable packages.
> I never encountered much frustration with LaTeX.
I'm yet to work out how to include graphics (particularly diagrams)
nicely and easily. You see in things *others* have done with it that
they clearly did them using TeX (text in them is Computer Modern Roman
for instance), but I don't know where to begin with that. I also find
that including things like JPEGs or even PDFs with pdftex always seems
to result in the wrong resolution being used, so you have to manually
specify the dimensions and then you still can't get it quite right.
Aside from images, I quite like (La)TeX.
--
Tristan.
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Message: 11
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 23:14:43 -0800
From: Jonathan Chang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Amerinds (was: Gallopavo (was: Re: fruitbats))
on 11/15/05 1:25 AM, Peter Bleackley at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I have heard that some "Native Americans" prefer to self-designate as "Red"
> - for example, there is a lobbying group called WARN, which stands for
> "Women of All Red Nations".
>
> I don't know if this proves anything, other than that self-designation is a
> matter of personal taste.
>
> Pete (who self-designates as "English").
Hanuman Zhang, who self-designates as a WOG (Wiley Oriental Gentlecreature),
and BBC (British-Born Chinese)
--
Hanuman Zhang
"...So what is life for? Life is for beauty and substance and sound and
colour; and even those are often forbidden by law [socio-cultural
conventions].
. . . Why not be free and live your own life? Why follow other people's
rules and live to please others?..."
- Lieh-Tzu/Liezi, Taoist Sage (c. 450- c. 375 BCE)
From bamboogrove.com:
# The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove were a group of Chinese scholars
# and poets of the mid-3rd century AD who banded together to escape from
# the hypocrisy and danger of the official world to a life of drinking
# wine and writing verse in the country. Their retreat was typical of the
# Taoist-oriented ch'ing-t'an ("pure conversation") movement that advocated
# freedom of individual expression and hedonistic escape from extremely
# corrupt politics. Their ideal consisted in following their impulses and
# acting spontaneously. Their outstanding collective characteristic was
# their sensitivity to the beauties of nature.
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Message: 12
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 09:52:58 +0100
From: taliesin the storyteller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
* And Rosta said on 2005-11-15 03:13:27 +0100
> [..] I got to wondering about (La)TeX, & would be very grateful for
> informed advice on this score.
I'm writing my master's thesis in LaTeX, because it already has a lot of
packages fine-tuned for linguistics-works like gb4e for interlinears,
avm for HPSG/LFG and several packages to draw trees.
> My question is: What is the best document preparation software for
> someone who
> (i) works a lot with truetype & unicode fonts,
I haven't had a need for this in LaTeX yet.
Something else good with fonts is Framemaker, but that is muuuch more
expensive than word.
> (ii) is a typography fetishist,
Both LaTeX and Framemaker are all about typography.
> (iii) loathes the frustrations of trying to get complicated software
> to work correctly or at all.
TeX (and LaTeX) are programming-languages, so the complicated things are
done in unusual ways to you. Table-of-contents and indexes are already
handled for instance, and it's all about marking up the text with
semantic styles. If you want pixel-perfect control, use TeX, as LaTeX
makes *a lot* of choices for you.
> (iv) is reluctant to learn lots of elaborate & radically new ways of
> doing old familiar things;
LyX <http://www.lyx.org/> is wysiwym (What You See Is What You Mean) and
you can do everything through menus, though I write all my LaTeX in vim
(with Latex-Suite) and is happy with that. If you don't use LyX the work
flow goes like this:
1) write content
2) compile
3) watch (in a pdf-reader or postscript-reader)
> or, broadly speaking:
>
> (I) is generally very happy with Word 2003 (bar the cost and the
> enslavement to Microsoft) but
Framemaker is a lot better but also much more expensive, but a lot
better...
> (II) would like something that gives typographically better results (e.g.
> intelligent handling of ff fl fi ligatures; centring diacritics over m & w)
> and that doesn't severely degrade when typographical demands start getting
> very heavy
Both Framemaker and TeX/LaTeX does this.
What I miss in LaTeX is an easy way to make new templates (in
Word-jargon), know as documentclasses in LaTeX2e. It's not at all easy
to do arbitrary things, like a one-sheet folded brochure, but extremely
easy to do what there already are documentclasses for, like (scientific)
articles, books, technical reports, presentations (use acroread to run
them) and anglo-style letters. Luckily I found a documentclass for
Norwegian-style letters (named "brev") or I would have needed something
else than LaTeX to write the first page of such.
Again, TeX gives *a lot* of control.
t.
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Message: 13
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 11:13:14 +0100
From: Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, 07:45 CET, caeruleancentaur wrote:
> German: es regnet Bindfaden/Strippen/in Str�men, it is
> raining > threads/strings/in streams; es gie�t wie mit
> Mollen/Scheffeln, it > pours as if with beer-glasses
> (I love this one!)/bushels.
My environment says "Es regnet Bindf�den". Or just
(classmates), "Es pisst" (It's pissing). Quite often, you
can hear "Es regnet wie aus Eimern/K�beln" as well.
"Es regnet in Str�men" is common as well, although to me
it sounds rather bookish.
Carsten
--
"Miranayam cepauar� naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)
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Message: 14
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 12:58:45 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: (La)TeX for a conlanger? Advice sought.
Hi!
taliesin the storyteller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>... Norwegian-style letters (named "brev") ...
Do you happend to have a link to this? What is it, I'd like to see
these letters.
**Henrik
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Message: 15
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 13:46:07 +0100
From: Henrik Theiling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
Hi!
Carsten Becker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, 07:45 CET, caeruleancentaur wrote:
>
> > German: es regnet Bindfaden/Strippen/in Strömen, it is
> > raining > threads/strings/in streams; es gießt wie mit
> > Mollen/Scheffeln, it > pours as if with beer-glasses
> > (I love this one!)/bushels.
Most of these I've never heard. Carsten's examples are much more
common and well-known to me, too:
> My environment says "Es regnet Bindfäden". Or just
> (classmates), "Es pisst" (It's pissing). Quite often, you
> can hear "Es regnet wie aus Eimern/Kübeln" as well.
> "Es regnet in Strömen" is common as well, although to me
> it sounds rather bookish.
Instead of 'regnen', you could also use 'gießen' (='to pour') in most
cases (but not with 'Bindfäden'). Or simply just use it in isolation:
'Es gießt'. Also, 'es schüttet' (~'pours'). And to not use 'pissen'
explicitly, you can use 'schiffen' just like in most other contexts,
too. :-) (Originally, it means essentially nothing, stem obviously
'Schiff' ('ship'), but used due to sound similarity).
My dialect also has: 'Es plästert ['plE:st6t].' But that's probably
heavy dialect and completely incomprehensible to other Germans without
context. But it means nothing else, just 'heavy rain'.
**Henrik
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Message: 16
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:52:01 -0600
From: Thomas Wier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture
From: Herman Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Thomas Wier wrote:
> > one's keys. And such logical mismatches are even more deeply
> > embedded, since a sentence like "Every man saw three dogs" has
> > (for the vast majority of English speakers) precisely two readings:
> > one where there is a set of three specific dogs which every man
> > saw, and one where for every man, he saw three dogs, but not
> > necessarily the same three dogs across the set of every man. So,
>
> Isn't that just a problem with trying to read more into a sentence than
> the words imply? You can't tell if all of the dogs were seen at the same
> time and place or one after the other in different places. Why would you
> expect to be able to tell if each man saw the exact same three dogs, if
> this is unspecified? If it's a significant fact, it can be expressed as
> "every man saw the three dogs", or to be extra clear, "every man saw the
> same three dogs". English has many problems, but trying to find one in
> "every man saw three dogs" when there are much more radical problems in
> other areas seems a bit strange.
Well, it isn't just a trivial problem. Of course context will usually
clarify which of the two scopal readings is possible, but not always.
That's a crucial point, because it indicates that pragmatic implicatures
are formally distinct from the truth-conditional semantic values a given
utterance may have. And besides that, the goal of linguistics is to
describe what it means to "know" a language, and without any such context,
English speakers will generally readily agree on these judgements as
something they know, and they will not accept other possible judgements
(such that one or the other quantifier obligatorily takes wide scope).
The point I was trying to make, in re idioms, was that languages differ
on precisely such points: languages with nominal scrambling like Japanese
IIRC do not get the same scope ambiguities that English does. So, trying
to define what is an idiom, and what isn't, is not a straightforward
enterprise, since there is a real sense in which any difference between
languages is "idiomatic". We cannot just reduce the set of idioms to
semantically noncompositional constructions like "kick the bucket",
since there are other kinds of purely structural noncompositionality.
==========================================================================
Thomas Wier "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637
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