Re: OT: interestin' factoids (mostly language-related)

On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

> Where does your family live now?  If you're ever back in Houston, we really
> ought to get together with Alex or something.
(ruefully)  South Korea.  I haven't been to Houston since 7th grade, a
fact that I dearly regret...and NY is a far ways off, and I'm in college
loans up to my ears, so travel is a difficulty.  :-(

> > I like linguistics and have been reading layman texts where I can grab
> > (and understand them), and somewhat regret that I'm a math major, though
> > math is neat.
>
> I've never been too great at it, but I kinda like number theory myself.
I'm leaning toward algebra/topology.  :-p  And RSA encryption is just
cool, though calculating modulo the product of even two two-digit primes
by hand is an incredible pain.  (The prof never *said* we could use a
computer program, so I used a calculator...big mistake.)

> Though linguistics hasn't been mathematized as much as economics yet,
> there's been a respectable amount of work in that field.   The Cambridge series
> in linguistics has a book on the use of statistics in linguistics, which I have
> but haven't read yet.  You can probably either check it out from the library
> or buy one cheap from a local used bookstore, or online.
I bet I can find it at a library sometime.  Thanks!

> > :-/  I recently discovered conlangs as a *wonderful*
> > linguistics resource, not to mention I'm a sf/f writer (3 stories sold, 2
> > published) who likes messing around with worldbuilding.
>
> Have you been to the Language Construction Kit?
>
> It has a lot of information about basic linguistics for the beginning
> conlanger, and is very approachable.  Richard Kennaway also has probably the
> best inventory of conlangs on the net:
Been to both.  I just sent Kennaway a loooong list of dead links, but
even with all the chaff it's great browsing.

> > I'm learning all
> > sorts of things by just lurking...wanted to listen in and figure out the
> > etiquette of things before I posted.
>
> Well, until this week I had assumed that politics was off-limits, but we
> proved that wrong, I guess.  We handled it relatively well, I thought,
> considering the intense acrimony that usually goes along with that.  The
> only subject that is officially, and truly, off-limits is discussion of auxilliary
> languages like Esperanto or Interlingua and such.  About a decade ago
> or so, when the list was young, it was allowed, but it led to so much
> pointless bickering based on preconceived ideas about what's good
> and bad in languages that it was spun off as a separate list, and everything
> else came here.
Noted.  Since I barely know anything about auxlangs, I'm safer avoiding
the topic anyway.  :-p  When I try to build language sketches I'm usually
working with a story, so I *want* there to be annoying metaphorical
features and suchlike.

The books I've been working from are Terry Crowley's _Historical
Linguistics_--textbooks are *expensive,* but it was so worthwhile;
Crystal's _Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_ 2nd ed., which I found in
a used bookstore (!); and _Introduction to Linguistics_ by Fromkin and
someone else, can't remember who (half my books are in an apt-mate's
room, with his permission, because I ran out of shelf space).

An anthro major friend of mine complains that the Fromkin is too
pro-Chomsky, but I don't know enough about Chomsky and whatever
alternatives exist to have an opinion on the subject.  I'm still
reading.  <wry g>

> > Cheers, and good to hear from you.  Are you in Texas right now?  I ended
> > up at Cornell U., Nowhere--er, Ithaca, NY.  :-p  Long story.
>
> That's actually always been Alex's answer to that question...
>
> Yes, I'm living in Texas -- in Austin until next May except for holidays.
:-)  Hope it isn't too hot there...OTOH, I seem to remember way more
air-conditioning than we're getting here in New York.  I do get to laugh
at my friends when they complain about the heat...since South Korea gets
pretty darn hot during monsoon season, and I think I have a little heat
tolerance left over from Houston.

Cheers,
YHL