--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "mkelkar2003" <swatimkelkar@...> wrote:
>
>
http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/150000/146390/p339-batagelj.pdf?key1=146390&key2=6896835711&coll=&dl=ACM&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618
>
> This is an unusal study in terms of the selctionof langauges. The
> position of Persian and Albanian are notable. Persian is no where
> close to Indic languages.
>
> M. Kelkar
*********
I looked at the tree diagrams in the paper referenced above with
some amazement, and went on to do my daily check of Language Log
(which most people on this list would enjoy)
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/
which referred me to the perfect comment on nonlinguists' linguistic
tree diagrams, just out on April 1!
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004358.html#more
FORESTER HIRED IN LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT
WAYUPNORTH--
In a desperate effort to make linguistic tree drawings more
understandable to the linguistically unwashed, North Orizen Junior
Technical University yesterday proposed hiring an experienced
forester, Kari "Woody" Leohtenen, as a tenured full professor in its
newly created linguistics department. "Mr. Leohtenen has no background
whatsoever in linguistics, which makes him the ideal candidate," said
the dean, "but I'm sure that my brother-in-law's many years of
experience in the timber industry will prove invaluable to our
linguists as they try to prune what they call language tree diagrams.
I'm told that right and left branching leads to semantic
confusion--and we have a lot of this in our faculty meetings. We're
also hoping that Woody can teach one of those critical languages that
Homeland Security keeps harping about, like Finnish."
Mr. Leohtenen took his B.S. in Forestry at the University of Montana,
a state known historically for wiping out its ponderosa pines to stoke
the smelters of the state's now-defunct copper mines. Recent years
have seen a glut of foresters on the job market and so North Orizen's
experiment in cross-disciplinary cooperation is being heralded as a
boon for otherwise unemployed specialists in the rapidly declining
timber industry.
"It doesn't matter that I'll have to take a 50% cut in pay," said
Leohtenen. "The chance to be a big-time, highfalutin university
professor is worth it. Anyways, foresters don't have much to do these
days and I was probably about to get laid off." Despite the dean's
hearty endorsement, somewhat muted concerns about Leohtenen's lack of
qualifications were voiced by a few apparently disgruntled faculty
members. "I doubt he knows a stripling from a stripped cleft sluice,"
gruffed the newly hired syntactician. And the new phoneticican added,
"He probably thinks the alveolar ridge is somewhere in the Rocky
Mountains."
University administrators say that they don't intend to stop here.
Their next step in their "Hiring-Across-Disciplines" strategy is to
locate a forester who will specialize in the poetry of Joyce Kilmer
for the English department. "After that," said one top-level official
who asked that he not be identified, "we may examine the possibility
of using foresters to teach math logarithms."
BTW, M. Kelkar's postings a week or two ago reminded me I really
should have a copy of Mallory & Adams' Oxford Introduction. I found a
second-hand but "like new" copy offered for a very reasonable price on
Amazon by one M. Kelkar.
Thank You, Mayuresh, I'm really enjoying it!
Dan