Res: [tied] Re: Automatic clustering of languages / SIX

--- In cybalist@... s.com, "Daniel J. Milton" <dmilt1896@. ..> wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@... s.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
>

You are welcome Dan! Incidently, there is one Peter Forster a
geneticist turned linguists associated with the McDonald Institute at
Cambridge Univ.

M. Kelkar