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bM, you are oh so close -- you figured out how to do red, now just use <url> and </url> in the same fashion (with square brackets, of course). http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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Good grief. I've finally figured it out. I have to type <url> in square brackets before and </url> in square brackets after. Here it is: http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.htmlThanks tsuwm and Jo!!
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#7610
10/14/2000 11:27 PM
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Here it is...Thanks to you, bM - an interesting addition to my procrastinatory migrations 
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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>>Unfortunately, my units of thought are not always crystal clear to those
around me....
You are lucky. MY units of thought are not always clear even to myself...
Emanuela
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#7612
10/15/2000 10:06 AM
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Carpal Tunnel
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(Warning: the following is a half-YART post) Thanks for bringing up DARE, belMarduk. Seems it's taken nearly as long as the first edition of the OED to compile!! I worked on the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (affiliated with the DARE project) as a college student back during its beginnings in the 1970s. The criteria for "interviewees" were tough: age, gender (ahem) and race were no problem, but it was hard to find folks who had been in their respective areas for three generations or more. The easiest places to find respondents were at local churches and, believe it or not, fire stations (those guys get REAL bored polishing their engines between fires).  http://hyde.park.uga.edu/
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DARE has moved to the top of my 'most wanted' reference list. I've wondered how the project is getting along without its chief editor and guiding light, Fred Cassidy.
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#7614
10/16/2000 12:59 AM
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Wow Anna, what a tremendous piece of work. It is a shame they do not transfer those tapes to wavs/mp3s. A) you could avoid tape deterioration and b) we could all get to hear them. Since you worked on the project you should give them nudge in that direction. What a terrific piece of history. As brought up in a previous thread, we are experiencing a dilution of typical <accents> because of the ease in migration, not just from one country to the next but from one city/state to the next. Though we are not all speaking with one voice now I imagine things will become much more homogenized in the future.
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veteran
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veteran
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missing words and convoluted sentences
When I was in college and taking German and French conversation courses, there was always the problem of running up against something you didn't know the German or French word for. We were instructed not to hem and haw, or ask what the word was, but to talk around it. The results of taking this advice were often hilarious. Talk about convoluted sentences!! Now that I'm ancient and the little grey cells are becoming exhausted, I find these lapses which you described (which I never used to have) more and more frequent, so I have to resort to the old technique of "talking around it", with what results you can imagine.
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spoken vs. written language
I am fairly familiar with a half dozen languages and every one of them has a spoken language which is different from the written language. For the most part, it's a difference in the level of formality; the spoken language tends to take great liberties in the matter of grammar and also in vocabulary. I suspect that this is true of virtually all languages; a language would have to be already simplified not to have a simpler form for informal communication between people who know each other.
My theory is that this is due to the fact that until quite recently on the scale of history, only a very small percentage of any given language population was able to read and write. Literacy was the preserve of a small elite who were familiar with the classical forms of languages, not only their own, but those others which had some prestige or some scholarly value, like Latin and Greek to Europeans, or classical Arabic to other Muslim scholars, or Chinese to the early Japanese and other oriental peoples. Hence a level of formality develops in a language which is written and intended to be read for informational purposes.
Further, the literate scholars tended to be part of a state apparatus or bureaucracy, like the clergy in medieval Europe, or the bureaucracy in the Chinese empire, or the mullahs with their semi-judicial status in Muslim society. This being the case, much of their writing was expected to be taken as judicial pronouncement. In later times, some of the output of scholars was intended for oratorical purposes.
Lastly, at least so far as regards the situation in English and European languages, the scholars were familiar with the classical languages in which texts and works had been subjected to all the classical rhetorical treatment which they then carried over into their own vernacular, so that the written form of English (as well as certain works intended for oratorical use) exhibited all the flourishes and techniques of Demosthenes and Cicero. The verbal form of this, which we call the oratorical style, is now almost dead, having gone out of fashion. The last great practitioner in the U.S. was probably F.D.R. and in English in general, Winston Churchill.
What do the rest of you think?
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Quite a few years ago some Guru-or-other posited that there are two main types of conversations (spoken word only here) ... .
The Guru said Type One are people who finish each other's sentences and Type Two are those who speak in sentences and hate being interrupted.
No problem when type speaks to type BUT if you get a mix then the Type One people think the other is slow and the Type Two people thing the other is rude.
It was quite interesting.
I, and most of my chums, are constantly finishing each others' sentences. My brother once commented that, heard from a slight distance, the interchange sounded like the buzz of a beehive!
Since becoming aware of this I have noticed that when I meet someone who likes to finish a thought ... and I catch the meaning mid-sentence and interrupt they physically pull back!
NOW that I have learned the "trick" I change my conversational style to suit the occasion.
Strange, I just realized 90 percent of my close chums are back-and-forth speakers .... Like to like ?
As to accents : when I hear one from a stranger, if situation allows, I say something like : "Do I detect a slight accent? Do you speak another language?"
That usually covers it without giving offense.
wow
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#7618
04/03/2001 11:00 AM
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old hand
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Bob I am not very familiar with my nominal mother tongue - Malayalam - but from what little I know of it, it demonstrates greater diglossia (is that the word?) than any other language I know of. My mother is the only one in our family who is literate in it, and when she reads out a letter written to us (from say a relative back in the home state), it sounds like a different language. She reads it phonetically, as one is supposed to do with most Indian languages, and I cannot recognise most of the words she says until she 'converts' them into the spoken versions. As far as oratory is concerned, I suspect we have lost the old rhetorical flourishes for good. But it is possible that the new, sound-bite generation may eventually create something of lasting worth? As for your citation of FDR and Churchill, you are probably right as far as classical forms go, but I have to confess a fondness for the rhythmic flourishes in the speech of one Martin Luther King. You may have heard of him - he had a dream? cheer the sunshine warrior
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#7619
04/03/2001 12:47 PM
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Pooh-Bah
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But it is possible that the new, sound-bite generation may eventually create something of lasting worth?
Do you mean lasting worth, or long remembered?
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#7620
04/03/2001 12:58 PM
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old hand
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But it is possible that the new, sound-bite generation may eventually create something of lasting worth?Do you mean lasting worth, or long remembered?I mean, I suspect (though I never know what I mean until I say it ), that they might actually create a new idiom of rhetoric and oration. It may not be what we are accustomed to, or accustomed to consider as good, but it may spawn its own culture, art forms, conventions and values that, to its users (particularly if it becomes endemic), is the golden standard against which speech is measured. cheer the sunshine warrior
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Ohhhhh, I'd love to know what I know now and "come back" in, say, May 2003 and see how this board has evolved.
(Huge West-of-Ireland sigh.)
wow
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Dr. King's oratory
Certainly Dr. King was a great orator, as is shown by his masterpiece, "I have a Dream", and other speeches equally effective but not as well known. However, his oratory falls into a special category, that of the sermon. Indeed, most of his speeches could have been called sermons. He was, of course, a clergyman and had mastered the art of preaching, specifically the preaching style known as the "black preacher" style. This is far from a derogatory term, as this style is much practiced and admired by white preachers as well as black. Since it was originally developed for the benefit of an intellectually unsophisticated and mostly uneducated audience/congregation, it is marked by the following characteristics: a) the content is strictly limited to one, or only a few, basic points, although a sermon in this style may last an hour or more; b) ideas, expressed by sentences or phrases, are repeated over and over with or without variations, e.g., "I have a dream that ..., I have a dream that ..., I have a dream that ..."; c) the call-and-response technique is often used, which is the preacher deliberately but tacitly inviting a response from the auditory, usually supplied by ejaculations such as, "Amen!", "Yes, Lord!", "Tell it, Brother!", etc; d) a dramatic oratorical delivery, with carefully arranged crescendos rising at times to the top of the preacher's voice, at others falling to an almost inaudible whisper, accompanied by dramatic gestures, hand-waving, Bible-thumping, leaning out of the pulpit, etc., all as carefully scripted and carried out as an opera. To read one of Dr. King's speeches (or one by another preacher in this style) gives you about as much idea of what it was really like as reading the text ofThe Magic Flute or some other operatic masterpiece without hearing or seeing it.
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The effectiveness of the best black sermons is illustrated in the instructions of an old preacher to a young one:
"I tells 'em what I'm going to tell 'em, I tells 'em, and then I tells 'em what I told 'em."
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"I tells 'em what I'm going to tell 'em, I tells 'em, and then I tells 'em what I told 'em." is good advice for any oral presentaion-- i use it all the time!
Crossing thread, now, i realise i speak in sentences-- and i don't! (Now isn't that a typical Irish answer!)
Just as i know, but rarely use formal Standard Written English-(SWE) but rather instead use a less formal, written dialect-- i also speak several dialects--
Since i have to give a number of presentation-- i have a "Formal Speaking voice" and style-- that I can "turn On" when needed. I can also "turn on" a very low class style of speaking--(and use a vocabulary that would shock sailers, and send dear Dr. Bill to early grave!--he would have difficulting living with the knowledge i could speak so crudely)--when needed.
All this has been covered before-- i think of GBS scene in My Fair Lady-- where he has Dr. Higgins point out that a "shop girl" in a fancy shop need to speak a different dialect -- a more formal one, than even a princess! and GBS said it all better than i can!
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