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#7608 10/13/00 05:33 PM
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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/



#7609 10/13/00 06:14 PM
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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.html

Thanks tsuwm and Jo!!



#7610 10/14/00 11:27 PM
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Here it is...

Thanks to you, bM - an interesting addition to my procrastinatory migrations


#7611 10/15/00 07:14 AM
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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


#7612 10/15/00 10:06 AM
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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/


#7613 10/15/00 02:06 PM
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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.


#7614 10/16/00 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.


#7615 04/02/01 03:28 PM
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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.


#7616 04/02/01 03:56 PM
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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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