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Sesquipedalian #30

the SESQUIPEDALIAN 				       Volume V, No. 30
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Dare Day						   June 1, 1995

			     PRESS RELEASE
		     CREATORS ADMIT UNIX, C HOAX

	In an announcement that has stunned the computer industry, Ken
Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan admitted that the Unix
operating system and C programming language created by them is an
elaborate April Fools prank kept alive for a quarter of a century.
Speaking at the recent UnixWorld Software Development Forum, Thompson
revealed the following:
	"In 1969, AT&T had just terminated their work with the
GE/Honeywell/AT&T Multics project. Brian and I had just started
working with an early release of Pascal from Professor Nichlaus
Wirth's ETH labs in Switzerland and we were impressed with its elegant
simplicity and power. Denis had just finished reading 'Bored of the
Rings', a hilarious National Lampoon parody of the great Tolkien 'Lord
of the Rings' trilogy. As a lark, we decided to do parodies of the
Multics environment and Pascal. Dennis and I were responsible for the
operating environment. We looked at Multics and designed the new
system to be as complex and cryptic as possible to maximize casual
users' frustration levels, calling it Unix as a parody of Multics, as
well as other more risque allusions. Then Dennis and Brian worked on a
truly warped version of Pascal, called 'A'. When we found others were
actually trying to create real programs with A, we quickly added
additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL and finally C. We
stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);

To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually
thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years. Imagine our surprise when AT&T and
other US corporations actually began trying to use Unix and C! It has
taken them 20 years to develop enough expertise to generate even
marginally useful applications using this 1960's technological parody,
but we are impressed with the tenacity (if not common sense) of the
general Unix and C programmer.  In any event, Brian, Dennis and I have
been working exclusively in Pascal on the Apple Macintosh for the past
few years and feel really guilty about the chaos, confusion and truly
bad programming that has resulted from our silly prank so long ago."
	Major Unix and C vendors and customers, including AT&T,
Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, GTE, NCR, and DEC have refused comment at
this time.  Borland International, a leading vendor of Pascal and C
tools, including the popular Turbo Pascal, Turbo C and Turbo C++,
stated they had suspected this for a number of years and would
continue to enhance their Pascal products and halt further efforts to
develop C. An IBM spokesman broke into uncontrolled laughter and had
to postpone a hastely convened news conference concerning the fate of
the RS-6000, merely stating 'VM will be available Real Soon Now'. In a
cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH institute and father of
the Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon structured languages, merely stated
that P. T. Barnum was correct.
	In a related late-breaking story, usually reliable sources are
stating that a similar confession may be forthcoming from William
Gates concerning the MS-DOS and Windows operating environments. And
IBM spokesmen have begun denying that the Virtual Machine (VM) product
is an internal prank gone awry.

[LaughWEB]

		    ^\^\^\ LOOK WHO'S TALKING /^/^/^

-- LINGUISTICS SAFARI: A party of students from John Rickford's
'English Transplanted, English Transformed' class and others made an
expedition to the island of Oahu this past weekend.  Highlights of the
trip included meetings with Derek Bickerton, poets and authors in the
medium of Hawaiian Islands pidgin, and members of the Board of
Education of the State of Hawaii on pidgin issues; field research;
and, of course, the fabulous beaches.  Students are presenting
projects based on this work starting this week.

-- Arman Maghbouleh will spend the summer at the ATR research
laboratory in Japan as a guest researcher. He'll continue working on
phonological uses of duration models.

 	          ^/^/^/ LINGUISTICS COLLOQUIUM \^\^\^

     SIMPLE PRESENT TENSE ACTIONS IN THE DISCOURSE OF A SOCIAL MUD
			Dissertation Proposal
			     Lynn Cherny
			Stanford Linguistics

		     Friday, June 2, 3:30 p.m.
			Margaret Jacks Hall
			 Seminar Room 146
 		      Happy hour will follow.

Text-based virtual realities accessible via Internet, or MUDs
(``multi-user dimensions''), have become very popular for socializing,
teaching, and academic conferencing.  MUD communication is different
>From that in most other Internet chat programs in that it allows both
speech and action modalities.  The action modality, via the emote
command, allows users to simulate physical actions in third person,
``Vivien waves at Bob.''  Uses of the emote command and other
communication options during conversation are in fact highly socially
conventionalized; a MUD may be considered a speech community (Gumperz
1972) with a particular linguistic register, which is partly dependent
on modality features (Halliday 1985) and communication affordances, as
well as in-group language knowledge.  In this talk, I will concentrate
on the use of simple present tense in the MUD register, with which
users simulate not only communicative ``gestures,'' but also narrate
their ``real life'' actions while they are MUDding (e.g., ``Marie
packs for her trip''), in a manner reminiscent of that found in sports
commentary register (Ferguson 1983).
	Actions within the MUD are always reported in the third person
simple present tense, suggesting a similarity with speech acts like
first person performatives (Searle 1969, 1989), which become true as
they are uttered.  Actions that are part of byplay during conversation
in the MUD may have no real world referent, and they are interpreted
as punctual, started and completed at time of utterance: ``Jon shines
on lynn.''  Actions which describe activity happening external to the
MUD show complexity however; for instance, they may report either
intention to do something (``Joe really disconnects this time''), or
report actions already taken (``yduJ sends mail to the dispute
list''). I suggest that in part the aspectual class of the verb
determines which interpretation is valid, along with reference to a
world, either the MUD irrealis world or the real world.  Activities
are interpreted as on-going events in the real world, but as punctual
in the MUD world; and achievements/ accomplishments are assumed to
have just occurred in both worlds unless a simple futurate is invoked.
I offer a DRT analysis inspired by the event-based discourse
treatments of Partee (1984) and Hinrichs (1986), which generalizes to
the data in the literature on sports commentary register, for which no
semantic treatment has been provided.

	             ^\^\^\ CALL FOR PAPERS /^/^/^

-- UWM: 23rd annual UWM Linguistics Symposium (University of
Wisconsin, Milwaukee, April 18-20, 1996).  'Functionalism and
Formalism in Linguistics.'  We are seeking papers that
	- speak to the relationship between linguistic functionalism
	  and formalism; 
	- highlight the advantages or drawbacks of some functional or
	  formal approach;
	- provide analyses of the same data from multiple
	  perspectives;
	- explore the basic assumptions about language and cognition
	  that underline the two approaches;
	- trace the history of one or both approaches;
	- offer general discussions of the formalist-functionalist
	  dichotomy and its implications; OR
	- otherwise throw light on the similarities and differences
	  between the two approaches and their assessment.	
Papers will be 20 minutes long, with a 10 minute discussion period to
follow.  Please send 8 copies of an anonymous abstract and 3x5 card
containing the title of the paper and your name, affiliation, and
address.  The abstract may be up to one page typed, with figures and
referneces allowed on a second page.  Since we need a camera-ready
copy for reproduction in the meeting handbook if accepted, we prefer
regular mail over email or fax.  Send your abstract to
	96 UWM Symposium Committee
	Department of Linguistics
	University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
	Milwaukee WI 53201-0413
	email: edith@csd.uwm.edu or
	       noonan@csd.uwm.edu
	phone:  414/229-4285
	fax: 414/229-6258
Abstract deadline: November 17, 1995.  

		       ^/^/^/ BONUS TALK \^\^\^

-- NEW TIME!  Rafal Molencki (University of Silesia, Poland), Visiting
Fulbright Scholar, will give a talk on Friday June 9th: noon - 1 p.m.
in 110-11A.  
 
  	     The history of counterfactuals in English 

In this talk I will discuss the history of English counterfactual
constructions, especially counterfactual conditionals. I will trace
their development from Old English until modern times. Particular
attention will be paid to the interaction of tense, mood and modality,
and to strong and weak past-as-unreal hypotheses as outlined in Dahl
1994. Some interesting usages of the pluperfect tense and the perfect
infinitive will be shown. I will also claim that the tendency for
parallel forms in protases and apodoses in different periods of
English, and also in other languages, points to what one might call a
discontinuous grammaticalization across clauses.

		       ^\^\^\ LING-LUNCH /^/^/^

At our first Ling-lunch Bresnan and Peters tell us about the MIT
Optimality conference.  This event is meant to be a department-wide
forum for informal discussion of current topics of general interest --
something in the spirit of TINlunch, but more open in format, and
certainly not limited to discussion of some paper that you're supposed
to have read in advance.  Normally it will occurs Tuesday 12-1 in
those weeks when we don't have a faculty meeting.  This coming week,
it will exceptionally be Monday 12-1 in a room to be announced.

		    ^/^/^/ TRUE LINGUISTICS \^\^\^

-- WET BLANKETS THROUGH HISTORY: Real quotes from pivotal people at
the right place at the right time (great example sentences!):

'This "Telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered
as a means of communication.  The device is inherently of no value to
us.' (Western Union internal memo, 1879)

'The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value.  Who would
pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?' (David Sarnoff's
associates in response to his urgings to invest in radio in the
1920's.)

'Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?' (H.M. Warner, 1927)

'The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn
better than a C, the idea must be feasible.' (Yale University
management professor's comments on Fred Smith's paper proposing
reliable overnight delivery service.  Smith went on to found Federal
Express Corp.)

'We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.'
(Decca Recording Co. rejecting The Beatles, 1962.)

'Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.' (Lord Kelvin,
president, Royal Society, 1895)

'If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment.  The
literature was full of examples that said you can't do this.' (Spencer
Silver on his work that led to the unique adhesive for 3M 'post-it'
notepads)

'Drill for oil?  You mean drill into the ground to try to find oil?
You're crazy.' (Driller who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his
project to drill for oil in 1859)

'I think there's a world market for about five computers.' (Thomas J
Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM)

'Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.'
(Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929)

'Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.' (Marechal
Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre)

'Man will never reach the moon regardless of all future scientific
advances.' (Dr Lee De Forest, inventor of the vacuum tube)

'Everything that can be invented has been invented.' (Charles H.
Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office, 1899)

		    ^\^\^\ JOB ANNOUNCEMENTS /^/^/^

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

-- UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN: Postdoc position in Formal Specification
Languages at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.  DeStijl
(Design and Specification Through Interfacing and Joining Languages)
is a recently approved HCM (Human Capital and Mobility) project about
formal wide-spectrum specification and design languages, such as COLD,
VDM (-SL and Irish schools), RAISE, Z, ASL, VVSL. The project has
basically been divided in the work packages `Unification and
Integration', `Assessment' (of the different languages) and `Case
studies' (in the different languages).  Recurring themes are e.g.
modularity in language design, parallel processes, types, and
parametrization.  The duration of the project will be three years,
starting 1995. Participants in the project are Utrecht University,
University of Groningen, Philips, Trinity College Dublin, Technical
University of Denmark, University of Munich, Oxford University. On
short notice two postdoc positions of 10 months each can be fulfilled,
one at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland; and one at the University of
Groningen, the Netherlands. This announcement is for the Groningen
position. The Groningen posted postdoc will be required to start work
on the `Unification' and `Assessment' packages. It is expected that
the Groningen postdoc will bring experience with languages other than
COLD or VVSL. He/she will also handle DeStijl project management.
Extension of the contract period might be negotiable.  Only non-dutch
European Community (or associated) members can apply for the Groningen
HCM position. Ph.D. in Computing Science or related field is
preferred.  Extensive experience in one of the mentioned formal
specification languages is a definite requirement.  For more
information, contact the project leader prof. Gerard Renardel
(grl@cs.rug.nl) or the project manager Hans van Ditmarsch
(hans@cs.rug.nl).

(REDUNDANCY NOTICE: For fuller listings of these and other jobs, don't
forget to check the Jobs binder in the Greenberg Room, and the file
'jobslist.txt' on the CSLI directory /user/linguistics.)

		        ^/^/^/ INSTA-PRIZE \^\^\^

-- DESSERT ISLAND: Five students were stranded on a tropical island
with one monkey.  They spent their first day gathering all the
coconuts they could find.  During the night, one student decided to
take his share of the coconuts right away, so he snuck away and
divided the coconuts into five even piles.  One was left over, so he
gave it to the monkey, hid one pile, and re-stacked the remaining
coconuts.  Soon another student woke up and did the same thing.  After
she divided the remaining coconuts into five piles, one was left over
again, so she gave it to the monkey, took one pile away, and went back
to sleep.  The third, fourth, and fifth students all did the same
thing during the night, and each time there was one coconut left over
which was given to the monkey.  In the morning, after they all woke up
they divided the remaining coconuts into five equal shares and this
time there were none left over.  How many coconuts did they originally
gather? (Hint: there are of course an infinite number of correct
answers, but to win you must give me the lowest one.)

Solution to NIX WIE WEG: 'Creative people should be required to leave
California for three months every year.' (Gloria Swanson)


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