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Sesquipedalian #32

the SESQUIPEDALIAN 				       Volume V, No. 32
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John Lennon and Paul McCartney first meet (1952)	  June 15, 1995


				HARDCOPY

	'It's a strange thing, you know, life.'  He lifted the cup to
his lips and blew steam from it, then cautiously sipped its
bitterness.  'One minute, your heart pumps, your mind races, the next,
you're cold meat.  No more than a cow in a slaughterhouse...'
	I signalled the waitress.
	'I take that back.  You aren't meat, you're nothing, stark and
absolute nothing, with a rotting bag of water and bones left behind
for your friends and family to clean up.  But there's no real
difference from one moment to the next.  Your chemical composition is
the same.  Your skin's the same, your blood's the same, your heart,
brain, they're all the same.  But you're dead.  Just dead.  Something
leaves your body in that instant.  But what?'
	The waitress arrived.  I ordered another cup of tea.
	'Some people call it soul, some ka.  They see the spirit
leaving the body at the point of death, but continuing on to something
more.'  Pause, dramatic.  'It doesn't continue.  It doesn't even
exist.  The energies which flow through our bodies are gone, giving
way to entropy, as all things in the world must.  And so, the machine
of our bodies shuts down.
	The tea came.  It was with the waitress.
	'It works like a computer, a damn good computer, that's the
brain.  It's programmed from conception through birth, to run the
body, like a flesh robot.  The program is constantly changing,
growing, every second of sensory data forming it.  But when the power
gets turned off, after all, it is only a computer.  Like any other,
its memory bleeds off into nothingness, within minutes, perhaps
seconds.'
	I lifted the cup to my lips, blew on it, cautiously sipped.
	'Even if this machine can be fixed, the power restored, that
program is gone, irretrievable.  When the body is revived, the power
restored to the computer, it responds with a boot error, no Disk
Operating System to work with.  Nothing can bring the program back.'
	There was a small piece of white lint on my jacket.
	I stood up, reached into my pocket for some money, then placed
it on the table with a small tip.
	'I came for tea,' I said, 'not philosophy.'
	He looked at my face, reading something in it.  He said, very
solemn, 'I'm sorry.'  He looked sad.
	I turned to go.  The door swung open, and I entered the
sidewalk.  I took the two steps to a newspaper machine, bought a
Times.  Apparently, the Stock Market had crashed.  I read the article
while walking, turned to cross the street.
	I didn't see the bus.
	They didn't see me.
	Afterwards, they saw my bag, but there were some holes in it.

[Dermot Lyons]

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

-- Joseph Greenberg will be speaking at a roundtable at UC Berkeley
entitled, 'Pushing Back the Limits of Linguistic Prehistory: Methods,
Tools and Results,' June 22-23.  He will be giving two talks,
'Multilateral comparison and the comparative method' and 'Before
Indo-European: Nostratic and Eurasiatic.'

-- Congratulations to Martha Swearingen, who has accepted a
tenure-track position in the Department of Black Studies at the
University of California at Santa Barbara. She will teaching courses
on pidgins and creoles and introducing the Department to issues in
Linguistics.

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

-- NELS 26 (Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology) October 27, 28, 29 and 30, 1995.  Abstracts are invited
for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of theoretical linguistics.
Special workshops will be held on Monday, October 30, on Indo-European
Linguistics and Sentence Processing.  ABSTRACT DEADLINE: JULY 7, 1995.
Abstracts should be anonymous and typed single-spaced in 12-point font
on no more than one 8 1/2" x 11" page with one-inch margins.
References, but no examples, may be included on a second page.  For
the sake of the reviewers, guidelines will be strictly enforced.  At
most one individual, one joint, and one workshop-related abstract per
person will be considered.  Please write "workshop" in the top
left-hand corner of your abstract if you would like to have it
considered for one of the Monday workshops.  Submissions should
include (a) ten anonymous copies of an abstract, or five if submitted
for the workshop only; (b) one copy stating the name of; the author(s)
and affiliation(s), for inclusion in the NELS booklet if accepted; (c)
a typed 3" x 5" card bearing the title of the paper and the authors'
names, affiliations, phone numbers, and snailmail and e-mail
addresses.  Please indicate whether you would like e-mail
acknowledgement of receipt.  Abstracts sent after the deadline will
not be considered.  We will accept no fax or e-mail submissions.
Accepted presenters will be notified in early September.  Please send
abstracts to
            Dianne Jonas and Martha McGinnis, coordinators
                             NELS 26
               Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
                20D-219 MIT, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA
For more information, please write to nels26@mit.edu or to the above
address.

-- CONSOLE 4 (14-16 DECEMBER 1995): The fourth meeting of the Student
Organization of generative Linguistics in Europe (Console) will be
held in Paris.  Sole aims at providing students of generative
linguistics with a possibility of gaining international experience and
a publication forum of their own. Furthermore Sole strives at
enhancing contacts and cooperation between students of generative
linguistics in Europe and around the world.  Papers are solicited in
the field of generative linguistics, more specifically, but not
limited to phonology, morphology, semantics, sign language, language
acquisition and syntax. If you are interested please send three
anonymous copies of an abstract of maximally two pages, including
references, diagrams and examples using minimally a 10 pnt font to
	Jacqueline Gueron
	Departement d'Anglais
	U. de Paris X -Nanterre
	200 Avenue de la Republique
	92001 Nanterre Cedex, France
or to:
	Alain Rouveret
	Departement des Sciences du Langage
	U. de Paris VIII
	2 rue de la Liberte
	93256 Saint-Denis Cedex, France
The deadline for submission is August first. Abstracts received after
1 August will not be considered.

-- WECOL 1995: The Western Conference on Linguistics will be held this
year at the University of Northern British Columbia, in Prince George,
British Columbia, Friday 13 October through Sunday 15 October.
Abstracts are invited for 20-minute talks in all areas of linguistics.
Abstracts should be anonymous, and should be no longer than one page,
with margins of at least 2.5cm, in a typeface no smaller than 11
point.  An additional page with examples and references may be
appended.  Please provide 10 copies of the abstract. A separate index
card should contain the title, author's name, address, affiliation,
telephone number email address if available.  The deadline for receipt
of abstracts is Wednesday 19 July 1995.  Abstracts should be sent to
the following address:
        WECOL c/o Bill Poser
        Department of Linguistics
        Humanities Building 565
        University of New Mexico
        Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131-6353
        USA
Please DO NOT send abstracts to UNBC; the program committee will meet
during the Linguistic Institute in Albuquerque.  Prince George is one
hour by air from Vancouver. Accomodation is plentiful and cheap.
 
-- NLPRS '95: THIRD NATURAL LANGAUAGE PROCESSING PACIFIC-RIM SYMPOSIUM
(Seoul, Korea, December 4-6, 1995).  NLPRS'95, which will be held from
December 4-6, 1995 in Seoul, Korea, is the third forums to bring
together NLP researchers in the Pacific-Rim area for scientific
exchange and presentation.  The program will include tutorials,
invited talks, and demonstrations as well as tracks for paper and
video presentations.  Submissions are solicited on original and
previously unpublished research in all aspects of NLP, including, but
not limited to:
     * phonetics            * generation 
     * phonology            * parsing 
     * morphology           * machine(-aided)translation
     * lexicon              * spoken language processing
     * syntax               * linguistic models of natural language 
     * semantics            * natural language interface and dialog systems 
     * pragmatics           * language-oriented information retrieval 
     * discourse            * corpus-based language modelling 
     * document analysis    * multimedia and language
Papers of no longer than 6 pages in the double-column conference format 
should be submitted by 20th June, 1995.  We strongly encourage papers to be 
electronically submitted.  In this case, they should be in LaTeX format,  
plain text or PostScript format for non-alphabet, and should be emailed to :
                       nlprs95@cair.kaist.ac.kr
Latex submissions must use the NLPRS submission style (nlprs.sty) retrievable
from the NLPRS ftp server or WWW Home Page.  The following is an example of 
getting the NLPRS submission style sheet by anonymous FTP:
     $ftp cair-archive.kaist.ac.kr
     Name:anonymous
     Password:<Your Email Address>
     ftp> cd NLPRS-95
     ftp> get nlprs.sty
     ftp> quit
If electronic submission is not possible, three hard copies of the paper 
should be sent to:	
             Mr. J.M. KIM 
             NLPRS'95 Secretariat 
             Foreign Tourist Dept II 
             Hanjin Travel Service Co.,Ltd.(Conference Agency) 
             132-4, 1-ka, Bongrae-dong, Chung-ku, 
             100-161, Seoul, Korea 
             Phone:+82-2-726-5540, Fax:+82-2-773-1623 

		^/^/^/ FELLOWSHIPS/ASSISTANTSHIPS \^\^\^

-- The Mabel Wilson Richards Scholarship fund provides financial
assistance to women who are natives of the City of Los Angeles, (or
one of the cities described on the list).  Financial need is a prime
consideration, so parental income must be under $40,000.  The maximum
award is $3,000.  Formal applications (available from Jackie Vargo in
building one, second floor) should be made to the Graduate Financial
Aid Office who will recommend two qualified candidates to the trustees
of the fund.  Application deadline is August 11, 1995.

-- WHAT MAKES A PICTURE LOOK GOOD?  We are looking for a research
assistant to help us run psychology experiments this summer (and
beyond) in which we will measure people's judgements of image quality.
The job will involve working on experimental design, data collection
and data analysis.  The work hours will be flexible, and should be
from 20-40 hours a week.  Some experience using computers (Unix or
Mac) is necessary.  Experience with data analysis packages and
programming is desireable.  Pay will be commensurate with experience.
For further information contact Brian Wandell
(brian@white.stanford.edu) or Hagit Hel-Or (gigi@white.stanford.edu),
415/725-4014. 

--	The Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) of the University of
Pennsylvania is collecting telephone speech for three major studies
this summer, and we are asking all members of the research community
at large to participate in making them a success.
	The calls are being collected on a new Intervoice
RobotOperator platform that has dramatically increased the LDC's
ability to collect telephone speech. The new system allows up to
twelve two channel calls or 24 one channel calls to go on at the same
time. Up to 20 hours of conversation can be stored before it is
necessary to download data; the download as well as many programming
changes can be made without interrupting the application itself. In
effect, the application will be operational for 24 hours per day.
The projects are as follows:
For Voice Across Hispanic America, we need native speakers of
Spanish (from any country) who can call an 800 telephone number and
spend five minutes on the telephone reading a series of sentences.
Participants can receive $5.00 for their time.
For CallHome, native speakers of English, Egyptian Arabic, German,
Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish can make a free call to another native
speaker from an 800 telephone number anywhere in the world and talk 
for 30 minutes. Participants can receive either $10.00 or free 
telephone time.
For CallFriend, native speakers of English, Spanish, Tamil, Hindi,
Japanese, French, Farsi, German, Korean, Egyptian Arabic and Vietnamese can
can make a free call to another native speaker from an 800 telephone
number anywhere in the U.S., Canada or Puerto Rico and talk free for 30 
minutes. Participants can receive either $10.00 or free telephone time.
	Individuals or organizations who can recruit at least ten
callers should contact us to discuss various incentive programs for
all three projects. The recordings will be used for nonprofit
scientific research and instructional purposes, and are made available
to researchers and educators from all over the world on an equal
basis.
To receive more information, or to get a Personal Identification
Number and instructions for making calls, please call us at
1-800-380-PENN (7366) between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. EST, or send email to
one of the following addresses:
Voice Across Hispanic America 	vaha@unagi.cis.upenn.edu
CallHome			callhome@unagi.cis.upenn.edu
CallFriend			callfriend@unagi.cis.upenn.edu
For further information about the project or for other information
about the Linguistic Data Consortium, please contact us
ldc@unagi.cis.upenn.edu, or you can access our WWW Home Page at
ftp://www.cis.upenn.edu/pub/ldc_www/hpage.html.  You can also send
mail to us at the address below:
Rebecca Finch                          | Linguistic Data Consortium
Research Coordinator                   | 441 Williams Hall
finch@unagi.cis.upenn.edu              | University of Pennsylvania
Tel: 215/898-0464 / Fax: 215/573-2175  | Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

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

-- ENGLISH: A WORLD LANGUAGE?  In Japan you can drink Homo Milk, or
Poccari Sweat (a popular soft drink), and eat some chocolate called
Hand-Maid Queer-Aid, or go out and buy some Arm Free Grand Slam
Munsingwear.  In Sarajevo, five languages are in common use, yet in
not one of them does the word 'stop' exist.  But every stop sign there
says just that.  Chinese speak on the 'Te le fung.'  When a Ukranian's
hair gets too long, he goes for a 'herkot.'  In Poland, they eat
Ajskrym for dessert.  Lithuanians go to the 'muving pikceris' to see
the latest films, and Serbo-Croatians get paid on 'Peda.'  Italians
'shaicchenze,' or shake hands.  But the champions must be the
Japanese.  Witness:
	sumato: smart
	nyuu ritchi: 'new rich'
	upatodatu: up to date
	gurama foto: glamour photo
	haikurasu: high class
	kyapitaru gein: capital gain
	rushawa: rush hour
	sebiro: new suit (might pass, except it comes from Saville Row)
	purodakuchibichi: productivity
	moga: modern girl
	wa-pro: word processor
	masu-komi: mass communication
	erebata: elevator
	nekutai: necktie
	shyanpu setto: shampoo and set

		     ^/^/^/ 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.)

-- NYU: The Department of Linguistics at New York University invites
applications for a phonologist for a visiting assistant professor
position for the 1995-96 academic year.  Responsibilities include
teaching graduate and undergraduate courses.  We are especially
interested in research on Asian or African languages as well as a
demonstrated interest in the interaction of phonetics and phonology.
Interested applicants should send a letter of application, CV, three
letters of reference, and a sample of work to
	Phonology Search Committee
	Department of Linguistics
	719 Broadway, 5th floor
	New York University
	New York NY 10003
Deadline for submission is July 20, 1995.  Queries via e-mail may be
addressed to singler@acfcluster.nyu.edu (John Singler).  This
announcement supersedes the previous announcement.  AA/EOE

(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 /^/^/^

-- ALL YOUR EGGS: A lady is carrying a basket of eggs.  Frightened by
a horse that gallops past her, she drops the basket and all the eggs
break.  When asked how many eggs the basket had contained, she
replies, 'I am very poor in arithmetic... but I remember that when I
counted the eggs by twos, threes, fours, and fives, I had remainders
of 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.'  How many eggs were in the basket?

Solution to CLOCK TALK: The answer is no.  Briefly, the proof goes
something like this: The minute hand passes the hour hand ten times in
an hour (it does-- try it yourself), so there are eleven points on the
dial where the hour and minute hand are together.  There are 59 points
where the minute hand and the second hand are together, and 11 and 59
have no common factors, so there can only be one point where all three
hands are together: 12:00.


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                    ^\^\^\ CONSERVE DISK SPACE /^/^/^

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before you've read it), the Sesquipedalian Weekly Herald is stored
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at Berkeley (in the directory /usr/pub.)  The most current issue of
the Herald can be found by typing 'help quip'.

Neither Stanford University nor the Linguistics Department, nor any of
their employees, makes any warranty, whatsoever, implied, or assumes
any legal liability or responsibility regarding any information,
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necessarily reflect those of Stanford University or the Linguistics
Department, or their employees, and shall not be used for advertising
or product endorsement purposes.

Repeat as necessary

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