Re: OT: interestin' factoids (mostly language-related)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> On Mon, 7 Aug 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>
> > Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >
> > > I thought that was Victor Hugo, for _Les Misérables_.  Or did I misremember?
> > >
> > > Yoon Ha Lee
> > > new to the list and still lurking
> >
> > Yoon! Welcome to the list.  I don't think we've ever met, but we went to
> > the same middleschool together -- you'll probably recognize my address
> > from Alex's [our mutual friend's] emails.  What brought you to the list?
> > I'm sure you'll find us a most congenial group.  Everyone's very friendly,
> > far more so than most groups.
>
> Ohmygawsh, the name looked familiar, but I was *sure* it couldn't be the
> Tom Wier I vaguely remembered from middle school--I think Alex mentioned
> you a few times.  Hello, belatedly.  :-)
Where does your family live now?  If you're ever back in Houston, we really
ought to get together with Alex or something.

> I like linguistics and have been reading layman texts where I can grab
> (and understand them), and somewhat regret that I'm a math major, though
> math is neat.
I've never been too great at it, but I kinda like number theory myself.

Though linguistics hasn't been mathematized as much as economics yet,
there's been a respectable amount of work in that field.   The Cambridge series
in linguistics has a book on the use of statistics in linguistics, which I have
but haven't read yet.  You can probably either check it out from the library
or buy one cheap from a local used bookstore, or online.

Mark Rosenfelder, who runs the Metaverse, also has some subsites that
deal with questions of linguistics mathematized.

<http://www.zompist.com>

> :-/  I recently discovered conlangs as a *wonderful*
> linguistics resource, not to mention I'm a sf/f writer (3 stories sold, 2
> published) who likes messing around with worldbuilding.
Have you been to the Language Construction Kit?

<http://www.zompist.com/kit.html>

It has a lot of information about basic linguistics for the beginning
conlanger, and is very approachable.  Richard Kennaway also has probably the
best inventory of conlangs on the net:

<http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html>

That'll show you what others have done.  (Note, my pages listed there
about Degaspregos are old, written when I was younger and stupider,
so pay them no heed)

> I'm learning all
> sorts of things by just lurking...wanted to listen in and figure out the
> etiquette of things before I posted.
Well, until this week I had assumed that politics was off-limits, but we
proved that wrong, I guess.  We handled it relatively well, I thought,
considering the intense acrimony that usually goes along with that.  The
only subject that is officially, and truly, off-limits is discussion of auxilliary
languages like Esperanto or Interlingua and such.  About a decade ago
or so, when the list was young, it was allowed, but it led to so much
pointless bickering based on preconceived ideas about what's good
and bad in languages that it was spun off as a separate list, and everything
else came here.

> Cheers, and good to hear from you.  Are you in Texas right now?  I ended
> up at Cornell U., Nowhere--er, Ithaca, NY.  :-p  Long story.
That's actually always been Alex's answer to that question...

Yes, I'm living in Texas -- in Austin until next May except for holidays.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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