Hebrew poetry is complex in the ways it uses semantic parallelism and rhythm, and in its terseness. Hawaii Pidgin, which is the vehicle for a subculture of substantial size, has complexities that are different from those of Hebrew, in the ways in which it handles semantic parallelism, versification, sequencing of sentence and discourse elements, anaphora, phrasal lexemes, proverbial sayings, and metaphor. Nevertheless, adequate translation is possible. 1

Estimates of the number of first language speakers are available for most of the languages of the Pacific. Taken together, these reveal a pattern of size distribution that may relate to the inability of some languages to survive. The pattern is close to the log normal distribution, which characteristically results from multiple growth processes in which growth rate is independent of size. When language size distributions are compared to the theoretical curve, however, the smaller languages deviate from the expected size at rates that show two points of maximum change. The higher appears to relate to potential endangerment and the lower to critical endangerment. Linguists are concerned, as they should be, about evidence that many languages in the Pacific and around the world are becoming extinct (Hale et al. I992). This paper attempts to firm up the empirical base beneath that concern. Conventional wisdom has it that the smallest languages are the least likely to survive. This turns out to be more true in the mass than in the details: some small languages hang on despite modernization and national education, and a few larger languages go out of business. Furthermore, the population size that is large enough to suggest a low risk of endangerment varies from one part of the world to another; in the Pacific, for example, groups with populations of 500 or more stand a distinctly better chance of survival than do smaller groups, whereas in Africa the prospects for a group of that size surviving are less positive.2 Population distribution patterns can be recognized that seem to go along loosely with extinction or survival. The patterns suggest indirect conclusions; they are not based on historical analysis of actual extinctions, because the available sources focus on languages as living entities, and register extinctions only in the spotty cases where they are known. We have no idea how many or how few languages have already disappeared in the Pacific, even in this century, let alone before much was known about language diversity.3 The twelfth edition of the Ethnologue (B. F. Grimes 1992) contains estimates of the number of first language speakers for 5,404 of the 6,528 languages catalogued for the world, or 83%.4 Except for some very small groups, the numbers are estimates, not counts. Some are overestimated and some are

Previous articleNext article No AccessNotes and ReviewsBilingual Dictionaries for Indigenous Languages. Doris A. Bartholemew , Louise C. Schoenhals Joseph E. GrimesJoseph E. Grimes Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 52, Number 4Oct., 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/466034 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1986 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The program Grimes describes in this little book represents both a significant departure from, and contribution to, the traditional approach to computer-assisted morphological analysis. The traditional approach, exemplified in programs such as those described in Koskenniemi (1983) and Wolfart & Pardo (1979), tests a user-supplied morphological analysis against a set of word-forms. The PARADIGM program is concerned with a different aspect of morphological analysis. The user supplies a list of segmented word-forms, with morphemes separated by blanks or dashes (the output from either of the previously mentioned programs could be used), and the program produces output from which the user can deduce both relative affix positions (the slots the morphemes occupy) and various types of cooccurrence restrictions. Unlike the s temming of lemmatizat ion programs, the PARADIGM program does not test or apply a preexistent morphological analysis, but rather performs some limited analytic functions. The program proceeds through three distinct stages of analysis:

Previous articleNext article No AccessTopic Inflection in Mapudungun VerbsJoseph E. GrimesJoseph E. Grimes Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 51, Number 2Apr., 1985 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/465864 Views: 13Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: , Journal of Language Contact 7, no.22 ( 2014): 345.https://doi.org/10.1163/19552629-00702005Ana Fernández Garay Entre el sustantivo y el verbo, LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas 6, no.11 (Mar 2012): 61–75.https://doi.org/10.20396/liames.v6i1.1446 Lucía A. Golluscio Morphological Causatives and Split Intransitivity in Mapudungun Cysouw, International Journal of American Linguistics 73, no.22 (Jul 2015): 209–238.https://doi.org/10.1086/519058Willem F. H. Adelaar, Pieter C. Muysken The Languages of the Andes, 42 (Sep 2009).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486852Bruce Mannheim, Krista Van Vleet The Dialogics of Southern Quechua Narrative, American Anthropologist 100, no.22 (Jun 1998): 326–346.https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1998.100.2.326Ray Fabri The inverse morphology of Plains Cree (Algonquian), (Jan 1996): 17–41.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-3716-6_2M.H. Klaiman Inverse languages, Lingua 88, no.3-43-4 (Dec 1992): 227–261.https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(92)90043-I

A computational vehicle for lexicography was designed to keep to the constraints of meaning-text theory: sets of lexical correlates, limits on the form of definitions, and argument relations similar to lexical-functional grammar.Relational data bases look like a natural framework for this. But linguists operate with a non-normalized view. Mappings between semantic actants and grammatical relations do not fit actant fields uniquely. Lexical correlates and examples are polyvalent, hence denormalized.Cross referencing routines help the lexicographer work toward a closure state in which every term of a definition traces back to zero level terms defined extralinguistically or circularly. Dummy entries produced from defining terms ensure no trace is overlooked. Values of lexical correlates lead to other word senses. Cross references for glosses produce an indexed unilingual dictionary, the start of a fully bilingual one.To assist field work a small structured editor for a systematically denormalized data base was implemented in PTP under RT-11; Mumps would now be easier to implement on small machines. It allowed fields to be repeated and nonatomic strings included, and produced cross reference entries. It served for a monograph on a language of Mexico and for student projects from Africa and Asia.1

Interim field reports on the phonologies of previously undescribed languages can be tested for consistency using synthesis-by-rule techniques. Such a report on Mura-Piraha of Brazil provided information for the feature rule component of Hertz's Cornell Speech Research System. Values for the parameter rules came from spectrograms made from a tape recorded in the field containing the examples in the report. Both sets of rules were revised to improve the match between the synthesized speech and the recordings. Out of this revision came recommendations about changes to the phonological description that the investigator can follow up on his next opportunity to do field work. In the current absence of such opportunity, two groups of linguists attempted to transcribe the forms phonetically. One had special orientation to Mura-Piraha phonology and the other had only general phonetic background. Both confusion matrices are given.