4.1232 Rs: Gender; Knowbots; MSS; Tops (4/69)

Elaine Brennan & Allen Renear (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Thu, 11 Apr 91 21:05:30 EDT

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 4, No. 1232. Thursday, 11 Apr 1991.


(1) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 16:11:31 -0400 (19 lines)
From: dgd@cs.bu.edu (David Durand)
Subject: 4.1226 Gender (3/67)

(2) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 14:06:40 EDT (33 lines)
From: Jan Eveleth <EVELETH@YALEVM>
Subject: Knowbot

(3) Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 09:02:58 PDT (8 lines)
From: cbf@athena.BERKELEY.EDU (Charles Faulhaber)
Subject: Huntington catalog

(4) Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 11:48 PDT (9 lines)
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: Re: 4.1213 ... Tops

(1) --------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 16:11:31 -0400
From: dgd@cs.bu.edu
Subject: 4.1226 Gender (3/67)

Linguists generally use the term gender to refer to a disjoint set
of inflectionally distinct noun classes where agreement is required
(usually noun/verb and noun/adjective) there are usually some
semantic correlates to these classes but they are usually approximate,
and distinctions of size, and animacy are frequently expressed as well
as "sexual" gender. My memory is that animacy is as or more common
than sex as a gender distinction, but I could not vouch for it.

Swahili for example has 10 distinct genders of noun (identified by
prefixes) whcih agree with the verb in subject object and indirect
object positions (that's 1000 forms before you even get to test,
aspect, et. al.). Disclaimer: I don't know swahili, but it's a classic
linguist-training excercise, as it's a nifty and regular agglutinative
verb system.

(2) --------------------------------------------------------------39----
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 14:06:40 EDT
From: Jan Eveleth <EVELETH@YALEVM>
Subject: Knowbot


"What is Knowbot?"

The Corp. for National Research Initiative in Reston, Virginia is interested in
mechanisms for searching diverse resources located on a network. Dr. Peter
Binder of NRI spoke recently at a NERComp meeting on Network Services at
Trinity College in Hartford, CT and he explained that Knowbot is a general
querying service. The idea is to send in one query and let the service track
down the resources and pose the query in the appropriate form. The Knowbot
Information System (KIS) that has been described in earlier Humanist postings
is NRI's current project for testing this network searching service by using
white pages directories available on the Internet. You submit your query to
Knowbot and it then searches the various (8? 10?) network directories by
issuing the correct commands for those systems. You only deal with one
interface and one connection to get the results of queries that have been posed
to several resources.

It sounds as though NRI is interested in developing this service in the
context of a high-speed network and for use with multimedia resources,
among others.

So, while Knowbot is in fact a first-step project for NRI, most Internet users
know it as a useful name directory searching service. Again, Knowbot can be
reached by telnetting nri.reston.va.us port 185 *or* sol.bucknell.edu
port 185.

--Jan Eveleth
Yale University
eveleth@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu

(3) --------------------------------------------------------------27----
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 09:02:58 PDT
From: cbf@athena.BERKELEY.EDU (Charles Faulhaber)
Subject: Huntington catalog

There is a recent catalog of the medieval MSS in
the Huntington Library by C. M. (Consuelo) Dutschke: Guide to the
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library. San
Marino, CA, 1989 (LC shelf mark: Z6621.H527 H46 1989). Charles
Faulhaber UC Berkeley

(4) --------------------------------------------------------------12----
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 11:48 PDT
From: KESSLER <IME9JFK@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: Re: 4.1213 Qs: Specialization; Tops; Giradeaux; Words (4/138)

For Elli@BrownVM: I have a memory ghost that tells me there was sometime over t
he past ten years an article about tops in the Scientific American. Try their i
ndex to find out about whipping tops. My ghost suggests to me that the article
began with the same quotation you cite! Or am I a Beckett character dreaming it
all? Kessler (IME9JFK@UCLAMVS)