17.741 an interesting survey

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk)
Date: Fri May 07 2004 - 17:03:01 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 741.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                       www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                            www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                         Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu

             Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2004 08:34:48 +0000
             From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
             Subject: Fwd: perception of Germanic languages

    Dear colleagues:

    I forward this because, although the objective has nothing whatever to do
    with humanities computing, the means toward it does. I suppose that members
    of the Linguist List would be able to say how common such an effort at data
    collection is nowadays -- that would be interesting to hear about. This
    particular one strikes me as quite well designed.

    Gone are the days, I suppose, when a dialectologist tramped around through
    village after village, heavy tape-recorder in the rucksack, asking people
    he encountered to listen and react or to speak his sentences into a
    microphone. Or are they?

    [I use the masculine singular pronoun because I am thinking of a particular
    individual, a PhD candidate from Heidelberg, who taught me advanced
    German. He was the only one, in all the years I studied this language, who
    insisted we learn how to speak the language properly. He forced us all to say,
    "Im Sueden war die Linie bereits zurueckgedraengt worden", again and again
    and again until he was satisfied. And he played us the tape-recorded sentences,
    most of which were to my ears totally incomprehensible. What a treat!]

    Yours,
    WM

    >From: "W.J. Heeringa" <W.J.Heeringa@let.rug.nl>
    >Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 11:59:23 +0100
    >
    >Dear Mr/Mrs,
    >As part of a course at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) we
    >developed a website intended for investigation of language perception. On
    >the website 11 recordings of different languages and dialects can be
    >heared, and the visitor is asked to rate the distance of the varieties
    >with respect
    >to his of her mother tongue.
    >To complete our project we need many different people with different
    >native languages to visit our website and do the experiment. We would like
    >to ask you to participate in this experiment or to send this mail to
    >students at your university so that these students can participate. The
    >experiment is for scientific use only and will not be used for other
    purposes.
    >The experiment and more information about the experiment, can be found on
    >our website:
    >http://www.let.rug.nl/perception
    >We thank you for your participation,
    >On behalf of the project team,
    >Jelmar Evenhuis
    >Wilbert Heeringa
    >University of Groningen / Faculty of Arts / Humanities Computing

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    Dr Willard McCarty | Senior Lecturer | Centre for Computing in the
    Humanities | King's College London | Strand | London WC2R 2LS || +44 (0)20
    7848-2784 fax: -2980 || willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk
    www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/wlm/



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