=========================================================================== SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES MAILING LIST (SEALANG-L) - CHARTER - Charter Version 4.0 October 5, 1994 ========================================================================== Welcome to the SEALANG-L Mailing List! DESCRIPTION ----------- SEALANG-L is an unmoderated mailing list and central electronic archive. It is maintained on listserver@nucleus.nectec.or.th at NECTEC (The National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, Bangkok, Thailand. SEALANG-L was established 06 Sep 1994 on the initiative of Trin Tantsetthi and Gwyn Williams . The list was initially proposed by Brian Migliazza . PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF DISCUSSION ------------------------------- The purpose of SEALANG-L is to provide an international scholarly forum and central archive for the discussion, documentation, and dissemination of information on the languages spoken in Southeast Asia. The languages spoken in this region belong to five major language families: Austronesian (AN); Mon-Khmer (Austro-Asiatic; AA, including Munda); Tai-Kadai (TK); Tibeto-Burman (TB; a branch of Sino-Tibetan ST); and Hmong-Mien (HM; also known as Miao-Yao). These are the core languages which form the Southeast Asian linguistic area. In addition to the core languages of Southeast Asia proper, SEALANG-L extends to all languages of the Sino-Tibetan language family, as well as all languages of the Austronesian language family, spoken in Vietnam and Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Java, and the Micronesian, Melanesian, Polynesian, and Madagascar regions. Languages of historical importance, particularly Pali and Sanskrit, and recently introduced European languages, such as English, are included in the discussion, to the extent they bear on the SEA situation. See the message by David Stampe on the suggested scope of SEALANG-L (APPENDIX 1). The scope of discussion includes formal features of these languages, as well as issues related to theory, research, history, relationship, sociolinguistic situation, language planning, and teaching. =========================================================================== SEALANG-L ARCHIVE ------------------ All postings to SEALANG-L are automatically archived. In addition, participants are invited to contribute files to the SEALANG-L Archive. Possible contributions include online bibliographic files, dictionaries, texts, scholarly papers, reports, and software. Archiving is not publication. It simply makes a document available for dissemination and review. Ownership remains with the author. Anyone, whether or not a subscribed member, can view and retrieve contributions to the mailing list in the SEALANG-L Archive which are accessible through NECTEC's ftp and gopher facilities. =========================================================================== NETIQUETTE GUIDELINES --------------------- Participants may join and leave the SEALANG-L mailing list at any time. All participants are expected to adhere to the purpose and scope of discussion and to maintain courteous and reasoned styles of communication. Those who do not will be advised and may be unsubscribed at the discretion of the List Owners. Subject headings should be clear and self-explanatory. For the convenience of all subscribers, please preface the subject with SEALANG-L or SEA, eg., "SEALANG-L: Whence Austro-Tai?" It will be useful to include your name, affiliation and e-mail address in the body of your message. Questions and queries for information should be brief and to the point. Discussion and debate is encouraged. Bear in mind that all contributions will be archived; if the response does not make a substantive contribution to the discussion or is of a personal nature, a private e-mail reply may be more appropriate. ================================================================= =========================================================================== LIST OWNERS ----------- Mr. Doug Cooper Mr. Trin Tantsetthi =========================================================================== APPENDICES ---------- 1) SCOPE OF SEALANG-L Date: Fri, 2 Sep 1994 10:48:40 -1000 From: David Stampe To: gwyn@ipied.tu.ac.th Subject: Re: Southeast Asian Language Interest Group A SEA group is certainly long overdue. I'm sure you'd have many subscribers from here, for Tai, Chinese, Chamic, and Austroasiatic. AA includes not just Mon-Khmer but also Munda, though the Munda languages are in India, because the half dozen active Munda scholars (myself, Patricia Donegan, and Stan Starosta at Hawaii, Norman and Arlene Zide in Chicago, and a couple in India and Japan) have Mon-Khmer interests but are too few to form a separate group. I think that a similar case can be made for extending Chinese to include all of Sino-Tibetan: there are too few Tibeto-Burman scholars to form a separate group, and they as well as Munda scholars have traditionally been included in SE Asian forums, e.g. the journal Linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan Area. The only difficult question is whether Chamic should be extended to include all of Austronesian, since there are so many Austronesian scholars whose interests do not center on SEA at all. However, one of the most active areas of scholarship just now seems to be the broader historical relationships of AN, e.g. there was a conference on this last year in Hawaii, and the prime candidates (except for Japanese [Paul Benedict in Florida] are SE Asian (Austroasiatic [Laurie Reid at Hawaii], Sino-Tibetan [Laurent Sagart in Paris]), and there is general agreement that the homeland of the ANs was in SE Asia. And since no one has come forward with a proposal for a Pacific linguistics group on the internet it would make sense at first to include AN at least to the extent that the discussion has SEA relevance. Australian, of course, does not seem to be relevant to SEA, and there seem to be ample facilities for discussion groups already at ANU etc. It would be useful to set up an archive of postings, and perhaps a gopher or ftp facility for accessing them, as well as for members to contribute files for archiving. For example, some people have good online bibliographic files, dictionaries, and texts (e.g. the Angkor Wat inscriptions in Old Khmer). And free software is being developed for SEA text processing, e.g. MULE, the free multilingual version of the Emacs editor, which runs under X windows (also free) on 386 and 486 PCs, unix workstations, etc., now can edit Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and IPA, in a single document, and since Emacs is programmable in LISP and therefore is capable to running various natural language processing programs, it would be nice to see this extended to other languages of the area, like Khmer, Burmese, Pali, etc. If you don't hear from them separately, I could find you the email addresses of a number of AA, AN, Tai, and ST scholars. Best of luck in getting this up and running. David =========================================================================== 2) SEALANG-L HISTORY SEALANG-L was the idea of Brian Migliazza (Thammasat University-SIL) with discussion with colleagues at Thammasat University and NECTEC. The first public call was: Date: Mon, 24 May 1993 13:59:09 -0500 From: The Linguist List Subject: 4.390 Qs: Spelling, Latin, Southeast Asian, Chinese ---------------------------------------------------------------------- LINGUIST List: Vol-4-390. Mon 24 May 1993. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines: 128 -------------------------Messages-------------------------------------- 3) Date: Thu, 20 May 1993 14:11:25 +0700 (GMT+0700) From: Brian Migliazza Subject: Southeast Asian Languages Interest Group I noticed in Comrie's list of computer bulletins for language interest groups that there were very few for Asia. The ones that were listed for Asia were only for North Asia, such as Chinese and Japanese. I wondered why there weren't interest groups for the many national languages of Southeast Asia as well as the many minority languages in this region. With the good attendance at the annual Sino-Tibetan Conferences, one would think that some language interest group would exist for Sino-Tibetan at least. Also the SEALS (Southeast Asian Linguistics Society) has been meeting annually for the past few years -- so this should potentially generate another source of people interested in SEA languages. Here in Thailand there are a number of Thai academics who study local languages -- and I imagine the same is true for the many linguists in other SEA countries. My question is: Is there anyone who would start a language interest group for SEA languages (Sino-Tibetan, Mon-Khmer [Austroasiatic], Austronesian)? Please let me know if there already are some email nets for these language families, or if anyone is interested. Brian Migliazza Thammasat University Bangkok, Thailand =========================================================================== Brian Migliazza subsequently discussed the group with Bernard Comrie and the group was entered in List of Lists, version 1.1. below: Date: Wed, 23 Jun 93 13:41:17 GMT From: Michael Everson Subject: List of Language Lists, version 1.1 Computer Bulletin Boards for Individual Languages Prepared by Bernard Comrie and Michael Everson Version 1.1 (13 May 1993) ..... Language(s): Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Mien-Yao; PL3551-PL4001, PL4111-PL4251, PL4281-PL4587, PL5021-PL6571, PL8801-PL8804 South East Asian Languages and Linguistics (NO NAME YET) Listserver: NONE YET For questions, contact: brian@ipied.tu.ac.th (Brian Migliazza) ======================================================================= The real impetus for the creation of SEALANG-L came with the offer to host the list at NECTEC, Bangkok: From: trin@nucleus.nectec.or.th (Trin Tantsetthi) Subject: SEAL-L Organization: Network Technology Lab, NECTEC, Bangkok, Thailand. Message-Id: <32v9li$8c9@senior.nectec.or.th> Date: 18 Aug 1994 09:29:22 GMT i found this in michael everson's list of language lists. i wonder if brian would like to pursue the idea. i can host this list from NECTEC mailing list server. [...] =========================================================================== This charter prepared by: Gwyn Williams and Trin Tantsetthi Thanks to Yuphaphan Hoonchamlong and David Stampe - END -