Folder: webmail-ic-2008-11-18/Voynich
From stolfi@ic.unicamp.br  Sun Mar 13 16:08:15 2005
Message-ID: <36200.143.106.23.232.1110740894.squirrel@webmail.ic.unicamp.br>
In-Reply-To: <200503130400.j2D3xx7Y018654@pop2.alphalink.com.au>
References: <200503130400.j2D3xx7Y018654@pop2.alphalink.com.au>
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 16:08:14 -0300 (BRT)
Subject: Re: [Piraha] Re: I'll swap you...
From: "Jorge Stolfi" <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: jguy@alphalink.com.au

Hi Jacques, you write:

> I had a closer look at "Killing the Panther", this
> time ignoring the Piraha and the interlinear translations,
> only paying attention to the English.  ...

Yes, the book was quite disappointing in that respect: the longest sample
is just a couple of short sentences, and most of them read like phrases
from a language textbook. I just had a look at the "corpus" now available
over the internet, and it is not much better.

One would expect much better material from someone who had "almost 7 years"
of contact with the pirahã.

Frankly what disturbs me is that Everett seems to have remarkably little
empathy or intimacy with his informers.  I may have told you that I have
recently corresponded with John Koontz about an Omaha-Ponca corpus that he has been
editing.  The corpus was collected by two Americans in the late 19th century.
One of them was half-indian, but the other was a missionary turned Indian Bureau officer,
yet both were clearly working on a different level. That corpus has dozens of full-length
tales of mythology, tribal history, familiar events, etc.; the informers were
clearly communicating with the linguists as people talking to their equals, or almost.
Granted that the culture of the pirahã is much different, but I cannot believe
that such a talkative people (as they are described) would have so little to say.
I would rather believe that Everett was a bit short of a Margaret Mead or Levy-Strauss,
and could only communicate with them on a "stupid native to American tourist" sort of way...

By the way, I have typed in another couple of pages from the book, about the
pirahã phonetic system.

  http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/PUB/misc/misc/piraha-tones.txt

Typing that text was a good exercise (I had only skimmed through that part before).
Curiously the book says that pirahã was thought to have three tones, and Everett
proposed four; but the modern sites say "two contrastive tones".  (Indeed the book
gives no tone-contrasting pairs.)

Either way, do you count tones when counting phonemes, for Guinness-book purposes?

> I have also received an e-mail from a couple in
> North Carolina saying: here is a photo of a tablet
> we bought 20 years ago in Easter Island, is it
> worth anything? Ha, ha, another pitiful fake, I
> thought to myself. But when I looked at it...
> the writing had all the properties which I had
> spent months explaining in my article. Nothing
> like the fakes floating about.

Wow!

I presume that you are referring to your yet-unpublished article.
Is there a chance that a con artist would have seen your writings,
and used that info to make a "state-of-the-art" fake?

(Hmm... would that sort of thing count as a citation for academic
evaluation purposes? 8-)

> It would have rotted away long, long ago.

Why do you think so?  It all depends on climate, I guess.
Here in Brazil even bone disappears after a couple of centuries, but
if the tablet was taken to a dry climate (such as much of California)
and just kept away from the rain, it could easily last centuries.

> Just remind me of your snail-mail address.

Jorge Stolfi
Instituto de Computacão
Caixa Postal 6176
13084-971 Campinas, SP - BRASIL

All the best,

--stolfi