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