Folder: webmail-ic-2008-11-18/Voynich
From stolfi@ic.unicamp.br  Sun Mar 13 16:20:19 2005
Message-ID: <36214.143.106.23.232.1110741618.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 16:20:18 -0300 (BRT)
Subject: Re: [Piraha] Re: I'll swap you...
From: "Jorge Stolfi" <stolfi@ic.unicamp.br>
To: jguy@alphalink.com.au

FROM http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/27/101394/16.html

  [...]

  Everett also is writing a paper describing a heretofore undocumented
  grammatical sound that he heard in Brazil while working on his Wari
  grammar.

  In English, the sound is rendered as "tp~" and pronounced as the "t"
  consonant sound followed immediately by what linguists call a
  "bilabial trill," which sounds like a person releasing air between
  vibrating lips in imitation of a snorting horse -- or flatulence.

  "Phonetically, there are two sounds there but they are treated in
  the language as a single sound. That combination has never been
  treated as a single sound in any other documented language," Everett
  said.

  After hearing the sound for the first time from Wari speakers,
  Everett was stunned to hear it again weeks later from the Piraha
  tribesman who had been his main teacher of that language. "I have a
  videotape of this scene, and you can see the shock on my face when I
  heard it," Everett said, with a laugh. "I had never before heard
  this sound from the Piraha in the 17 years I had been working with
  them." Stranger still, Piraha and Wari are not related
  linguistically. Everett theorizes that the two languages share the
  "tp~" sound because, according to the Piraha, some Indians who spoke
  the now-extinct Tora language -- which is related to Wari --
  intermarried with the Piraha.

  Why, then, didn't the Piraha pronounce the "tp~" sound in Everett's
  presence until recently? Probably because it sounds funny to
  Westerners, Everett said.

  "These Indians tend to get made fun of when they use certain sounds
  that are funny-sounding to us, so they substitute other sounds in
  their place when they're talking to Westerners. This is a
  socio-linguistically interesting phenomenon in itself," he said.

  [...]

Tp~!!  As the Italians say, "se non è vero è bene trovato"... 8-)

All the best,

--stolfi