Folder: mail-procmail-2008-11-18/2007-02-20-160800-voynich From owner-vms-list@voynich.net Thu Jan 27 03:01:23 2005 Message-Id: <200501270453.j0R4rkm3022971@mail2.alphalink.com.au> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:53:48 +1000 To: vms-list@voynich.net From: Jacques Guy Subject: Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish 26/01/2005 11:07:07 PM, Bruce Grant wrote: > Could you expand on this a little? Do women have a different vocabulary > in Piraha, or do they replace the "men-only" consonant with a different > one? No. I read that recently. What happens is that two consonants of the men's speech are undifferentiated in the women's speech. I just did a Google search and found far too many hits (Piraha, from unknown just a few months ago, is now quite popular, isn't it?) But I also found this: lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Info/staff/DE/pronborr.pdf which says: "Piraha has just eight consonants in the segmental inventory of men's speech, and seven in women's speech" Eight and seven, not seven and six. Oh well... I could not find which two consonants of men's speech had merged into one in the women's. I must say that I am starting to be a bit skeptical. For instance, Piraha has only two numbers: "one" and "more than one". The word for "one" also means "small" and the word for "two" also means "big". Further, they are both "hoi" differring only by the tone (Piraha has two tones). If I remember correctly, "one, small" is "hoi" in the low tone, "two or more, or big" is "hoi" in the high tone. Oh, granted, "nui" in the language of Easter Island means both "big" and "many", but I am starting to smell a hoax of Tasaday size (see: "http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/webcourse/lost/Tasaday/Tasaday.htm") "One" and "many", "small" and "big" differing only by the tone? Possible, of course, but on top of the rest... When I did my PhD I was tempted to make up the language which was the subject of my thesis. Since no-one but the natives spoke it, it would have taken years for my fraud to be discovered. But I thought that it was too much effort. There are documented cases when the natives pulled the leg of the linguists, and anthropologists, on a grand scale. The best known is Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa," unmasked by Derek Freeman 20 years ago. The natives had been taking the mickey out of poor Margaret. In fact, Polynesians are adept at taking the mickey out of outsiders. I have also first-hand experience of a native trying to take the mickey out of me in the Solomon Islands, and second-hand evidence of the natives taking the mickey out of William Thomson and, 30 years later, out of Katherine Routledge, on Easter Island.