Folder: mail-procmail-2008-11-18/2007-02-20-160800-voynich
From owner-vms-list@voynich.net  Sat Jul 15 08:02:05 2006
Message-ID: <001301c6a7fc$20d0a660$0e698848@D674ZD61>
From: "mjmurphy" <4mjmu@rogers.com>
To: <vms-list@voynich.net>
References: <200607150209.AA382927470@mail.asus.net> <op.tcp1vgp4typ5yo@system>
Subject: Re: VMs: Kircher, Piraha
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 06:47:54 -0400

Mr. Guy wrote:

> I am sure that Piraha is a hoax perpetrated upon a gullible linguist,
> Everett, by an Amazonian tribe. He has been at it for 20 years or more
> and only a handful of bilingual texts have been published. I found most
> on the Net, and they do not make any sense at all. If Piraha does exist
> then Everett cannot speak it (nor understand it), as his interlinear
> translations show it abundantly. And those two words: hoi and hoí.
> The first means "one" or "small", the second means "two" or "many" or
> "big". Pull the other one. And they differ only by the tone of the
> second syllable! What a joke.

Just very briefly, Everett is considered competent in his field and he is 
not the only linguist to have noted the peculiarities of the Piraha 
language.  The features he ascribes to the Piraha language and culture have, 
in ones or twos (the primitive number system, the extreme concentration on 
concrete experience), been noted in other "primitive" languages.  The notion 
of a hoax in this case is not particularly plausible.  Everett does make 
some (I think) overstated claims with respect to the language (with respect 
to, for example, quantification and the lack of Piraha color terms), but he 
is also aware of some of the short-comings of his arguments and has worked 
to make his views more nuanced over the years.

So I think Mr. Guys views are very much in the minority in this case.

Cheers,

M.J. Murphy