Latest on Hamptonese

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

     I fear I'm becoming a crank with my work on
Hamptonese.  Once again, here's my website.

http://www2.micro-net.com/~ixohoxi/hampton/hampton.htm

	 Lynda Hartigan, the Smithsonian lady who handles
Hampton issues, said that most people believe that
Hamptonese is either written glossalalia or something
belonging to a tradition of Afro-American "spirit
writing", which sounds like vaguely meaningful symbols
that may be produced in a trance state and are not
standardized.  

	I recall Moonhawk's saying that there is no such thing
as written glossalalia.  As for the other, here's a
site on African writing systems (quite interesting in
their own right!):

http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/List_of_Scripts.html

	Here there are some genuine African syllabaries,
somewhat in the spirit of Sequoyah's Cherokee
syllabary, but I don't think that's "spirit writing" . 
Also, "Nsibidi is a writing system of the Ejagham
people of Nigeria. It is seen on tombstones, secret
society buildings, costumes, ritual fans, headdresses,
textiles, and in gestures, body and ground painting." 
This is an ideographic system, probably not "spirit
writing" either. 

	I have an article with a bibliography on Afro-American
spirit writing but haven't yet read any items. In any
case I decided upon a cryptographic attack.  

	I did typical single-letter and digraph frequency
counts on a small (~855 char's) corpus of Hamptonese. 
Since the number of vowels and consonants point to
phonetic English, I tried to solve it as such. 

	Hamptonese has a large set of "stroke" characters,
characters organized around a stroke like /  .  I
noticed that almost all the characters identified by
the Sukhotin algorithm as vowels are *not* stroke
characters.  Therefore, I redesignated all stroke
characters as vowels.  There are no word spaces in
Hamptonese.  

	I prepared a 4500-char corpus of phonetic English.  I
used text from the Fanetiks site:

http://hometown.aol.com/Fanetiks

	By distinguishing lower- and upper-case letters, I
made a one phoneme per letter BITRANS conversion.  u is
the schwa, vowels in lower case are lax and vowels in
upper case are tense.  A is a as in "hat".  D is dh,
thus "the" -> "Du".  The rest should be fairly clear.  

	I tried to solve it as a simple substitution cipher by
making Hamptonese fit the single-letter and digraph
frequencies of the phonetic English corpus.  Below are
some examples from my first try.  All I see is a lot of
repetitious mumbo-jumbo. Hampton repeated the syllables
"nuh" and "tuh" a lot, but even if you pull those out
as nulls, it's still mumbo-jumbo, with h1-h2 ~= 1.2. 
(The text below has strings of more than one "nuh"
reduced to a single "nuh".)  There may be a word game,
but I haven't yet seen it.  If anyone sees more, please
tell me!!!


Dennis

----------------------------------------------------------------------

	Page 92 (text only):

otunEununu
nAnArAniI
ArnnunUonua
onanutunununu
tunununnArnwa
kAnturaonua
kaIwrnunua
wnuDununura
Untuitunuru
rtufkatinu
tuwrDutunu
tinuDwaena
wenianiniDi
nuweueuDnini
naekaIwAia
erkawrunu
erkaIIkaylm
tuDltunununu
ntituernwui
ninaIwnnwwu
wnntunununuI
Enrnueernununa
neEEtEtuDuEti
lktunioenunt
mlnunueruEi
lssstuDIsusu

     Here are corresponding positions on two tables of
the 10 Commandments:

<p10:2>  Apil                         <p9:2>  Apul
<p10:11> EzOset                       <p9:2> 
AzOsen{?}t 
<p10:3>  Etlbu                        <p9:3>  Etlwu 
<p10:12> AxUulz                       <p9:3>  Dsulz
<p10:5>  yIunu                        <p9:4>  Iunu 
<p10:13> D*lOz                        <p9:4>  AlOz 
<p10:6>  yltusO                       <p9:5> 
Altu{?}sO  
<p10:14> yxuzO                        <p9:5>  xuzO
<p10:7>  yAEssu                       <p9:6> 
dsssu{unclear} {[I]   no other gods }
<p10:15> ymOiu                        <p9:6> 
mOiu           {[VI]  no murder} 
<p10:8>  yEEAut                       <p9:7> 
EEAtu          {[II]  no graven image} 
<p10:16> ynnUOzu                      <p9:7> 
nns{?}Ozu      {[VII] no adultery}  
<p10:9>  yer{3 r's}ut                 <p9:8> 
der{3!}ut      {[III] not God's name in vain} 
<p10:17> yeuUu                        <p9:8> 
buUu           {[VIII]don't steal} 
<p10:10> dltAt                        <p9:9> 
EltAt          {[IV]  remember the Sabbath} 
<p10:18> yUuOeu                       <p9:9> 
KUdOvu         {[IX]  no false witness} 
<p10:11> EzOset                       <p9:10>
Iunu           {[V]   honor father & mother}
<p10:19> AUnOi                        <p9:10>
pUddOi         {[X]   don't covet }    

	The BITRANS script is attached.  Vowels and consonants
are in descending frequency for each group.

{(comment)} {(comment)}
<(comment)> <(comment)>
(comment) vowels
v   u
i   a
l   i
n   e
k   A
f   I
w   E
e   o
o   O
g   U
q   ay
a   Y
b   *
J   *
(comment) consonants
y   n
p   t
r   r
d   s
u   D
c   d
h   l
z   k
s   z
x   w
j   x
m   m
T   y
U   p
D   b
Y   v
t   f