Re: Another language candidate for the VMS

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

RSRICHMOND@xxxxxxx wrote:

> This is a strange story, its facts somewhat in dispute. Thomas McElwain,
> about 50 years old, at least a few years ago was the ONLY known speaker of
> this obscure Iroquoian language, whose speakers supposedly hid out in the
> West Virginia hills after the Civil War....
> 
> An Algonkianist I know (who did his Ph.D. studies with the legendary Mary
> Haas) who has some competence in Iroquoian (the language groups are not
> related to each other, though they are geographically adjacent) has told me
> that he believes that this whole story may be a fabrication.

I must confess that the same suspicion occurred immediately to, 
seeing that I got the reference from alt.language.artificial.

Also, when I was sent in 1977 to chase up a dying language
called Laghu in the Solomon Islands, I was first directed
to an informant by the name of Gudu, who turned out to
be a first-class bullshit artist. My suspicion became
certainty when, two days apart, he gave me different
words -- different by only one phoneme -- but such 
common words as "head" and "four".Laghu cleary being
Austronesian and seemingly a mixture of Kokota and
Zabana, it made no sense. Eventually I found an 80-year
old informant, whom I knew to be honest, because,
every other word, he'd tell me "Sorry, I don't remember".

Nevertheless, we have here _yet_ an interesting problem
to solve.

1. Is Mingo a fabrication?
2. How do we tackle the problem?
   a) Who is the bullshit artist (if there is one)?
      The informant, or the linguist?
   b) What evidence do we have?

It is abominably familiar, because, for my PhD, I
was sent to analyse an unknown language of Vanuatu.
It was not even known whether it was Papuan or
Austronesian. My supervisor's reaction to the first
sample I sent of it was "it's Papuan." No, it turn
out to be perfectly good Austronesian, without any
Papuan mixed. Since no-one knew about the language,
I was strongly tempted to invent it from scratch.
Then I thought "it's too much trouble, too much
work."

The description of Mingo on that web site is
hideously obscure (but I have seen much worse
from my head of department, Prof. Stephen
Worm). The only answer I can think of is:
from the corpus of texts  available, do I smell
a rat? I am not overly worried about the lack
of labials -- archaic Basque lacked /m/ -- I
am not worried about three vowel lengths or
more (I have read somewhere that Estonian had
three). And about the lack of labials, did I
mention in  this list that 

1. There is a tribe in Indonesia (forgot which)
   where children are raised by their grandmothers
   who chew betel all day long. When they speak,
   they tuck their betel quid between their
   lower lip and teeth, so that they cannot
   pronounce bilabials.  They replace them with
   velar.

2. My wife used to have a personal language,
   some of it total fabrications (akakwa =
   cake, shita = bucket, akakunga = my hat), 
   but some clearly French in disguise (nana~
   yanin = "maman Jeannine", tete kane~ =
   "pépé câlin", shetakonsha = "c'est pas
   comme ça). Have you noticed? No bilabials,
   every French bilabial replaced by a dental!

This Mingo sends us back to the original puzzle:
is Voynichese a natural language, an invented
language, or just gibberish? 

For Mingo, the problem might be easier. Presumably,
it is algonquian. Comparative phonology ought to
help tell.  Compare it with other Algonquian
languages, with Proto-Algonquian as reconstructed,
see if it makes sense. If it makes sense, it is
highly likely that the informant did not make it
up. Remains the possibility that the linguist
made it up! Alas, for Voynichese... c'est une autre
paire de manches.