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Re: VMs: The Manuscript



3/7/03 1:03:34 AM, Ronald Farneth <mallzone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Now, let me take a flight of fancy and postulate that some little green man 
>dropped his field notes getting into his saucer and that the basis of his 
>"language" was similar to bird chirps or whale wailings?  That would screw 
>up all of those frequency counts and entropys, wouldnt it?  It also 
>wouldn't follow any patterns of terrestrial languages!

Ho ho ho ho! 'Tis the season to be jolly! We've been through
all that during the past 14 years. Sometimes I think of things
which I believe are new... only to find them in the archives.

I am sure that I wrote back then about the "fairie" theory which
Donald Laycock and I dreamt up one night of boozing and poker-
playing. The VMs is a fairies' book written in fairy language.
I'll spare the reasons we found to back up our theory. Neither
of us believed in it!

But there is more wonder in our earthly languages than you
can imagine. My pet harping is that you will find everything
and anything you thought was impossible, if you look for it
in Papua-New Guinea. (But I have it only second-hand. Laycock
was the expert. I was into Austronesian, which are pretty
run-of-the-mill boringly easy languages) My contention is:
there must have been as much language variety in Europe
(not so very long ago) as there still is now in Papua-New 
Guinea. Just think of Etruscan and Basque.



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