VMs: Enochian rambles

["Barbara Barrett" <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barbara babbles;

This may be of interest.

A few years ago Enochian was dissected on the CONLANG list, the general
conclusion of the linguists there was that Enochian (language) was mutated
English and that if one memorized the rules of mutation it was possible to
"translate" an English thought into an Enochian phrase on the fly.

Oddly enough, the alien language of the TV series "Alien Nation",
Tenctonese, was based on the same idea. (EG IIRC; Tenctonese; police
/poeleess/ = "melissia" from;
p = m, oe = eh, l = l, ee = ih, ss = s, + "ia" = plural noun suffix.
I don't remember the Enochian examples alas.

The debate really was about weather or not "languages" of this type were
really languages or phonetic ciphers (part example above; Tenctonese swaps
bilabials, Enochian swaps labio-dentals with labials)  or "word games" (like
Pig-Latin): IE did they qualify as "conlangs" or "auxlangs" (Constructed
Languages - like Sindarin, or Auxillary Languages like Esperanto) or even
"artlangs" (which covers everything from Solmiso to Klingon)?

The general opinion was that they were more sophisticated than word games,
but not as complete as a conlang or auxlang, and fell between the two, and
yet didn't have enough originality to even qualify as an
"art-lang".

It was agreed that as a "quick and dirty" way to make a new/alien
"language" that was convincing to the ears it was a very effective
shortcut. Personally I call these languages "distlangs" (from
DISTorted LANGuage).

There's even a program for making this kind of language;
>The best automatic generator is LangMaker: www.langmaker.com/langmake .
This >works with windows 3.1, 95, and 98 I know to my knowledge, probably
with others. >You can input a phonology, and a lexicon, and get translations
of up to 3000 words in >a single minute.<

I wonder if this can be used in reverse at all?

I note that cryptographic substitution ciphers generally swap *letters*,
whereas
Enochian and Tenctonese swapped *phonemes* (with the occasional phoneme
brought in from outside English (IIRC Enochian used /x/ and Tenctonese used
/!/), then fiddled with syntax and affixes in a minor way (the main grammar
staying the same IIRC).

As the substitution is phoneme rather than letter based,
adding the syntax tweaking, I don't think cryptographic methods
would crack these. After all the substitution was based upon loosely
"phonemic" rules which would largely depend upon the ear of the originator,
whereas cryptographic substitution follows patterns based upon alphabetic
order. Even with poly alphabetic ciphers, the alphabetic order is retained,
In phonemic transposition the order is by comparison random.

Phonemic substitutions are obvious when written phonetically (say with the
IPA) but difficult to recognize in written romansization,  and completely
obscured when written in an invented script. hmmmmmm.

A thought occurs to me that if one created a distlang with a very limited
vocabulary one would end up with a high degree of repetition and relatively
short words in the majority - kind of like a pidgin such as Won Tok (One
Talk) as used in New Guinea. Could Voynichese be a Distlang of this type?

Has anyone ever thought to do statistical comparisons between Voynichese and
pidgins/creoles? What would the relative entropy be I wonder?
As there are newspapers in pidgins/creoles that reduce French, German,
English, and even Chinese then getting a body of text in them shouldn't be
too hard.

Anyway, that's enough mindwandering fun for today ;-)

Barbara










______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list