Re: VMs: Enochian rambles

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Barbara Barrett wrote:
> 
> 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".

	What synchronicity!  I was just thinking that
something of the sort could be the basis of
Hamptonese.  

> 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.

	If you look for a (normally written) plaintext, it's
hard.  But if you look for phonemic plaintext, it's no
different from any other simple substitution.  I did
just this for Hamptonese - which showed that Hamptonese
isn't "just" phonemic English.  

	Of course, it could be a more complex system of
substitution.  It could depend on the surrounding
phonemes, which in principle would make it a
polygraphic cipher, and word games that insert nonsense
phonemes, equivalent to nulls.

	I wonder.  If one had the corpus of Helene Smith's
"Martian", with little context, translation and only
the fact that the creator's mother tongue was French as
spoken in Geneva, could you decipher it?  My impression
is you could.  

	Can anyone point us to studies of the idiolects that
identical twins have created?  That is another
interesting point of comparison. 

> 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?

	This is sort of what Levitov did.  He reduced
Voynichese to a very basic pidgin medieval Dutch, with
a vocabulary of around 40 words.  

> 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.

	I'd think the entropies would be low.  Pidgins are
very reductionistic. In Voynichese 250 "words" may make
up 80% of the text - but ~8000 make up the rest.  It
does have some words differing only by a letter or
two.  If all these are really syntactic words and not
just orthographic variations, it couldn't be a
pidgin.   

Dennis
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