VMs: pidgins

[William Edmondson <w.h.edmondson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Re pidgin

knoxmix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Maybe this has been exhausted on the list in the past but I will 
> bring it up again anyway. What could account for the binomial 
> distribution of vocabulary words as shown by Jorge Stolfi? 
>
> http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-12-21-word-length-distr/
>
> I think this is an acid test for any scheme that someone might 
> devise. Does it show that the Currier transcription is pretty close 
> to the mark or is it a function of the transcription? I ran a check 
> on a long section, almost 8000 tokens, of an unmodified EVA 
> transcription that I have been working with and it showed almost 
> identical results. It will  be interesting to see whether this holds 
> with shorter sections and if not, where and how it breaks. Does it 
> vary from one section to another?  Is it consistent with a real 
> vocabulary in the writing about certain subjects or with any known 
> specific cipher? Who would have such a vocabulary? Could (the) 
> elimination of certain (sometimes) unessential parts of speech or 
> letters explain it? (Shorthand, Nick?) Pidgin? Maybe there was a 
> European Pidgin that became obsolete. 

There was - it was called Lingua Franca.  Mediterranean, possibly the 
right sort of period for VMs.  Pidgins have interesting properties in 
relation to grammar (restricted) but suffer from having rather 
restricted lexicons - as they depend upon travellers/traders for their 
creation/maintenance (they seem to crop up predominantly in maritime 
locations).  Problematically for historians of language they tend not to 
be writen down (their purpose is to permit/facilitate verbally 
transacted business/intercourse) and this will, in the context of VMs, 
permit almost endless creative speculation as folk have a shot at 
constructing putative pidgins to fit.  When they become creoles they 
become grammaticalised and intergenerational transmission can set in. 
But then they are not pidgins any more.

Have a look at Hugo Schuchardt's essay on Lingua Franca - 1909 - in the 
book on pidgins and creoles edited/translated by Glenn Gilbert.  And 
there are many other books about pidgins and creoles, look for authors 
like Bickerton, DeCamp, Hymes, Mühlhäusler.

One useful statistical test might be to take some transcribed pidgin and 
analyse it for token frequencies etc.  I'd suspect the entropy would be 
very high as grammatical morphology would be largely absent, removing 
suffixation (which is what one thinks one sees in the VMs).

Cheers

William

> Ciao ......... Knox
>
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--
Dr William H Edmondson
School of Computer Science
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston B15 2TT
United Kingdom

Voice  -  +44-121-414-4763
email  -  w.h.edmondson@xxxxxxxxxx



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