Re: VMs: Re: RE: Re: Information lost!

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1/11/2004 1:55:43 PM, "Ger" <ger.hungerink@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Marke wrote:
>
>> There may be a lot of doubled words (~300), but there are even more
>> wordpairs where the difference is only one "character" (~1900), and
>> this is too many to be explained solely by the similarity of VMs
>> words.
...
>If however it shows that these constraints are not sufficient to force that 
>many near equals, we will have to look for an explanation. More rules, or 
>something concealed in the language itself.


beruwag-beruwag
brakbak-brokok
brakbak-brukbuk
bruak-bruak
brut-prut
cah-cah
cecek
clagcag-cligcig
cagcag-cigcig
crakcak-crekcek

There are five more pages of those, in the chapter 
on language in a two-volume book on Bali. Those
were onomatopoeia, but the use of onomotapoeia
is extremely common. (Colloquial Japanese also
makes considerable use of onomatopoeia).


Many words which do not seem  to be onomatopoeic 
by any stretch of imagination still
display such alliterative patterns, e.g. 
gotong-royong "community work".

Then you have word pairs of apparently related 
meanings which also display alliterations.
Two examples:

batu "stone"
patung "statue"

merah "red"
marah "angry"

Finally, you have grammar, which leads to absurd-
looking repetitions. My favourite: mahasiswa-mahasiswa,
mahasiswi-mahasiswi ("étudiants, étudiantes" as you 
would start a speech). So there is nothing surprising.

We just had elections here. I was silly: I should have
kept the multilingual pamphlet on how to vote. One
paragraph was in East Timorese (an Austronesian
language related to Javanese, Indonesian, etc.).
It looked like absolute gibberish, even more so than
the examples I gave above. Most of us here haven't been 
exposed to languages that behave like that... apart
from Voynichese, that is. Nothing to write home about,
really.


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