Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

26/01/2005 11:07:07 PM, Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Could you expand on this a little? Do women have a different vocabulary 
>in Piraha, or do they replace the "men-only" consonant with a different 
>one?

No. I read that recently. What happens is that two consonants
of the men's speech are undifferentiated in the women's speech.

I just did a Google search and found far too many hits (Piraha,
from unknown just a few months ago, is now quite popular,
isn't it?)

But I also found this:

lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Info/staff/DE/pronborr.pdf 

which says: 

"Piraha has just eight consonants in the segmental inventory of 
men's speech, and seven in women's speech"

Eight and seven, not seven and six. Oh well...

I could not find which two consonants of men's speech had
merged into one in the women's.

I must say that I am starting to be a bit skeptical.

For instance, Piraha has only two numbers: "one" and
"more than one". The word for "one" also means "small"
and the word for "two" also means "big". Further,
they are both "hoi" differring only by the tone
(Piraha has two tones). If I remember correctly, 
"one, small" is "hoi" in the low tone, "two or more,
or big" is "hoi" in the high tone. 

Oh, granted, "nui" in the language of Easter Island
means both "big" and "many", but I am starting to smell
a hoax of Tasaday size (see:
"http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/webcourse/lost/Tasaday/Tasaday.htm";)
"One" and "many", "small" and "big" differing only by
the tone? Possible, of course, but on top of the rest...

When I did my PhD I was tempted to make up the language
which was the subject of my thesis. Since no-one but the
natives spoke it, it would have taken years for my
fraud to be discovered. But I thought that it was too
much effort. There are  documented cases when 
the natives pulled the leg of the linguists, and
anthropologists, on a grand scale. The best known
is Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa," unmasked 
by Derek Freeman 20 years ago. The natives had been
taking the mickey out of poor Margaret. In fact, 
Polynesians are adept at taking the mickey out of
outsiders.

I have also first-hand experience of a native trying to
take the mickey out of me in the Solomon Islands, and 
second-hand evidence of the natives taking the mickey 
out of William Thomson and, 30 years later, out of 
Katherine Routledge, on Easter Island.


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