Piraha (Re: VMs: Welsh/Cornish)

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

27/01/2005 8:12:36 PM, Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I can't attest to Piraha personally, but Daniel Everett has certainly been
>been getting away with it since 1979.
>
>His original U of Pittsburgh web site:
>
>http://web.archive.org/web/20001206044500/amazonling.linguist.pitt.edu/

I don't know what to think of it. In the "word form inventory index"
I saw this:

áhwÉso

but neither w nor É (whatever that stands for) are
in the phonemic inventory (which gives 8 consonants,
BTW). There are many more cases of such "phonemes"
that are not in the phonemic inventory.



Since there is no phonological description
beyond that list of 8 consonants and 3 vowels, 
there is no way of figuring out what that w and
that É are.

In the pages on personal pronouns having been
borrowed from Guarani I see:

/ti/  [töI]
/gi/  [nI]

So /i/ is sometimes pronounced [I] (in /gi/) and
sometimes [öI] (in /ti/). Possible, but is it
freely alternating, or is the alternation 
conditioned by the environment? Same question
about /g/ being pronounced [n] in /gi/.
If they are freely alternating you should
expect [tI] and [töI] occurring indifferently,
ditto [nI] and [nöI] for /gi/. If they 
are environment-conditioned, let's have the
rules, because I cannot figure them out at
all (polite way of saying: they do not make
any sense to me).

Or are they all typos?

>His current academic site:

>http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/DEHome.html

I did not see much there, just a text in pdf which 
I downloaded "Killing the Panther", and the word for
"panther" is "kopaíyai". But there is no "y" in the
phonemic inventory, so what is it really? Is the
text written phonetically? If so, why isn't
"ti" (me) written like in the article on the
borrowed pronouns, i.e. töi?  So it must be
written phonemically... so I expect "kopaíiai".

Sentence #12 I see ka?áowí "basket". Again, 
where does that "w" come from? There is no "w"
in the phonemic inventory, and no "u" either.
The only three vowels are a, i, o.

Sentence #16 "panther" is "kopaíai". Makes more
sense to me. So the "y" was epenthetic, so 
would be the w of ka?áowí "basket", and 
ka?áowí should be properly spelt ka?áoí.

Sentence #17 I see two occurrences of ?iowi "there"
so, logically, that has to be /?ioi/

Sentence #35, two occurrences of  ?aowi "stranger"
which must be a _phonetic_ spelling for /?aoi/
and one new word -kwí, which does not make sense,
and yet does not appear to be a typo, because it
occurs in the next sentence again.

Look at the first two sentences now.

The translation of the first sentence does not
fit the Piraha text: "koái", parsed as "k-o-á-i"
"undergoer -die -move -into", is left
untranslated. But in the next sentence, where
"koái" is translated, it is parsed as 
"k-o-ái" i.e. "undergoer-die-do".

The next occurrence of -ái as "do" is in sentence
#11, but the tone is wrong: "ai" instead of "ái".
Now look at what comes next: "koaí" (note the
high tone on the i instead of on the a), parsed
as: "k-oaí" = "undergoer-die". Either this
text is riddled with typos, or Everett could
not figure out the language at all, or...
take your pick.



Which has taken us a long, long way from the VMS...

 


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