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Vadi: Difference between revisions
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Vadi is an extinct language once spoken in Minhay. A small parchment fragment was discovered in April 1963 in a cave outside of Peħħat, a small township in Sakkeb Prefecture. More fragments were discovered in subsequent years in the vicinity of the cave, named Aħħur, where the first texts were discovered. Finally, in the late 90's, the wonderfully preserved Kalapái Scriptum were discovered in an isolated hut approximately ten kilometres north of Peħħat. These texts were dated to the mid to late 1800's CE. The Kalapái Scriptum is a collection of letters between two farmers, Éro and Sorvin, who were embroiled in an ongoing feud regarding the property lines between their lands. The letters were written in Vadi intermixed with words from the unrelated [[Peshpeg]] and [[Minhast]] languages. A few letters were written entirely in the the extinct Minhast Knife Speaker dialect. Also found among the letters are legal papers drawn from the Prefect of Dog Speaker Country. The farmers' letters contained several texts clearly indicating code-switching between Vadi and the Knife Speaker dialect. The portions containing the intermixed Knife Speaker and Peshpeg words were used to decipher the Vadi texts. The Dog Speaker papers did not contribute directly to the decipherment of the language, but as an external source it provided a great deal of context of the nature of the feud between the litigants. This external contextual source clarified the translation of otherwise ambiguous passages. The Kalapái Scriptum is thus popularly referred to as the "Minhast Rosetta Stone". | Vadi is an extinct language once spoken in Minhay. A small parchment fragment was discovered in April 1963 in a cave outside of Peħħat, a small township in Sakkeb Prefecture. More fragments were discovered in subsequent years in the vicinity of the cave, named Aħħur, where the first texts were discovered. Finally, in the late 90's, the wonderfully preserved Kalapái Scriptum were discovered in an isolated hut approximately ten kilometres north of Peħħat. These texts were dated to the mid to late 1800's CE. The Kalapái Scriptum is a collection of letters between two farmers, Éro and Sorvin, who were embroiled in an ongoing feud regarding the property lines between their lands. The letters were written in Vadi intermixed with words from the unrelated [[Peshpeg]] and [[Minhast]] languages. A few letters were written entirely in the the extinct Minhast Knife Speaker dialect. Also found among the letters are legal papers drawn from the Prefect of Dog Speaker Country. The farmers' letters contained several texts clearly indicating code-switching between Vadi and the Knife Speaker dialect. The portions containing the intermixed Knife Speaker and Peshpeg words were used to decipher the Vadi texts. The Dog Speaker papers did not contribute directly to the decipherment of the language, but as an external source it provided a great deal of context of the nature of the feud between the litigants. This external contextual source clarified the translation of otherwise ambiguous passages. The Kalapái Scriptum is thus popularly referred to as the "Minhast Rosetta Stone". | ||
Today, two linguists, | Today, two linguists, Dr. Iyyaħmi min Ruššur of the University of Aškuan, and [[Minhast/Dialectology#The_Tashunka_Model| Dr. Napayshni Tashunka]] of the University of the Lakota Nation at Three Pipes, are the two major figures in the Vadi language. A third Vadist, Dr. J.F. Schumann of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid<sup>1</sup>, was originally the pre-eminent Vadist scholar, but Iyyaħmi and Tashunka eventually displaced him. | ||
Iyyaħmi, inspired by earlier work by Tashunka, led to his discoveries of previously unknown mutations and other sandhi processes in Vadi. He developed a new romanization scheme of Vadi which showed underlying sandhi processes that were represented by the litigants' unorthodox use of the indigenous Minhast ''Širkattarnaft'' script. | |||
Tashunka incorporated Iyyaħmi discoveries, and created an alternate orthography focused on the actual phonetic realization <u>after</u> sandhi processes were applied. Tashunka's system has become very popular among Vadists, and now the prevailing practice is to present Tashunka's and Iyyaħmi's transcription side by side, the first for its simplicity and focus on the final phonetic realization in a format familiar to many linguists who utilize the Americanist system, and the latter for illustrating underlying mutation and other sandhi processes. | |||
This article presents both Tashunka and Iyyaħmi's analyses, and to a lesser extent, Schumann's as his findings are from older material. | |||
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