Vadi: Difference between revisions

Vadi is an extinct language once spoken in Minhay.  The language was discovered when a small parchment fragment was found 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 from 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]], [[Ín_Duári | Ín Duári]], 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".