28.1600, Incredible Parrot Speech Decoded As 300 Years Old English Dialect

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1600. Sat Apr 01 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.1600, Incredible Parrot Speech Decoded As 300 Years Old English Dialect

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Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2017 11:10:54
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Incredible Parrot Speech Decoded As 300 Years Old English Dialect

 Dear Linguists, Language-Knowers, and other Pirates, 

We at the LINGUIST List strive to provide you with the most up-to-date
information on the field. You are familiar with our listings of current and
upcoming conferences as well as open job searches and calls for papers. On
occasion, we report on other current events as they unfold. Today, we’ve
dedicated an entry in our blog to the discovery of an 17th century dialect of
English still alive, thanks to a flock of parrots!

Incredible Parrot Speech Decoded As 300 Years Old English Dialect

Puerto Lempira, Honduras —- Shrouded in mystery and dense rain forest, the
region known as La Mosquitia In SE H is one of the largest and least explored
wilderness areas in Central America. It adjoins the Caribbean Sea to the east;
its Caribbean shore constitutes part of the Mosquito Coast, which was
something of a pirate haven during the Golden Age of Caribbean Piracy in (the
17th and early 18th centuries). 

Recently, aerial surveys have revealed for the first time untouched ruins left
by a mysterious and yet unnamed civilization. The latest archeological team to
venture into La Mosquitia is a joint Honduran-American expedition led by Dr.
Rebecca Webb of Penrose University. Dr. Webb’s team is now excavating a site
that appears to have been a significant pre-Columbian urban center.  

La Mosquitia provides an ideal habitat for many species, including an
astonishing number of bird species and subsubspecies. One of these is the
Yellow-Naped Amazon parrot, which is renowned for its ability to mimic human
speech.

During the excavation’s third week, Dr. Webb noticed an intricately carved
chunk of stone protruding from the rain-forest floor. She thought it might be
a were-jaguar head and crouched down for a closer look it. Just then,
completely out of the blue, she heard a parrot’s squawky voice say, “Thee bist
a zon of a biscuit eater.” Or at least that’s how she transcribed it. 

“The voice certainly gave me a start,” she said. “I looked up and saw a
beautiful Yellow-Naped parrot perched on a branch not more than five meters
away. I immediately scratched down a quasi-phonetic transcription of the
vocalization, but I confess I didn’t understand what it meant. It did strike
as sounding like human speech, however, and I was pretty confident that it
ended with the words “of a biscuit eater”.

Read the full article on our blog:
http://blog.linguistlist.org/uncategorized/incredible-parrot-speech-decoded-as
-300-years-old-english-dialect/



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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-1600	
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