Throne Ormament from The Miracle of St. James Hampton, by Mike Walsh
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Phonemic English

       The author did typical single-letter and digraph frequency counts on a small (~855 char's) corpus of Hamptonese.  Since the number of vowels and consonants point to phonemic English, he tried to solve it as such.

        Hamptonese has a large set of "stroke" characters, characters organized around a stroke like /  .  The author noticed that almost all the characters identified by the Sukhotin algorithm as vowels are not stroke characters.  Therefore, the author redesignated all stroke characters as vowels.  There are no word spaces in Hamptonese. 

        The author prepared a 4500 character corpus of phonetic English, using text from: 

   By distinguishing lower- and upper-case letters, the author used BITRANS TO make a one phoneme per letter version of a text in "Fanetiks".   u is the schwa, vowels in lower case are lax and vowels in upper case are tense.  A is a as in "hat".  D is dh, thus "the" -> "Du".  The rest should be fairly clear.

   The change was made in two steps, with the BITRANS script ftk2st1.txt used to change the Fanetik units of multiple Roman letters into a one character per phoneme notation.  The second BITRANS script st12st2.txt changed the previous notation into one using only upper- and lower- case Roman letters. 

   Note that BITRANS scripts are in the MS-DOS character set and will not appear accurately in the ISO character used on Web pages.

   The  resulting phonemic English corpus and statistics:

   From examination of the single-letter frequencies and digram frequencies of Hamptonese and phonemic English, the author wrote the following BITRANS script which changes transcribed Hamptonese to fit the statistics of the phonemic English corpus.     This table shows how the substitutions were made:
 
Symbol Character Vowel/
Consonant		 Phonemic 
English
Substitution		 Pronunciation
v v vowel u
y1 or y2 y consonant n
p p consonant t
i i vowel a
r r consonant r
l l vowel i
n n vowel e
k k vowel A
d d consonant s
u u consonant D
f f consonant I
c c consonant d
h h consonant l
w w vowel E
z z consonant k
s s consonant z
x x consonant w
e e vowel o
o o vowel O
g g vowel U
j j ? *
m m consonant m
T T consonant y
U U consonant p
q q vowel ay
D D consonant b
Y Y consonant v
a a vowel Y
J J ? *
b b ? *
t t consonant f

   The results were disappointing.  Here is the overall converted Hamptonese text:


   Here is the result for page 92 (text only)::  

otunEununu
nAnArAniI
ArnnunUonua
onanutunununu
tunununnArnwa
kAnturaonua
kaIwrnunua
wnuDununura
Untuitunuru
rtufkatinu
tuwrDutunu
tinuDwaena
wenianiniDi
nuweueuDnini
naekaIwAia
erkawrunu
erkaIIkaylm
tuDltunununu
ntituernwui
ninaIwnnwwu
wnntunununuI
Enrnueernununa
neEEtEtuDuEti
lktunioenunt
mlnunueruEi
lssstuDIsusu


   Especially interesting is the comparison between the two tables of the Ten Commandments, on pages p9 and p10:  

page p10               page p9                     
---------------------  --------------  Bible    
J-num  line  text      line  text      Citation     
-----  ----  --------  ----  --------  --------------
---  top   viD       top   viD(?)     

  I   2    kUlh      2L    kUvh       
 II   3    wphDv     3L    wphxv      
III   4    Thrjv     ---   ------     
 IV   5    Tfvyv     4L    fvyv       
  V   6    Thpvdo    5L    khpv{?}do  
 VI   7    Tkwddv    6L    cdddv{?}    I no other gods      
VII   8    Twwkvp    7L    wwkpv      II no graven images    
VIII  9    Tnrrrvp   8L    cnrrrvp   III no name of God in vain
 IX  10    chpkp     9L    whpkp      IV remember the Sabbath 
---  ---   -----     10L   fvyv        V honor father & mother

  X  11    wsodnp    2R    ksodny{?}p 
 XI  12    kjgvhs    3R    udvhs      
XII  13    uJhos     4R    khos       
XIII 14    Tjvso     5R    jvso       
XIV  15    Tmolv     6R    molv       VI no murder      
 XV  16    Tyygosv   7R    yyd{?}osv  VII no adultery    
XVI  17    Tnvgv     8R    Dvgv       VIII no stealing    
XVII 18    Tgyonv    9R    KgcoYv     IX no false witness
XVIII 19   kgyol     10R   Ugccol      X no coveting  
XIX  20    khDvp     bot   UhDvp      

---- 21    viD       ---   ---          
   Although there are clearly the same "words" at corresponding positions in the tables, they are not at all recognizable as English. If Hamptonese were a straightforward phonemic English script, we would have seen recognizable English.  This would have been like solving a newspaper cryptogram.  Since this has failed, the author sees two possible further hypotheses, which we shall discuss on the pages Gullah and Idiolect  . 

 
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