Twintalk

April 13, 2004 6:14 PM

Idioglossia, cryptophasia, the (in the best cases) autonomous language of twins: Twintalk. Does anyone know of any recorded twin languages with translation? A case-study with a, well... Twintalk-to-English Dictionary is what I guess I'm looking for.

I can't find anything on the Internet, so I'll probably have to resort to (*gasp*) the library. So far my best hope is this:

Spaka: A privative language.
Diehl, Randy L. & Kolodzey, Katherine F. 1981.

...which describes sisters Katherine and Sarah Kolodzey and the language they call Spaka, "which incorporates a surprisingly large set of non-English syntactic and phonological rules."*

Any other good bets?

posted by Shane to Writing & Language (2 answers total)

There is a chapter of Oliver Sacks' "man who mistook his wife for a hat" that deals with this phenomenon. Other than his main mathematically communicating twins, he also mentions Liosha and Yura as examples of twins manufacturing language.
No samples though.
posted by milovoo at 8:37 PM on April 13, 2004

Response by poster: Thanks, as always, milovoo.
posted by Shane at 6:49 AM on April 14, 2004