Re: Specialty words

["John Grove" <4groves@xxxxxxxxx>]

    I like to think that I'm non-biased and open to all venues of attack on
the VMS, but the more I focus on what appears to be 'key elements' to me,
the more I lean toward an Arabic type of language...
1. Letter shapes change according to position in a word/syllable - so that
'o,a, and y' could be the same character. Sometimes a character you might
expect at the beginning (o) is instead replaced by (y) - because in reality
the letter is followed by a glottal stop or specific vowel. [The down side
to this - the overall character set is reduced unless minor changes in the
writing are significant rather than minor.] We find the same characters
(iin) almost always in word final position. [Yes, it could be that the
spaces aren't real boundaries but caused by the style of this character].
2. Doubling, as I've discussed before, and as Bruce mentions below - It is
possible that the 'double' marker isn't written - thus adding to the
confusion. dain might actually be daain sometimes in reality.[Any consonant
only system that 'solves' the VMS should be able to withstand criticism if
the occurrence of double letters falls within one word - For example if I
made dain equivalent to {d=b in word initial, medial positions, a = t in
medial position, and in= r in word final position, I could create the words
"bitter, butter, or biter"
3. Even though this text is obviously written left to right [it could be
mirrored], I am convinced that the centered text following a paragraph or
page is a title for the preceding text, and this possibly indicates that the
text should be read from the bottom to top of a page [Wild assumption -
yes].

    Well so much for not being biased!
I think [IF] the script represents a natural language that it is either:
1. - A Consonant script akin to Arabic (not Ukrainian, sorry)
2. - A Syllabic script with an inherent vowel (to reduce the amount of
variations) akin to Brahmi script
3. - An Alphabetic script that we've unfortunately reduced to too small a
set of actual characters because letters that look the same - really are
significantly different.

I suppose Jorge's Chinese could fit in NR. 2 above 8-), but I'm leaning
toward NR. 1 - although - I'm still very open minded about what the
underlying language is!

    John

----- Original Message -----
From: Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <voynich@xxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2000 1:13 AM
Subject: Re: Specialty words


> Maybe the language suppresses double letters, as Spanish appears to do
compared
> to French.
>
> Or, maybe it's Arabic, and they neglected to write in the superscript
characters
> (shaddas) to indicate doubling. (My copy of "Teach Yourself Arabic"
indicates
> that the shaddas are not always there in present-day printed matter.)
>
> Bruce Grant
>