Re: About Turkish

[Zandbergen@xxxxxxxxxxx (Rene Zandbergen)]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:

> Following up on the "vowel harmony" guess, here are some glimpses of
> Turkish grammar (from an elementary textbook I borrowed from my
> almost-linguist son).

[...]

>   There no definite article. 

If Voynichese is a language that has articles, they are attached
to the words (as in Arabic), unless Voynichese is a highly verbose
encrytion of a language. Czech doesn't use articles (at least in
the official language), so by gross extrapolation I'm assuming
that this is true for more (most/all?) Slavionic languages of
the late middle ages. Most Romance and Germanic languages do
use articles (except of course Latin).

>   This sumamry is over-hyper-simplified, and may contains all sorts
>   of errors.

But, it is also worth mentioning that Turkish is one of the most
regular languages in the world. There are hardly any exceptions
to the grammatical rules, if at all (!) (This actually is the only
bit I knew about Turkish until this post came around :-) )

>   Note that Turks used the Arabic alphabet until the 1920's or so.

I can see how Turkish written in an Arabic script might share
a number of statistical oddities with Voynichese. My guess
from the above is that Turkish would have a tendency to form
long words. These would be split up by the orthographic breaks
caused by the script.

An unanswerable question is, of course, whether one should expect
that if someone 'invented' a new script for (in this case)
Turkish, he would stick to the same orthographic breaks.
I would say that the answer is yes if the VMs writer couldn't
actually understand the input text he was copying/converting.

What is missing in this model (Voynichese as a result of 
Turkish written in an Arabic script) is the tendency of 
Voynichese words to follow strict patterns.
For this I can see one other explanation: Voynichese as a
result of numbers written in the Arabic script.

For a moment I thought that the recent discussion about the
50% probability of having a gallows character in a word was
a confirmation of this, but it doesn't really fit.
Stolfi suggested that the gallows could be part
of 'low-bit' information (which of course is not the same as
saying that Voynichese is a binary code!). 
I'm still lacking a good explanation for the occurrence of
the character sequence 'ed' (in Eva) which only starts 
appearing little by little in the astro section, to become
regular in the B language part. This could be a 'high-bit'
piece of information (e.g. numbers over 1000).

But this would be a very unusual scheme,  since this low-bit
and high-bit information is not really found at the extremes
of the words.....

Cheers, Rene