Re: About Turkish

[Mark Perakh <perakh@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I doubt the following will add much to the discussion, but it would not
harm, so here it is.  When I tried to apply some simple tricks to VMS
one thing I did was to compare the frequency of letters in Vms
separately for alleged consonants and vowels (how I guessed which was
cons and which vow, using LSC, was described in my article on my web)
with those in a number of languages. I obtained only gibberish with one
exception. When I applied that trick to Czech, I got one word which
seemed to be meaningful.  It means either "flower" or "ticket" depending
on the alternative interperation of one of the letters.  Regarding
articles, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Belorussian have no articles
(and do well without them).  Hebrew has only the definite article (which
is just one letter which is always written together with the word,
although pronounced as a syllable) but no indefinite one. Its use is not
exactly the same way as English "the," but more or less similar.
Regarding Turkish, while I don't speak it, many years ago I studied some
Uzbek which is very close to Turkish. Its grammar is very simple and it
was very easy to learn (at least on some rudimentary level) as compared
with any other language I ever tried. It has no articles. Mark

Rene Zandbergen wrote:
> 
> 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