Syllabics -- was Brute Force attack on VMS

[Dan Moonhawk Alford <dalford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm very interested in John's line of reasoning below, that perhaps we're
dealing with syllabic information, already vowel-less, being put into
Voynichese, thus obviating the need for it to be aloud-readable.

It inspired this lunacy: what if ... the syllabics being enciphered were
ancient Egyptian texts? The vowels would be predictable morphologically --
but they would be mostly triliterals, way easy to spot. Oh, well. I assume
anything Egyptian was ruled out long ago.

warm regards, moonhawk

dalford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<http://www.sunflower.com/~dewatson/alford.htm>

"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines!" 
                                                   -- Roy, Mystery Men



On Fri, 1 Sep 2000, John Grove wrote:

> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <mskala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: <voynich@xxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Thursday, August 31, 2000 10:30 PM
> Subject: Re: Brute Force attack on VMS
> >... This criterion is the reason I'm not convinced by claims of
> decipherments
> > that require the manuscript to be written in some natural language with
> > the vowels removed.  There the amount of information the decipherer must
> > add (by putting the vowels back in) is much too big a fraction of the
> > information content of the final product.
> >
> > Matthew Skala
> > mskala@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx              I'm recording the boycott industry!
> > http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/
> >
> 
>     While I agree that some claims of decipherment take too much leisure in
> deciding how to 'replace' the vowel content in a consonant only text, I'm
> not so sure you can toss the basic concept into the trash so easily.
> 
>     Some earlier claims have ignored word spacing, added several vowels when
> the author needed them to make a word work, conveniently chose alternate
> readings for a given letter (like r or s in EVA) to the one that could make
> a word, etc.  However, if a language is written in its natural state without
> vowels - and is enciphered with a simple substitution with the VMS odd
> character set, one doesn't have to 'add' vowels per se - unless you're a
> foreigner and want to pronounce the words with some degree of accuracy. Now,
> I can't say for sure that this line of thinking will ever result in
> anything, but I'm not ready to discard the possibility that a vowel-less
> (really vowel-limited) writing system is part of the underlying structure.
> 
>     In Arabic 'jumhuuriyya' is written with only 'jmhuria' - some vowels are
> present, but several are understood. The Arabic word for 'sentences' is
> 'jumal' written with only the three letters 'jml'. Recently, Jorge has
> ventured into the Turkic realm of languages as well - Turkish itself used
> the Arabic script, although unsuited for the language, for a number of
> centuries. I don't know enough about these (Turkic) languages to say
> absolutely that a consonant based writing system was used effectively to
> make recording information easily understood by a learned reader, but it
> seems to me that a few centuries of forced use of an Arabic script on a
> non-Arabic language leans toward the probability that a set of linguistic
> rules 'could' govern the use of this type of system on several other
> language families.
> 
>     John Grove
> 
> 
>