Re: WG: average word length in VMS

[Brian Eric Farnell <bfarnell@xxxxxxx>]

Dennis wrote:
>         My current plan.  I assume that the underlying
> language is medieval French and that the word divisions
> are in fact syllable breaks, because:
> 
> 1)  Spoken medieval and modern French do not have
> distinct word divisions,
> 
> 2)  If the "words" of Voynichese were in fact
> syllables, that would explain the average short "word"
> length; and

I really like the syllabic idea, too.  Before I found the
discussion of the Chinese theory, I also got that impression,
much to my embarrasment after I posted stuff that was already
discussed.  My problem with the syllabic idea is that we should
see more 1,2 and 3 letter tokens than expected, not less.  Of
course that might explain all of the 'ain' and 'aiin's if they
were nulls thrown in to obfuscate short syllables.  As far as
Chinese proper, there are alot more Voynich tokens than modern
Mandarin, I don't have the stats for other dialects, but I think
most of them are still too small.  I'd like to get a Romanized
sample of one of the Fukien dialects (if there is such a thing),
I think those show more promise than any other Chinese dialects
I am aware of.  The fact that they are pretty 'backwoods' may
mean they have a closer correspondence to old Chinese than
modern dialects, much in the same way that we find 12th century
English songs and words in the hills of Kentucky.
Regards,
Brian