KMC & syllables

[Rene Zandbergen <rene@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:

> I'll assume that you have read my pages about the
> core-mantle-crust (KMC) word structure model,
> http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/00-06-07-word-grammar/

[...]

> However, I will be very surprised if any KMC-like structure is ever
> found in Latin or English words. 

Indeed! And that would be true, by analogy, for other Romance and
Germanic
lanugages as well, and I presume also for Slavionic languages.

> As far as I know, there is no letter that is
> constrained to occur at most once in each Latin word (and yet occurs
> on every other word!). More generally, there seems to be no
> tripartition of the alphabet into core, mantle, and crust subsets,
> with positions nested as specified by the KMC model.

But see below.

[...]

> I seem to recall that Sukhotin's algorithm applied to
> Voynichese produced only a few unconvincing results that led
> nowhere (probably echoes of the OKOKOKO model). Part of the
> problem may have been the multiletter Voynichese->EVA encoding

Jacques ran his tests using the Currier alphabet, IIRC, and while
O, A and 9 were identified as vowels, the confidence levels of 
these identifications were lower than for Latin.

> On the other hand, the KMC structure is not unlike the structure
> of single *syllables* in Latin and other natural languages.

Here are a few other options.
In various representations, numbers show this behaviour too.
Roman numbers (MCLXI) have a strong positional behaviour.
Greek numbers are perhaps even more interesting since there are
nine letters reserved for 1-9, nine for 10,20, ..., 90 and nine
for 100, 200, ... 900. To go higher, the letters for 1-9 are
reused, with some indication of the factor 1000 involved.
Zero is not needed in this system.
Greek astronomical tables used the hexagesimal system so numbers
1-59 would predominate.
Arabic used the same numbering style, while two different 
assignments of letters to numbers were used in parallel.

Also, Arabic words (i.e. not numbers) tend to have a three-character
root, and the shape of the letter depends on whether the letter 
is initial, medial or final. This is the most obvious  parallel to
the KMC structure I can think of.

[ snipping large parts of you-know-what... ]

> It is known that the Portuguese arrived in that region a few decades
> before landing in Macao (~1510), a date that could take some strain
> away from the chronology. Unfortunately I could not find any
> information about those early contacts.

The silk route connection should not be ignored either.

>  (According to one source, the pleiades are called "sMen-du's" in 
>  Tibetan. Can we match that to EVA <doaro>?)

But doaro (or doary) is not a _very_ typical Voynichese word
and fits the KMC model only with a stretch (unless I am mistaken,
please correct). Thus, it could be a 'foreign' word in whatever
language the MS is mainly written in.

Cheers, Rene