Re: AW: Voynichese = Old/unknown/extinct kind of Chinese dialect

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [stolfi:] Come to think of it, properties (1-2) are quite
    > strange under any of the theories I know of. They seem to
    > suggest that the number and type of the gallows/benches is
    > irrelevant, only their presence/absence do matter. I.e., that
    > 
    >   okchedy = ochtedy = okeeedy = oshcfhedy = ...
    
    > [Brian Farnell:] that seems very similar to the way a tone mark
    > would behave. It seems to suggest that the gallows and tables
    > are not letters but some sort of symbol for something else, they
    > are their own class.
    
Perhaps...

    > Another possibility is that they are grammatical markers for
    > person and case. Along that line of thinking, if a list were
    > compiled of all words in a certain class like the gallows w/o
    > tables words, then removing all of the gallows characters from
    > the words should shorten the length of the unique word list by a
    > disproportionate amount. Potentially it might even shorten it by
    > a factor equal to the number of characters removed.

In fact more. Consider removing all "t"'s and "d"'s rom English words.
That not only merges "tip" with "dip", but also merges "at", "tad",
"dad", "add", etc. with "a".

--stolfi