Re: D!

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Rafal T. Prinke" wrote:
> 
> The range of possible languages (assuming it is not an
> artificial language) covers all European and Near Eastern
> languages, I believe, plus perhaps Asiatic ones (the Chinese
> theory has been discussed at length).

	I think we should generalize the Chinese theory to the
syllable theory - that Voynichese "words" are in fact
syllables of the underlying language.  

> The minimum range of highest probability should IMHO include:
> 
> - Latin (also bad, corrupted, uneducated Latin)
> - Italian (and related dialects)

	Why Italian if not Spanish and Portuguese?  Italian is
one of my candidates, though.

> - Hungarian (tough!)

	Been there, don't think so.

> - Turkish (and those of other Turkic peoples)
> - Arabic

	Been there too.

> - Caucasian (Georgian, Armenian - some vague similarity of VMS script?)

	Been there also.  We have much more plausible
precedents for the script, many of which you display on
your website.

> I think that the following may safely be excluded (in the first
> iteration, at least):
> 
> - French, Spanish, Portugeese

	French is my favorite.  French words are not clearly
marked out in speech, since there's little, if any,
stress or pitch accent in a French word.  Poetry in
French does not count on stress (English) or length
(ancient Greek) but on the number of syllables per
line.  The "alexandrine" verse, the equivalent of the
heroic couplet in English, is a rhyming couplet with 11
syllables per line.  Finally, Louis XIV's "royal
cipher", which was never cracked in his lifetime, the
record of which was lost, and which was finally broken
by the great late-19th-century crippie Étienne
Bazeries, had multiple substitutions for, not words,
but *syllables* (the cipher elements were numbers with
three digits, so probably only some syllables had
multiple choices).  All this makes medieval French (but
not Old French) words more likely to be broken up into
syllables.

> - Basque

	Ah, Basque.  The following site is always worth a
visit.

http://www.islandnet.com/~edonon/

> - Finnish, Latvian, Lithuanian

	Not a lot heard of.  As I recall, Lithuanian is the
closest language existing to original Indo-European. 
Maybe the underlying language is PIE.  Could we get
funding for that? ;-)

> No doubt others have different lists <g>.

	As you can plainly see!

Dennis