Re: D!

[bfarnell@xxxxxxx]

Dennis wrote:

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

I concur.  Without having read any reference to it before, I was
absolutely stunned one day after several weeks of pondering when it
jumped out at me that it was so incredibly like Chinese, and I have
quite a bit of knowledge of Chinese to base that on.  However, after
looking through some of the details, it seems less and less likely.  The
fact that I and someone else (was Jaques Guy the originator?)
independantly were so struck with the similarities tends to suggest that
the reasons for drawing the conclusions are likely to be  valid, even if
the conclusion is not and so it should be generalized to syllable
theory, or perhaps less generally to 'syllabic language' theory.  I
still consider Chinese as a possible solution, however the conclusions
that I drew from that were very disheartening.  I didn't study it in
detail, but the cursory comparisons I made to Chinese dialects seemed to
indicate that it was likely one of the dialects of the Fujian region. 
This was based on a casual examination of the number of tones (with
gallows as tone markers) and the requirement for a large number of
options for finals.  These dialects are very difficult, and there is
little reference material for them.  They exhibit not only very
complicated tone sandhi, but also a very complicated sandhi with
initials based on the previous finals.  Since the author did not write
the book in characters, it seems very likely that he transliterated the
sounds of the words instead of their basic representation.  This would
make it very hard to extract the data.  On top of that, when I took
Chinese in the military, one of our teachers recieved calls from various
universities and military people to answer questions, because she had
one of the only Fujian-English dictionaries around, and the one she had
was printed in 1910!  I think we would need one of the better Chinese
linguistics experts in China to work on a 500 year old Fujian dialect.
My final thought on the Chinese hypothesis was that it was like looking
for a dropped key under a lamp post at night...there's no point in
looking in the non-lit areas, you not have dropped it in the lit area,
but it is the only place where you have a chance to find it.
Regards,
Brian