Re: Introductions

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bruce Grant wrote:
> 
> >From time to time, list members have posted short self-introductions
> along the lines of this:
> 
> "Hello, I'm so-and-so, here's what I do, here's my take on the VMS
> etc.".
> 
> For new list readers or people like me who don't always keep up with the
> list, it might be really useful if proponents of various active theories
> about the VMS would post a similar short item explaining the basics of
> their hypothesis.

	I'm game.  I'm Dennis Stallings, with a BS in Chemical
Engineering, currently unemployed.  I have other
interests that turned me into a Voynichomane.  

	Dr. Jorge Stolfi said that a lot of us think that
Voynichese is a monosyllabic language with a complex
encoding.   I extend that to say that the underlying
language could be a familiar European one, written with
breaks between *syllables* rather than words.

  French is my favorite candidate.  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.

	About 80% of Voynichese words follow a two part
paradigm, like that of Robert Firth

http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich/firth/24.txt

Thus we can account for perhaps 280 Voynichese words. 
*But*  -- there are a total of 8300 words in the
Voynich directory!!!!  Dr. Stolfi has been formulating
various tripartite paradigms that might explain the
other 8000.  

	And that's where I stand ...

Dennis Stallings