VMs: Re: Paradigms Regained

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 15 October 2002 5:20 am, Jacques Guy wrote:
> Dennis wrote:
> >Which brings us back to the theme I like to harp on.
> >Could
> >the Voynichese 'words' be syllables of a European
> >language like French, Italian, German, Croatian, etc.?
> >Why can't they be?  
>
> Well, I know French, I know Italian, I don't know
> German or Croatian, but I know Russian. And Spanish.
> And I say: "I can't see any evidence of it".

To my taste, there are too many different words, unless some of the words 
represent more than one syllable. Maybe some characters are syllables (like 
some abbreviations), but I would be surprised if all of them are.

I am not sure what would be the frequency distribution of syllables, but I 
think that there are too many 1-instance words=syllable in the vms.
If there is some algorithm to separate words in syllables, we could try this 
out in a few sample languages. It would be interesting to see what is the 
result.

Cheers,
Gabriel