VMs: Re: Paradigms Regained

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dennis wrote

> 	I must be dense.  Could you be more specific? E.g.,
> French, Italian, etc. syllables don't have the
> paradigmatic nature of Voynichese words, don't have the
> relative small number of endings that lead one to think
> of Chinese, have too many/too few open syllables, or
> something I can't think of?

I think it can be shown very simply that Voynich 'words'
are not transliterated words or syllables of French, German
or Latin. Consider what letters can occur initially and
finally in words of those languages and which ones can be
doubled.

French

initial		abcdefghijlmnopqrstuvxz
final		acdefgilmnoprstuxz
double		elmnprst

German

initial		abdefghijlmnopqrstuvwz
final		bdefghlmnprstuz
double		abeglmnoprst

Latin

initial		abcdefghijlmnopqrstuvx
final		abcdeilmnorstux
double		bcdfgilmnprstu


In all three of these languages, more or less any letter which
can occur finally in a word can also occur initially and many
letters commonly occur as double letters. Furthermore, the
letters which occur as doubles are also common initially.

In Voynichese, only c and (if it is an independent letter) i
occur as double letters at all frequently. i is never initial
and c seldom initial. Furthermore, Voynichese (a)in and (a)iin
are almost exclusively found in final position and never occur
initially.

There are other patterns in Voynich 'words' which have no
parallel in these three languages. For instance only a minority
of Voynich characters ever occur twice in the same word, and
most characters have a strong preference for a fixed position in
a word relative to other characters (e.g. where a word contains
both c and k, the c almost always comes between the k and the
end of the word).

French, German and Latin are my strongest foreign languages, but
I have never noticed the Voynich patterns in languages like
Italian which I know less well.

Philip Neal



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