Re: VMs: Two Questions

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

2/21/03 11:14:48 PM, Ronald Farneth asks hard questions,
yes, seriously.

>Q1 - Has anybody labeled all the words on a particular page with the number 
>of times they have been used in the Ms?

As far as I know, no. What you really want is a concordance, and that
is easy to produce. But we all disagree about what constitutes a word
in Voynichese. For instance, I hold that spaces are not necessarily
word breaks anymore than they are in Arabic or in Thai. So what is
needed is a character concordance. The VMS being roughly 240kB long,
that means 240,000 pointers. That is only 4*240k = 960kB, but the
sorting will take a while. A pox on thee, thou blackguard, you have
tempted me into doing it! (I did produce a concordance of the corpus
of Easter Island hieroglyphs not very long ago, so the work is half
done. I would have to resist temptation far beyond my weak will,
undermined as it is by my devouring curiosity.)


>Q2 - Would the frequency of mandatory words such as the verb "to be" and 
>it's variants be approximately equal from language to language?

The verb "to be" is far from mandatory, viz Russian "je suis francais" =
"ya -- frantsuz". And that was an Indo-European language. If you go
outside Indo-European languages, "to be" can be pretty thin on the
ground. Even other words, which we take for granted. For instance, 
"and" just does not exist in the Polynesian language spoken on Easter 
Island. Even within Europe, if we knew more about those extinct languages
such as Northern Iberian, Etruscan, Pictish... who knows?


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