Re: VMs: Two Questions

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday 22 Feb 2003 6:07 am, Jacques Guy wrote:
> 2/21/03 11:14:48 PM, Ronald Farneth asks hard questions,
> >Q1 - Has anybody labeled all the words on a particular page with the
> > number of times they have been used in the Ms?
>
> 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.

I used to think this too, but doing a symbol-correlation spectral analysis 
*without* spaces, yields a peak in the power spectrum at the same length as 
the modal token length. This also happens in English and Latin (yes, without 
spaces, so it seems that it may be possible to guess the modal token length 
in texts with spaces removed).

> 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.)

I wonder if it would be more efficient (i.e. easier) to look at the 
concordance of words that have high frequencies, since for the very low 
frequent ones one would be pushed a bit hard to make further assumptions?

> >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.

Not to mention that in Spanish there are 2 verbs "to be": 'ser' and 'estar' 
and the conjugation for each personal pronoun is different. :-(

Cheers,
Gabriel





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