Re: VMs: Line and paragraph as structural unit (Noise or data ?)

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> >Which brings us back to
> >the phenomenon of
> >the line and paragraph as a structural unit. It was Currier who noticed
> >this, but neither he nor
> >anyone since has explained why this should be so.
>
> I cannot explain why this should be so, but I can explain how
> this could be so (I actually might have some years ago. The
> disheartening thing about the VMs is that, whatever new ideas
> I have come up with lately, I have found already in the archives
> long ago, often suggested by myself: I had just forgotten).


We have indeed discussed this before, to my mind inconclusively.
Whenever any one feature of Voynichese is mentioned, somebody is sure
to point to a type of natural language which displays a similar feature. The
problem is that the several explanations given never
amount to a consistent overall story. Thus:

Voynichese has low entropy.
"It must have a restricted set of phonemes like Hawaiian."

Many words have the same initial sequence and a different ending.
"Voynichese must have inflectional morphology like Russian."

Many words have the same final sequence and a different initial.
"Voynichese must have initial mutations like Welsh."

Many words have the same initial and final sequence but are different 
medially.
"Voynichese must have vocalic ablaut like Arabic."

The EVA vowels <o> <e> <ee> <a> <y> commonly occur in that order in a word.
"Voynichese must have vowel harmony like Finnish."

Certain characters are restricted to the final position in a line.
"Voynichese must have external sandhi like Sanskrit."

The same word frequently occurs twice and thrice in succession.
"Voynichese must have repeated plurals like Malay."

Certain words seldom occur initially or finally in a line.
"Voynichese must have a strict word order like Japanese."

Short words are more common towards the end of the line.
"Voynichese must have sentence final particles like Chinese."

Certain combinations of characters are rare.
"Voynichese must have positional restrictions on phonemic contrast like 
German."


It has always rather surprised me that Jacques Guy thinks that
Voynichese is a natural language, but he knows far more languages
and far more about linguistics than I do. Can he give even tentative
answers to questions like these:

Can Voynichese be identified as an SVO, SOV or VSO language?

Is Voynichese isolating, inflectional or agglutinative? Can a single
Voynichese word represent a sequence of two morphemes? Can a sequence
of two Voynichese words represent a single morpheme?

Is it possible to identify syntactic categories? E.g. do the one-word
star labels behave like members of the same substitution class when
they occur in continuous text?

How many phonemes does the Voynichese language possess?

Do the EVA characters <a> <e> <o> <y> in fact represent vowels? If so,
are they the only Voynichese vowels? Does Voynichese display vowel
harmony?

Do characters with a similar appearance represent phonemes with a
common feature? E.g. would you expect the gallows characters to be
various kinds of labial, various kinds of fricative or something like
that?

Is the Voynichese orthography systematically defective in the manner
of the Semitic scripts?

Does the Voynichese script involve the systematic use of allographs
like Latin capital letters?

I have never seen a plausible story of Voynichese as a natural language
and until I do, I prefer to think that the MS represents an encipherment of 
a well known language.

Philip Neal

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