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

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

5/24/03 6:07:05 PM, "Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>It has always rather surprised me that Jacques Guy thinks that
>Voynichese is a natural language

You wouldn't believe what some natural languages do, and I know
only about a pitifully small sample.

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

I do not know how to answer this question. Rather: I cannot
see any evidence for or against. There is a fourth possibility:
Voynichese is a free word-order language, like Latin, like
Kupapunyu (Australia), like Laghu (Solomon Islands), like Finnish
(as I was told by a Finnish correspondant).

>Is Voynichese isolating, inflectional or agglutinative?

Some Chinese dialects, which are isolating, have extensive
external sandhi. Sanskrit, which is inflectional, has internal
and external sandhi (the term, at any rate, is a Sanskrit word.
It was coined when philologists discovered Sanskrit). Korean,
which is agglutinative, also has extensive internal and external
sandhi. I suspect that Voynichese is also affected by sandhi, 
external sandhi at least (I won't go into the reasons here, 
they're in the archives). The "Chinese theory", which I 
originally did not believe in, but which I could not reject,
in the light of Jorge Stolfi's statistical evidence, makes me
think that Voynichese is perhaps an isolating language.

> Can a single
>Voynichese word represent a sequence of two morphemes? Can a sequence
>of two Voynichese words represent a single morpheme?

I hold that the spaces between words are artefacts of the 
shapes of the letters. Therefore, we do not know where word
breaks are--except, of course, at the beginning and end of
paragraphs. Labels? Perhaps the labels are not words, but
... er... "numbers", as we would label pictures A, B, C, D, 
and so on. The Chinese use a set of special characters for this
purpose, each with its own pronunciation, so each one syllable.
The Voynich labels could be such a system.


>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?

Labels. See above.

>How many phonemes does the Voynichese language possess?

Honestly, I have not idea. Consider: in German "sch" is a
single phoneme, likewise "dd" and "ngh" in Welsh, and "ch" and
"c'h" in Breton.


>Do the EVA characters <a> <e> <o> <y> in fact represent vowels? 

I am pretty sure that they do, for two reasons:

1. The application of Sukhotin's vowel algorithm suggests so.
2. Their shapes.

I also believe that <i> = <e> and that <ee> = <a>

If you rummage through the archives, you will find very old
posts from me where I opine that <y> is an unstressed,
undifferentiated vowel, a schwa in other words.

And rummaging through the archives again, you'll find what
I wrote about the likely origin of this alphabet: the
Beneventan script. EVA <ee>, which I think is the vowel
"a", is the spit and image of "a" in Beneventan. Frogguy
<ct> (can't remember EVA), which Sukhotin's algorithm
identifies as a consonant, is the spit and image of 
Beneventan "t".

>If so,
>are they the only Voynichese vowels?

I have argued that <ol> was a single vowel, "ou", just like
in Modern Greek and in Armenian (I did not know any Armenian
back then, so I did not mention Armenian).

>Does Voynichese display vowel
>harmony?

I cannot tell at all.

>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?

No.

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

You mean Arabic, Hebrew, Phenician, don't you? Certainly not. An obvious
reason: its entropy would be much higher, and the distances between
successive vowels as given by Sukhotin's algorithm would show a much
wider spread.

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

I think so. In fact, I am sure. Didn't I write above that EVA <i> = <e> ?
I stand by that.




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