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

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 05:05 25/05/2003 +1000, Jacques Guy wrote (in reply to Philip Neal):
> > 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.

I fully agree that this is the most likely reason for the apparent "word" 
structuring rules we see. Though of course, to my eyes this seems more 
symptomatic of conscious misdirection than of language artificiality... 
YMMV. :-)

> Therefore, we do not know where word
> breaks are--except, of course, at the beginning and end of
> paragraphs.

Even then, we'd have to be sure that paragraphs' actual contents aren't 
wrapped (ie before and/or after) by anything misleading. ISTM that the 
first paragraph of a page often seems to start with anomolous character 
groups, so this is by no means a certain way of determining word breaks. 
Again, TSMSOCMTOLA. :-)

> >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.

I would be interested to see the result of applying Sukhotin's vowel 
algorithm to a text enciphered using a paired 15th Century cipher - I 
predict it would yield extremely strong false positives (and that this is 
in fact what is happening with the VMS).

> 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.

Such a small alphabet to have a schwa! And so common a letter! And to have 
schwas at the start of so many labels! How wonderful! :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling..... 


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