VMs: Chinese: [was: More questions]

[Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jacques Guy wrote:
> Barbara Babbled;
> >The question is has anyone ever produced even something as simple as
> >frequency tables for the various suspected VMS languages' phonemes?

> Jacques Jzotted; 
> No. The "Chinese hypothesis" alone would require producing frequency
> tables of several hundred Chinese dialects, most mutually unintelligible.

Period in which most believe the VMS's origins lie the "Chinese
Hypotheisis" is *very* unlikly indeed.

>From when the Jesuits first encvounted the Chinese and noted that those
with mutually exclusive *regionalects* (a more accurate term than
dialects as many are quite different languages, as diiferent as the
romance and germanic languages of europe) were able to communicate by
writing (restricting themselves to the small number of pure ideograms
and meaning/meaning compounds) the myth began that chinese writing spoke
"directly to the mind" without the need for language. This myth
persisted right up to the 19thC and held up the decipherment of
hieroglyphs by 200 years, and Mayan by almost as long, in spite of loan
voices protesting the most
(around 80 odd per cent) of written chinese was phonetic (the first
character provides a syllable, the second the context, and thus the
correct tone for the syllable can be deduced) they were ignored because
the myth of the "universal" writing system was too firmly entrenched in
scholastic thought to be disloged by anything as inconvinient as facts.
Chinese speakers in europe were very few indeed.

When east asians hundreds of years ago used to try to break down their
languages into phonomic form they thought in terms of syllables rather
than single elements. 

There's exceptions like 15C Korean Hang Gul, but there too the elements
existed
to be reformed in "square" syllables, and although the chinese were
exposed to Tibetan and Indian scripts - these are not truly alphabets as
each symbol has an inherent vowel, a chinese scholar would see these
as syllabic too: Mongol is alphabetc, but has such a complex
orthography that it's inapplicable to any other language). I don't think
it likly that a native chinese whould have come up with a solution even
vaugly simalar to the Voynich script: the mindset is all wrong, the
"informing" (by other scripts) is all wrong. 

Outsiders, hung mao, learning chinese were restricted to court chinese,
"manderin". Which if that's what voynichese enciphers there's problems
too.

The devisor of the voynich system was informed by european alphabets;
ascenders, decenders (particularly mixed together), diacritics, etc; and
seeing sound as having units smaller than a syllable. This required a
great exposure to european scripts (and therefore many european
languages) which make it very plausable that the Voynich author(s) were
europeans. So for the devisor of the Voynich script to have used their
script to write in mandarin chinese would involve a quite long chain of
very improbable ifs.  

> I have a comparative dictionary of (modern) Chinese dialects, but no texts.

<lust>. Title, author(s)/eitor(s), publishers, and ISBN, pretty
pretty please <pout>.

> Even if there were texts, those should be in the dialects as they
> were 500 years ago, when the VMs was likely written. We have nothing.
> Chinese was always written in wen2yan2 (Classical Chinese), never in the
> dialectal forms, and we do not know with any degree of certitude how these
> were pronounced, nor how many there were (many must have become extinct,
> many arisen since).

Ah! Unlike european languages with its tonic shift and vowel changes,
the chinese regionalects suffered little from this kind of change. A
chinese
"accent" was/is using "odd" or extra syllables. Something that
linguistically is quite easy to "push back". It's been done by linguists
working with, wait for it, theaters and actors, wanting to reproduce
regional plays as they were heard by their original audiences.

Plays have been re-written in their original "accent" for that
regionalect and there are your texts.
There's a large Gov dept dedicated to preseving pre-revolution spoken
and written langauges: contact; Ye Xumin, Vice Director of the Central
South
China Institute for Nationalities, Bejing. Nice bloke, good english ;-)

> The situation is the same for most other possible candidates. At any
> rate, it does not take any statistical analysis to realise that the
> VMs, if in a simple substitution cipher, cannot possibly be in Gaelic,
> nor in Nahuatl, but just might, just might, be in Malay (or some other
> Austronesian language), and very possibly in a Chinese-type sort of
> language.

Personally I think a "rare" language (rare in europe anyway) if written
in latin character would have provided more than enough security. It
woudln't have been recognisable except to another chinese speaker and
they were rarer than virgins in materity wards!
Chances are that if the author used such a language they were one of the
few speakers of it in europe and so wouldn't have needed the 2nd level
of a new "alphabet" too.

Again, returning to theater companies. All over the world theatre
companies "revive" plays in their "original" accents - sometime several
accents for nobel characters from different regions and "local" common
characters. I sat throug a production of MacBeth done just this way (and
another of the same play done in pidgin english!).

>From these the more reasonable candidates of 500 year old German,
French, English, Italian, Latin and Greek, could be reconstucted in the
IPA for phoneme counts. 

Still not an easy job, but a possible one, and not so huge it's
undoable.

Barbara
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list