Re: VMs: [LONG] Voynich & semiotics (early notes)

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

	Welcome, Gabriele!

Gabriele Ferri wrote:
> 
> One of my professors is Umberto Eco and, during a course about intersemiotic
> translation and medioeval semiotics, I told him about the VMS. He's quite
> interested in this subject and I agreed to write a short term-paper about
> the main different decoding hypoteses that have been presented on this list.

	Great!  Let us know how it goes.  I don't think we've
had a semiotic point of view before, and we're
definitely interested!  

> c) the "fake theory": someone believes that the VMS is actually glossolalia?
> has a synopsis of such theory been written? is there any statistical
> analysis proving or disproving this theory?

	I don't know of a statistical analysis of this. 
Finding transcripts of glossalalia with which to
conduct such an analysis is very difficult.  In turn,
making such a transcript is difficult, because word and
phrase boundaries are unclear.

> d) could the VMS be written in an artificial language? has anyone
> investigated this possibility?

	It's been mentioned many times.  Since the Voynich
text has much morphological, and probably syntactic,
structure, but doesn't fit any known natural language,
an artificial language is an obvious default.  I don't
think a detailed analysis of a known artificial
language for comparison with Voynichese has been done. 
Antoine Casanova wrote a doctoral thesis in which he
concluded that the VMs is in four, and possibly six,
artificial languages.  I'd have to look again at his
thesis to give more detail. 

Dennis
--------------------------------
[This E-mail scanned for viruses]

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