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

[Luis Vélez <legal1@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ciao Gabriele,

Welcome back.

In re: your question:

> > 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.


David Kahn has noted the phenomenon of constant prefix repetition while suffixes undergo variations as being a typical trait of artificial languages such as Dalgarno's or that of Bishop Wilkins, and very present in the VMS. William F. Friedman, cryptanalist extraordinaire, who spent a long time studying the VMS, believed it represented some kind of artificial language that divided everything into categories described with some basic symbols, and subcategories formed by attaching additional symbols to the core ones. 

Congratulations for bringing our siren to the attention of Professor Eco - we have discussed his brilliant work on the quest for a perfect language on several occasions in the past, and always wondered why it did not include references to the "Bacon" manuscript. We should be familiar with Dr Eco's treatise of general semiotics, signs and meanings, forma and content etc .

I'll be happy to send you a copy of the CD to your snail mail address if you don't have it yet - it's really worthwhile (thanks again, Ken!).  Best of luck at the Superscuola.

Luis