Re: VMs: Mixtures of languages in the VMS

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 20:27 03/11/2003 -0600, Dennis wrote:
>         Other possibilities.  An unattested or poorly attested
> Romance or Germanic language, (say Dalmatian, a Romance
> language which became extinct in the 20th century),
> which however would bear strong resemblance to known
> cognates.  A pidgin language resembling Lingua Franca
> which is poorly attested.

I thought the whole point of a pidgin language was to aid communication, by 
using a simplified grammar and words stolen wholesale from the existing 
languages known by the people who want to communicate using it?

Of course, parts of the VMS (like the herbal and the astrological pages) 
might well contain words taken from many languages - in the case of the 
herbal, names of plants in multiple languages was almost obligatory. But 
surely this can't be true of *every page* on the VMS?

Basically, while we can't easily distinguish the contents of the former 
(possibly less structured pages, with synonyms in multiple languages) from 
the contents of the latter (possibly more structured pages [like recipes, 
balneological, cosmological, etc]), I fail to see any obvious explanation 
for the VMs' entire contents apart from *hoax*, *code*, or *shorthand*.

Although there's a *remote* possibility it's written in a lost pidgin 
language, I can't presently see a single piece of physical evidence to 
support the idea. Please tell me if I'm wrong!

The related view sometimes taken of the VMs' set of "words" - "that, as the 
VMs has an apparently large vocabulary, it must therefore be appropriating 
words from multiple language sources" - similarly appears to be unsupported.

One piece of evidence which I suggest strongly contradicts this second 
point of view is that many, many words in the VMs appear combinatorial - 
[qo|o][l][t|k|ch]e[e][dy|ky], or dai[i][i][n|r] etc - which (I believe) 
fails to accord with any known languages, whether taken singly or 
together... apart from (a) completely artificial languages, (b) artificial 
memory systems (where names denote addresses within a taxonomy, similar to 
mnemotechnics, Lullian systems, etc), or (c) numbering systems (like Roman 
numerals).

Structurally, the closest match with the VMs would appear to be either an 
"accessorised number code", where words are converted to numbers (and those 
numbers then obfuscated), or a wholly artificial language (though, strictly 
speaking, these are rarely combinatorial). I'm saying this not because I 
particularly want either of these last two ideas to be true, but because I 
can argue the case for either of these without having to jump through 
endless hoops.

Perhaps it's time to crossing things off the list, rather than continually 
adding to it? Yes, the different explanations for the VMs are all 
*possible*... but not *equally possible*, surely? :-o

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


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