Re: VMs: left & right word entropy

[Akinori Ito <aito@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 06:38:59 +1000
Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 23/12/2003 12:57:06 PM, Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> >I understand that his findings may be interpreted to point to a lack of 
> >grammar.
> 
> No. Read on.

I have three interpretations about my finding. One is that Voynichese word-like
strings are not actually words, that perhaps means inter-word spaces are fakes,
or a Voynichese word corresponds to a phrase of ordinary languages.
The second interpretation is, as Frogguy pointed out, Voynichese is word-order-free
language. The last one is that Voynichese word order has no meaning (therefore
VMS have no grammar).

I feel that this phenomenon (left entropy=right entropy) must be explained
with the fact that VMS has more than two times as many distinct words as English.

> 
> >I just can't imagine a natural language in which the words do not have some 
> >determined order in the text flow (Jacques?).
> 
> Take his example of what precedes "am" in English.
> Fair enough. Take Latin now. What precedes "sum"? Just about
> anything. Can you think of any word at all in Latin that
> calls for a particular word preceding it or following it? 
> Or even a small set of particular words? 
> 
> Try, and keep trying until you do.
> 
> Then wake me up when you have.
> 
> Latin is not the only one. I am sure the same is true of Lagu,
> an Austronesian language of the Solomon Islands (but I don't
> have enough text in Lagu, and if I had, I wouldn't feel like
> typing it in). I only mention Lagu because, unlike Latin,
> and like most Austronesian languages, it is uninflected.
> So this property of texts (left = right) does not even
> tell us whether the language is inflected.
> 
> It MIGHT tell us that word-order is free. 
> 
> But again, that depends on whether the text has been 
> correctly segmented into words. Take an English text, 
> remove the punctuation and the  spaces, insert word 
> breaks anywhere you feel like, at random, or after 
> every 'e', or whatever. I bet you that left 
> entropy = right entropy.
> 
> I know that, strictly, I should back up my claim about
> Latin, and I have downloaded Cesar's complete "De Bello
> Gallico" last week. I prefer to spend my time designing 
> "Frogguy for Rongorongo".
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Akinori Ito, Assoc. Prof.
Graduate School of Engineering, Tohoku Univ.
TEL: 022-217-7084  E-mail: aito@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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