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