VMs: VM in made-up language?

[Elmar Vogt <elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Recent posts on the list brought up the question whether the VM was perhaps 
written in an invented language.

As one who dabbled a bit in the field of constructed languages himself; the 
effort to create such a language would not be forbiddingly high, depending 
on how "alien" its look & feel is supposed to be. Actually, some people are 
making a hobby out of it (see www.langmaker.com), and the fact that there 
are Esperanto and Klingon speaking communities out there proves that it is 
within the realm of the hobbyist to devise, learn and use such languages.

The high internal structure of Voynichese would in this case hint to an "a 
priori" language, ie one which is based on "logical" and philosophical 
considerations. (The opposite would be an "a posteriori" language, which is 
derived from one or several existing languages, eg Esperanto.)

A priori languages usually categorize the world around them in their 
vocabulary and try to get a systematic grasp at it -- ie, the first syllable 
would indicate whether the word is a noun, a verb or an attribute, the 
second syllable would distinct between animated or "dead", etc. breaking 
down the possible candidates further and further, until "gold" would end up 
being something like "noun dead metal elementary precious golden", with one 
syllable/sound for each of the components.

Although this looks a bit like a word written in Voynichese, there are two 
arguments against it:

*) The concept seems to be later than the VMs origin,

*) For all practical purposes, these vocabularies turn out to be useless. 
The real world (tm) seems to defy the theoretically elegant breakdown in 
independent categories. While a disctinction between "gold" and "silver" in 
the above scheme seems to be feasible, "apple" and "pear" is getting 
difficult, not to mention "strawberries"...

Cheers,

	Elmar

--
Elmar Vogt / Königswarterstr. 18 / 90762 Fürth / GERMANY
elvogt@xxxxxxxxxxx / Tel.: (++49/0)911 - 31 52 58
Agilmar von Sevelingen: VIS VISCERIS NON FERRE FERTUR (T.Doom)

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." (Oscar Wilde, attrib.)

"I come from a country where being liberal is a virtue, and patriots are
viewed warily. YMMV."



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