Re: VMs: transcriptions and shorthand notes

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

"Christoph M. Wintersteiger" wrote:
> 
> Did anyone ever check how the vms' language patterns relate to french? The
> french do have a lot of those apostrophe things, and I've always been
> thinking that there are a lot of that kind of things in the vms' language.
> Just an idea :)

	I use to believe that French might be the VMs' source
language, and I still wonder.  It's not because of
this, though.   

	We have a dilemma.   On one hand, Voynichese mean word
length is rather short.  On the other hand, the
entropies of Voynichese are low, which would at first
glance lead to Voynichese words being long. 

	I thought that Voynichese word divisions might be
syllable divisions in the source language.  If this is
true, French would be a good candidate for the source
language.  This is because medieval and modern French
in spoken form do not clearly differentiate words. 
There is no definite syllable stress in words, and most
morphemes, perhaps all,  are bound.  

	So Voynichese might be spoken French in a verbose
cipher, or some functional equivalent.  

	Arguing against this is the fact that Voynichese has
about 8200 words, while French probably has 500-1000
possible syllables.  Any verbose cipher would have to
be highly homophonic, i.e., have many variant forms.  

	The consonant-vowel alternation of Voynichese might
also argue against this.  

	Jacques does not believe this, in any case.  He told
me, "I don't see the evidence,"  but I couldn't get him
to elaborate.  

	As for your idea, I don't think anyone has looked at
patterns of apostrophe-like marks.  

Dennis
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