VMs: A couple of questions.

["Smári P. McCarthy" <spm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

<disclaimer>
  I'm pretty new to the VMS, but I've been monitoring the list for a
while and reading this, that and everything else.
</disclaimer>

>From what I can see, the VMS doesn't seem to agglutinate, at least not
regularly (possible prefixing?), but please if somebody begs to differ,
let me know. If I'm correct on that count we can pretty much rule out
finno-ugric languages (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), although
something, I'm not sure what, makes me think of Hungarian when I look
over the manuscript. I don't know Hungarian, but still, there's
something.

Regarding the repetitions of words, some languages like Hawai'ian use
repetitions to make words (adjectives primarily) more important, e.g. on
f1r.P1.2:
   sory.ckhar.o!r.y.kair.chtaiin.shar.are.cthar.cthar.dan! -   
the word "cthar" might be an adjective, e.g. "good", and in this case,
since it's doubled, means "better", or something akin. Working on that
assumption, a few speculations could be made into sentance structure.
Just a thought.

A few questions though:
	- has anybody done a comparison with the number of characters in the
Voynich character set and other Eurasian languages?
	- is there anywhere I could find the Perl scripts that have been used
to do the statistical analysis mentioned in the parent letter?
	- has the character set been identified as alphabetical, abjadic,
syllabilic, etc? I see that people are working on the assumption of an
alphabet.
	- are the letter assignments made by transcriptors based on anything
other than whim?
	- could it be that the words have been encoded using some primative
method to obscure the meaning further?
	- I have read that the Ziph values are typical Indoeuropean languages,
but are they close to any other language groups?
	- What information is available besides that which is on voynich.nu?

Thanks in advance,
	Smári.

<introduction>
FYI, in case anybody cares or thinks it might help, I'm fluent in
English and Icelandic and have moderate abilities in Dutch and Danish.
I'm pretty familiar with a dozen or so other languages. I'm a
mathematics major and comparitive linguistics minor, with an entire
youth of programming experiance. At any rate, I'd appreciate a bit of
guidance into this world, for it is intriguing and fun. :-)
</introduction>

-- 
Smári P. McCarthy
spm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
(+354) 662 2701
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