Re: VMs: De modis significandi sive grammatica speculativa

[Florin <ifthink@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jean,

>From what I understand they tried to demonstrate that any kind of
grammar could be explained based on an universal grammar set of rules.
The existence of an universal grammar was assumed implicitly, probably
as a natural context-free grammar (hence their problems). Or it was
vice versa, they tried to find a set of rules to prove the existence
of an universal grammar. This is as confused as I am myself reading
their works. Anyway, what they were not doing, it was building an
universal language/grammar, something like Esperanto. Maybe another
obscure group was trying to do just that.

I was trying to find some similarities between the Rohonczi, Hampton,
Seraphianus and Voynich. While I didn't studied very much the first
three ones, I have a feeling that their authors were/are some how
"wired" differently than most of the folks. Entering their worlds
would be difficult but not impossible as I saw/expect some consistency
in their works, which is largely lacking in the Voynich. Whenever I
find a pattern in it and I expect this to stay, something comes and
brakes it down  and this seems done rather deliberately.

I would have expected this to be an obfuscation(done by substitution) 
of a franco-germano-latino-scandinavian language written with some how
strange symbols but this is hardly the case as there are no (as far as
I know) large repeating blocks of texts.
This means that a seed/key may be  involved and the things are getting
more complicated.

So, what this could be ? An encrypted artificial language ? A very
sophisticated algorithm with endless rounds of substitutions and
transpositions at the bit, nibble or byte/s level ? This sounds rather
overkill.

Or, a very simple thing with very complex consequences. 

Regards,
Clueless One aka Florin :)


PS. Now that I wrote those down I realized two things: 
1. Writing in a very elaborated style, a large text even with a
minimal number of topics, may not necessary exhibit large repeating
blocks of text.
2. There is a common thing to those codices, ... all of them are 
written with an uncommon, unique set of symbols. Why ?

On 8/28/05, jean-yves artero <jyartero@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi Florin
> 
> Your post is intriguing and elliptic; here is a bit
> more about this book and his author:
> 
> http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/8246/gramspec.html
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/erfurt/
> 
> "Thomas of Erfurt belonged to an interesting though
> somewhat obscure group of late 13th- and early
> 14th-century philosophers known as the speculative
> grammarians or Modistae. The term 'speculative
> grammarian' is ambiguous because it is also used by
> historians of medieval philosophy to refer to
> 12th-century Parisian grammar masters such as William
> of Conches, Peter Helias, and Ralph of Beauvais, who
> systematically revised the ancient grammars of Donatus
> and Priscian -- textbooks which had been used to teach
> Latin to schoolboys -- in order to produce a universal
> semantics.[7]  The two groups are related, as it turns
> out, since the latter-day grammarians adopted many of
> the theories as well as the universalizing tendencies
> of their 12th-century predecessors. Foremost among
> them was the theory of the modi significandi, or modes
> of signifying. The term 'Modistae' or 'Modist'
> properly refers to the later group."
> 
> Interesting...but somewhat obscure group, ey, why not?
> 
> Jean
> 
> --- Florin <ifthink@xxxxxxxxx> a écrit :
> 
> > Could it be that the vms author was inspired by this
> > book written by
> > Thomas of Erfurt ?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Florin
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