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+--- Thread: Interesting Vwords - those pesky 4o vords (/thread-2043.html)
Interesting Vwords - those pesky 4o vords - -JKP- - 13-08-2017
I am not convinced that there is meaning behind the VMS text, or that it's natural language or has any linguistic significance, but I'm keeping an open mind because someone spent a lot of time creating it and it's clearly not random text. So, I try to look for patterns that reveal how it was constructed.
While looking through the text, I noticed this interesting contrast...
Each of these is a unique vord, with the exception of keeey which occurs twice:
Plant 5r Plant 49r Plant 50v Plant 38v Folio 116r Sagittarius
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qoykeeey oykeeey ykeeey keeey [font=Verdana]> keeey eeey[/font]
It looks exciting if viewed as a deliberate pattern, possibly a "connector" between folios, but... is it?
In contrast, another 4o vord behaves like this:
275 times 87 times 50 times 2 times 2 times 106 times
------------- ----------- ----------- --------- ---------- -------------
qokeedy okeedy keedy eedy edy dy
Superficially, qoykeeey and qokeedy appear similar, but they behave very differently. The first (qoykeeey) is a unique vord that breaks down into more unique vords by removing the first letter. One might almost suspect a system of pointers, as are used in programming languages to connect data in different places. In contrast, the second (qokeedy) is common, and breaks down into additional vords that are not unique.
So it's not as simple as looking at unique vords with morphological similarities (length, glyphs) to see if they have a connecting function. Might there be a linguistic explanation?
In linguistic terms, there are situations that might explain the first pattern. For example, in English, the sequence nascent > ascent > scent > cent resembles the first set of Vwords. They are all words in their own right, and don't necessarily have to have any relationship to one other in terms of meaning—only the letter patterns are similar.
IF (this is a big "if") qoykeeey and qokeedy are linguistic and IF (this is an even bigger "if" and one of which I am very skeptical) the VMS were a substitution code, then one could look for patterns in a variety of languages where some letter combinations are rare (as in the first example) and others are common (as in the second) in terms of breaking down into viable words if the leading letter is dropped.
I'm not sure how fruitful this line of investigation would be. I see the ok "prefix" as far too common to mesh with natural language patterns, but I decided to post it anyway because a pattern of patterns, studied over time, might lead to other insights.
RE: Interesting Vwords - those pesky 4o vords - Emma May Smith - 13-08-2017
This is more or less what I've been doing for the last few years: looking to understand adjacency rules both within words and across word boundaries. It's possible to learn quite a bit from this kind of study.
For example, we can show that k and t don't just look alike, they act alike too. That may seem like basic stuff but it's super important. Putting characters into groups based on how they work lets us think about word structure in more abstract ways. I think that, on the assumption the text is linguistic (not proven, but a worthwhile assumption to allow research*), we can identify a group of characters most likely to be vowels.
I'm currently working on some further research about character adjacency between the end of a word and the beginning of the next. It turns out that words beginning ok may be strongly related to those beginning k, but simply coming after different characters.
*I've researched along linguistic lines for a few years and have neither proposed a language nor a single reading. Yet I think I've managed to find some interesting things that non-linguistic researchers might also be interested in.
RE: Interesting Vwords - those pesky 4o vords - Davidsch - 22-08-2017
Agreed, the pages follow specific word-part-patterns.
Agreed, the K and T behave a-like.
If there would be close cooperation, summaries and tools that were developed could be shared
and time could be spent more efficiently, because the results are always the same with this static corpora we have.