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+--- Thread: Natural semantic metalanguage (/thread-2976.html)
Natural semantic metalanguage - RenegadeHealer - 18-10-2019
I've been spending some time reading through the blogs of -JKP- and Emma May Smith for the past few days, trying to get a deeper sense for how Voynichese is constructed, and what patterns it contains. These two researchers do an excellent job teaching this, and their blogs should be required reading for any aspiring Voynich theorist, right up there with classics like Currier and D'Imperio. As much as I like to let my imagination wander, I agree with both of these bloggers that a solid foundation of what is there must form the foundation of any good speculation on what might be there. I am also now firmly convinced that the writing system is synthetic, and the construction of vords and lines of text are deliberate.
In my wanderings on Wikipedia, I came across the theory of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and am about to order myself a copy of Wierzbicka and Goddard's seminal work on this theory. Basically it proposes that all natural languages, and quite possibly all human systems of symbolic communication, can be expressed as combinations of approximately 65 basic concepts that are fundamental to the human experience, and cannot be simplified any further. This was a little further down a wiki-hole that started for me with the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., a short list of lexical items that would have been known to all prehistoric humans, and show a high resistance to sound changes or replacement by borrowing, over time. The point being, if the VMS contains a natural language, a constructed language, or any sort of symbolic encoding of human communication, there is a short list of concepts that must appear in the VMS, and must have a Voynichese way of being written. Defining this list would be the first challenge. Later, I'm envisioning finding a way to use, for example, -JKP-'s differential distribution of Janus pairs and Emma's rules about syllable construction, along with clues from the imagery, to try to identify which units of writing likely correlate with which units of meaning.
But I don't want to be that newbie who reinvents the wheel, and ignores good research that's already been done in this direction. Can anyone point me in the direction of any VMS researcher who has already worked on something similar?