29-07-2017, 09:12 AM
In linguistics, the distinction between synthetic and analytic languages is that the former stick more "bits" of meaning in one single word. This generally results in long words and a complex, hard to learn grammar. Finnish is more synthetic than German. An interesting development in Western Indo-European languages is that they have been evolving from synthetic to more analytic. Latin has much more "grammar" than its offspring. You need to "unpack", i.e. analyze the grammar from Latin into short words when translating to French or Spanish. For example rosarum = "de las rosas".
It's true what you say, that of course this terminology wouldn't apply completely because Voynichese wouldn't be a language in the traditional sense. It would be both synthetic (because you put a lot of stuff into one word) and artificial.
But then, even if we add "artificial", there's still the problem that there would be an apparent lack of diverse lexical items. You could combine your available bits of meaning in a variety of ways to express a near infinite number of patterns, but in my opinion it's hard to write about stuff without actually using its name. So yeah, maybe it all is in the drawings.
/offtopic I was reminded of this in an article I read about AI's which were developed to learn how to negotiate/barter with one another. The programmers forgot to tell them to stick to proper English, which resulted in them coming up with their own language system.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
![[Image: i-1-ais-are-writing-their-own-perfect-la...t-them.jpg]](https://assets.fastcompany.com/image/upload/w_596,c_limit,q_auto:best,f_auto,fl_lossy/wp-cms/uploads/sites/4/2017/07/i-1-ais-are-writing-their-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-them.jpg)
Kind of reminds me of Voynichese
It's true what you say, that of course this terminology wouldn't apply completely because Voynichese wouldn't be a language in the traditional sense. It would be both synthetic (because you put a lot of stuff into one word) and artificial.
But then, even if we add "artificial", there's still the problem that there would be an apparent lack of diverse lexical items. You could combine your available bits of meaning in a variety of ways to express a near infinite number of patterns, but in my opinion it's hard to write about stuff without actually using its name. So yeah, maybe it all is in the drawings.
/offtopic I was reminded of this in an article I read about AI's which were developed to learn how to negotiate/barter with one another. The programmers forgot to tell them to stick to proper English, which resulted in them coming up with their own language system.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Kind of reminds me of Voynichese