20-09-2017, 09:43 AM
(This post was last modified: 20-09-2017, 09:46 AM by davidjackson.)
Yes, well, I wasn't just looking for the definite article of course, but generic function words that might pop out. Emma, I didn't realize Czech doesn't have them either.
Perfectly correct - I was thinking of other things when I typed it and didn't word it correctly. Anyway, I haven't gotten to actually trying out the methodology yet....
Anyhoo - I'm bored of my original thrust now (surprise, surprise). Instead, I've delved down an intellectual side alley. Will a shortcut or a dead end await me? Or a metaphorical mugging in a back alley?
Let us constrain our thoughts to this one page, taken in isolation from the corpus (f104r), and examine how these words function solely on this page, without regard to the corpus.
We take the most common word, chol <chol>:
It appears 14 times on this page:
So we have prefixes oke p qok and suffixes for cham xy or kar.
On this one page we have the following correspondence:
If we try combinations of prefix, functor and suffix, the only word that is viable is pcholor, which is unique to this page, and whose deconstruction led to the original fix inclusion. So that could be an error on someone's part.
The second most common word is chey.
Chey appears as opchey (twice), olkeechey, lkechey, okolchey.
Giving us only prefixes op, olkee (unique to this word, although is we assume a space between ol and keechey, the latter appears several times in the corpus), lke, okol (although to my mind this could easily be two vords again). So let's assume the spaces should be there: Chey is now prefixed with:
op, kee, lke
The third most common word is char.
Char appears as charaiin *, opchar and qopchar.
Giving us prefixes char, op and qop.
I skip over the bi- and uni-grams as they are too common.
sar only appears on this page by itself.
dam appears as chedam, qodam. Giving us prefixes che and qo.
Enough already! You cry. We know qo is a popular prefix.
And anyway, all this was worked out long ago by Stolfi in his core theory.
But I mention one thing which I'll refer to again in a minute: there are almost all prefixes,
So let's go back to my original idea of word identification. What sort of a word can appear by itself or as a modifier? Well, function words, but generally depending upon the construction of the language they are either single or fusional.
But - nouns can occupy that function. They can appear by themselves (flower) or be modified (yellow flower) and even categorised (big yellow meadow flower). And languages have different ways to expressing and joining these classes of words - either in a sentence, or fusing them together or smashing them into one whopping big agglutinative word.
Voynichese is unlikely to be agglutinative, as it doesn't have the word length necessary. But it could very well be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- where the language uses a simple morpheme to denote semantic features.
So far, I've proposed nothing new. So let's propose another thought experiment and see where it takes us:
Are these words nouns (or more correctly, content words) which are being modified mainly by prefixes?
Which, if any, languages work in this way, concentrating on prefixes with the occasional suffix for certain cases?
Quote:Just to set the record straight, it's not Bax's method.
Perfectly correct - I was thinking of other things when I typed it and didn't word it correctly. Anyway, I haven't gotten to actually trying out the methodology yet....
Anyhoo - I'm bored of my original thrust now (surprise, surprise). Instead, I've delved down an intellectual side alley. Will a shortcut or a dead end await me? Or a metaphorical mugging in a back alley?
Let us constrain our thoughts to this one page, taken in isolation from the corpus (f104r), and examine how these words function solely on this page, without regard to the corpus.
We take the most common word, chol <chol>:
It appears 14 times on this page:
So we have prefixes oke p qok and suffixes for cham xy or kar.
On this one page we have the following correspondence:
| oke p qok |
chol | cham xy or |
The second most common word is chey.
Chey appears as opchey (twice), olkeechey, lkechey, okolchey.
Giving us only prefixes op, olkee (unique to this word, although is we assume a space between ol and keechey, the latter appears several times in the corpus), lke, okol (although to my mind this could easily be two vords again). So let's assume the spaces should be there: Chey is now prefixed with:
op, kee, lke
The third most common word is char.
Char appears as charaiin *, opchar and qopchar.
Giving us prefixes char, op and qop.
I skip over the bi- and uni-grams as they are too common.
sar only appears on this page by itself.
dam appears as chedam, qodam. Giving us prefixes che and qo.
Enough already! You cry. We know qo is a popular prefix.
And anyway, all this was worked out long ago by Stolfi in his core theory.
But I mention one thing which I'll refer to again in a minute: there are almost all prefixes,
So let's go back to my original idea of word identification. What sort of a word can appear by itself or as a modifier? Well, function words, but generally depending upon the construction of the language they are either single or fusional.
But - nouns can occupy that function. They can appear by themselves (flower) or be modified (yellow flower) and even categorised (big yellow meadow flower). And languages have different ways to expressing and joining these classes of words - either in a sentence, or fusing them together or smashing them into one whopping big agglutinative word.
Voynichese is unlikely to be agglutinative, as it doesn't have the word length necessary. But it could very well be You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- where the language uses a simple morpheme to denote semantic features.
So far, I've proposed nothing new. So let's propose another thought experiment and see where it takes us:
Are these words nouns (or more correctly, content words) which are being modified mainly by prefixes?
Which, if any, languages work in this way, concentrating on prefixes with the occasional suffix for certain cases?