(05-02-2018, 10:49 PM)Koen Gh. wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Torsten: no, I'm saying that many properties of a spelling system, whether governed by rigid rules or not, are independent from human natural language. There is no intrinsic reason to ancient Egyptian why it should be written in hieroglyphs. This happened because of historical reasons.
Korean is spelled by forming a square out of each syllable. Arabic is spelled with omission of vowels and right to left. And those are just modern, well known examples.
What I'm getting at is that we are looking at a spelling system (with or without intentional obscurity), not an actual natural language. You can't write down a language, there is always human mediation, and that's where strange things can happen, which are not necessarily reflected in the spoken form of the language.
Indeed, you have to identify the writing system first. A writing systems is designed to represent language. Therefore a writing system is not independent from language.
See for instance the Phaistos Disc (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). The disc contains only 241 imprinted signs. The writing system and the language are unknown. But even with only 241 signs it is possible to identify sentence structures and to identify subject, verb and object in it. It is also possible to say that the verb corresponds with the subject and that the language of the Phaistos Disc is therefore either of an agglutinate or inflection type: an isolated language can be ruled out (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
The VMS contains much more then just 241 glyphs. It should be much easier then for the Phaistos disc to identify the writing system and the language.