Successful translation ?

[-JKP-]

Recently I've been playing with my own "four step solution" as an experiment. I tried to identify a language, assign values to glyphs, find matching words in the target language, and create some kind of meaning out of the word soup. The truth is that it hasn't been easy.

I thought the target language was a good choice: geographically viable, historically unwritten, small phoneme inventory, simple syllable structure. I read about the language's phonotactics, its historical phonemes, the frequency of different sounds, and about related languages and dialects (to give myself some leeway). I would have been happy to assign any value to any glyph so long as it worked. But nothing seems to work as well as it should. I have barely been able to look at the meaning of individual words and never once got to the point of questioning whether sentences were grammatical.
...

I've managed to do it with four languages. Well, 3.5 languages... the 4th one didn't work quite as well. I wrote out a list of about 30 languages after looking into their structure and went through the list one at a time.

But... I could never get more than a few long phrases, or a sentence here and there (quite a bit more than some people get but not nearly enough to satisfy me), and then the approach doesn't generalize to the text around it, and I'm pretty confident that it's NOT because the VMS switches languages—the structure of the VMS tokens doesn't change.

I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude to what Geoffrey is doing. Greek was one of the languages I tried and had some success with (this was years ago) BUT it was not Judaeo-Greek. I also tried Yiddish, Ladino, Romano (and many of the more common languages), BUT these didn't work terribly well.

The reason I decided to take a different approach to understanding the VMS after that long and very arduous exercise was because I thought to myself, "If I can get this to work in three different languages, then that probably means the VMS is structured with a common vowel-consonant appearance (I say appearance because the vowel-shapes are not necessarily vowels) that occurs in a number of languages and it's probably NOT because I have a solution."