I don't think reduplicated words are nulls. Not only does the text not appear to work that way, but it would take some of the blocks out of the VMS's already limited glyph-set.
In fact, in years of looking at the text (and trying to manipulate it in a thousand ways), there's only one character that seems to me to behave like a null and even that one I'm not sure of (maybe it's a letter, marker, or modifer). I have a couple of non-null ideas (one in particular) that might explain the behavior of that particular glyph.
I do think the spaces are contrived. I think VMS tokens are probably syllables in some sense, not words. I've suspected it for a long time, have never quite been able to confirm it, many have disagreed with me, but some work I've been doing the last couple of years seems to point even more in that direction. I'll keep pounding away at it until I have an answer.
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Reduplication can be explained in many ways and over the years I've been collecting manuscript samples with a large amount of repetition and reduplication, and there's more of it than I suspected. When I have time, I'll post the examples. Even if the VMS is not reduplication in the same sense as the examples (which are of many different kinds), reduplication can be simulated simply by altering spaces and grouping glyphs as multiglyphs.
As for multiglyphs, I've written about this on blogs and have posted charts and I've been investigating it for two reasons: Studying possible multiglyphs will either eventually reveal if they exist and what they are or, if they are sparse or nonexistent, they will hopefully reveal enlightening patterns (some of which hopefully are linguistic in nature).
In fact, it was my study of multiglyph patterns (without the assumption that they are multiglyphs, but just looking at them as patterns) that led me to the language I used to create the almost-substitution sample I posted in René's thread (creating Voynich-like text from natural language).
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If there are multiglyphs, it would nullify some of the results of computational attacks that assume one-to-one correspondence between VMS glyphs and alphabetic letters, but the possibility of multiglyphs has to be considered, and if the studies have to be redone, they have to be redone. I don't get the feeling the VMS is highly verbose, however. The patterns don't seem to lean that way (more study is needed but the repeating patterns within them that don't seem to behave as highly verbose, as far as I can see... so far).
In fact, in years of looking at the text (and trying to manipulate it in a thousand ways), there's only one character that seems to me to behave like a null and even that one I'm not sure of (maybe it's a letter, marker, or modifer). I have a couple of non-null ideas (one in particular) that might explain the behavior of that particular glyph.
I do think the spaces are contrived. I think VMS tokens are probably syllables in some sense, not words. I've suspected it for a long time, have never quite been able to confirm it, many have disagreed with me, but some work I've been doing the last couple of years seems to point even more in that direction. I'll keep pounding away at it until I have an answer.
.
Reduplication can be explained in many ways and over the years I've been collecting manuscript samples with a large amount of repetition and reduplication, and there's more of it than I suspected. When I have time, I'll post the examples. Even if the VMS is not reduplication in the same sense as the examples (which are of many different kinds), reduplication can be simulated simply by altering spaces and grouping glyphs as multiglyphs.
As for multiglyphs, I've written about this on blogs and have posted charts and I've been investigating it for two reasons: Studying possible multiglyphs will either eventually reveal if they exist and what they are or, if they are sparse or nonexistent, they will hopefully reveal enlightening patterns (some of which hopefully are linguistic in nature).
In fact, it was my study of multiglyph patterns (without the assumption that they are multiglyphs, but just looking at them as patterns) that led me to the language I used to create the almost-substitution sample I posted in René's thread (creating Voynich-like text from natural language).
.
If there are multiglyphs, it would nullify some of the results of computational attacks that assume one-to-one correspondence between VMS glyphs and alphabetic letters, but the possibility of multiglyphs has to be considered, and if the studies have to be redone, they have to be redone. I don't get the feeling the VMS is highly verbose, however. The patterns don't seem to lean that way (more study is needed but the repeating patterns within them that don't seem to behave as highly verbose, as far as I can see... so far).
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