27-05-2016, 05:56 PM
(27-05-2016, 05:26 PM)VViews wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So are we back to Jacques Guy's Mandarin hypothesis?
I wonder where Jacques Guy is by the way: he was one of my favorite out of the contributors to the list, waaay back when I used to subscribe and just lurk around. Haven't read anything from him in years... has he given up on the Voynich?
Stating that something behaves in a certain way is not the same as having a Mandarin hypothesis.
René gave good examples, but like many examples, there are other languages that behave this way besides Mandarin and Mandarin happens to be convenient for explaining it. All languages start with a certain basic "rule set" upon which the rest is built, or there would be no common ground; it would all be memorization and too difficult for people to learn. Look how people struggle to learn gender-based languages (a boatload of memorization and the main reason Esperanto was not widely adopted). Now imagine if the basic building blocks were equally arbitrary.
The structure of the VMS is similar to old languages and eastern languages moreso than contemporary languages but... that doesn't necessarily mean it's natural language. Natural languages in their "purest" form and constructed languages have much in common.