My thoughts on the VMS

[ThomasCoon]

I don't understand what the argument is for arbitrary spaces. Word structure is very strong and character position is often dependent on beginning, middle, and end.

Given that the writer of the manuscript was familiar with the concept of the word divider we must begin from the assumption that he was using it to divide words. There needs to be a strong argument contrary to this before we discard them as arbitrary.

Word structure is such a strong feature that it is one of the few problems in the text that we can easily think about. Starting by discarding it leaves us much worse off.

Emma,
There are two main reasons why I believe spaces are arbitrary. Here is the bigger one:

In order to explain the "morphology" of a group of words that look similar, it seems you would need (at best) an agglutinative language like Turkish, or (at worst) a polysynthetic language like Cherokee, to create all the different forms:

qot
qoteo
qoteol
qotcho
qotchol
qotcheo
qotcheol
qotol
etc.

I have not heard a linguistic explanation that can account for all the variation of <qot> and <qok> in my above chart, but I would be open to hearing one from the people who support the "valid spaces" side.