My thoughts on the VMS

[ThomasCoon]

1) If you are searching for a natural language for Voynichese and believe the VMS spaces are true, you are almost certainly limited to agglutinative and polysynthetic languages because of the "morphology" of Voynich words (see the <qot> forms). This eliminates most of the languages in Europe.

I see your point. This seems to be consistent with where some linguistic research about the ms is going.

Interesting, Marco; could you tell me which researchers think this?

Contrived spaces aren't going to result in VMS-like text on their own. That's why I suggested possible addition of null characters.

A null or two would cancel out many of the "tells" that would identify text as a contrived-space system.

Plus, nulls don't have to be nulls in every instance. They can be positionally dependent to distinguish them from ones that might have linguistic (or structural) meaning.

In the VMS, the g is at the ends of words far more often than one would expect, even in languages with many words ending in vowels. And o is at the beginnings of words with unusual frequency, as well. If they were nulls or semi-nulls, they could be put there to obscure contrived (or arbitrary) spacing.

That could very well turn out to be correct. I see what you mean, JKP. Thanks for the idea; I'll keep it in mind when I try to break down the text.

Thomas,
What Marco says is correct.

This seems to be consistent with where some linguistic research about the ms is going.

I cannot give you links to all the persons concerned because I don't know which ones Marco meant - no names mentioned.

I do know that Don Hoffmann has been exploring agglutinative structures, of not exactly 'languages' in the formal sense.

I've also very recently published on other forms of text - technical-instructional - which employ strongly abbreviated forms and can be 'agglutinative' - but again not the formal sense.

We have similar forms in every day life e.g take 2gr NaCl.   But similar patterns emerge with any number of comparable technical-instructional texts including ones I've tested out such as numerical-coordinate series, or helmsman's orders, or knitting patterns and so forth.   If you wrote Latitude and Longitude without superscript you'd get, say 32o45N 33o24W ..
Given that (imo) the map is derived from a Hellenistic one and much of the imagery also, and on one folio is depicted what I have reasonable grounds to believe is an aid for the cosmographer, the Lat.Long. example isn't necessarily hypothetical, either.

Thanks Diane - I'll look on your blog for the post. You're right that certain patterns would emerge in texts of the same genre, and that sounds highly interesting about the cosmographer's map