My thoughts on the VMS

[-JKP-]

JKP, Thomas, thank you for your work on the text analysis, for bringing up the issues of spaces, null words, word structure in the VMs etc. I've found many important points for myself, moreover, I want to do my bit, too. 
I've made a comparative table of word combinations (pairs) with the two VMs words: ol and qol. 


This table shows only the matched combinations, but there are many other matched and not matched ones in the VMs. Anyway, I didn't expect 100% matching between them. Is that enough to conclude that ol and qol are the same words and q-glyph is a null character? Honestly, it seemed to me very promising idea in spite of that this table can't be a master card.  It could be successful for my theory, as well (I wont go into details here).
 I want to pay your attention to the word combinations from the group of "okedy" and "otedy" words. The difference is in e, ee, eee, ch, and, of course, in the "q"-presence. There are all the combinations (if I didn't miss some):
1) 
okedy okedy
okedy okeedy 
... [part of the list deleted for brevity]
qoteedy qokeedy
qotchdy qokchdy

Personally I find the variety of these incredibly similar word pairs strange. I'm at a loss and can't decide whether they are only two real word combinations or all these in their distinctions. I think, it could be a stronger argument in favour of the supposition about null "q"-character. On the other hand, in this case, if we mentally take away all the q-characters we get You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. 
The excessive richness with these words in the "balneo-" and "recies-" sections is too strange, even for incantations.
Ultimately, I'm still confused. Maybe, someone has a fresh explanation for this phenomenon.

One idea is that the "o" characters (or SOME of the "o" characters, possibly depending on position) are nulls. Considering the large number of "o" glyphs and their frequent position at the beginnings of vords, it should be strongly considered, but... there may be other explanations.

Single characters are used in many ways in natural languages...

• to denote plurals,
  
• to indicate masculine or feminine,
  
• to create emphasis,
  
• to represent aspiration,
  
• to take the place of accents (as the "e" is sometimes used to represent a missing stroke in a letter or diacritical mark, as in oe for ø, or ue for ü),
  
• to indicate a definite article in the same way we use "the _____" in English, or
  
• to indicate a capital letter or a name.
  

As part of this kind of investigation, one should check how often these words appear at the beginnings of paragraphs. If spaces are "not always real" there's the possibility of the 4 functioning by itself (as in "et") or, alternately, as belonging to the preceding word.


1. As far as it functioning by itself (if the lack of space after 4 or 4o is artificial), there is a precedent for this in the Latin and Anglo-Saxon languages (and, to some extend in Middle English). The & symbol (which often is written to resemble a Z or 7 with a crossbar) can sometimes be by itself and is sometimes attached to the next word. In Latin, it serves two purposes: it can mean "et" as in & (and) but it can also mean "et" as in the two letters being expressed as an abbreviation at the beginning of a word that starts with "et".

It doesn't occur frequently enough in the VMS for "&" to be the most likely explanation. So what might be a better line of thought?


2. Some languages will have a letter or syllable at the beginning or end of the word to denote a grammatical unit such as a noun or to give emphasis or specificity (as we use "the"). Consider that the distinction between upper- and lowercase letters was not made in the same way in ancient languages as it is now. We denote capitals with a taller and often more elaborate shape, but old languages sometimes used other methods.

In Scandinavian, a suffix is added to the end of a noun to indicate specificity. In some Mediterranean languages, a prefix is added. In some Asian languages, a radical is added before the main character, or two characters are combined.