28-09-2016, 03:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 28-09-2016, 03:24 PM by ThomasCoon.)
Hi Diane,
Both are excellent questions. I'll leave the first question to the others because the second one sounds like fun
Statistical analysis can help us because all languages have certain recognizable patterns. For example, if I sent you some Cicero in Latin, you'd see that almost all words ended in a very limited number of letters (-a, -i, -o, -m, -s) which indicates the use of case endings. If I sent you a paragraph of Turkish text, you could pick out the units that repeatedly appear in long words (-et-, -le-, -mek, etc.) and determine that the language is agglutinative (i.e. it stacks endings upon each other to form words). And if you didn't speak Spanish, you could observe the slightly-changing forms of hablar in a text (hablar, hablas, hablamos, hablan, hablo) and hypothesize that this may be a verb conjugation.
When we statistically analyze Voynich, we are looking for these types of linguistic patterns. Some of us (like Emma May Smith) search for phonetic patterns that may indicate what sounds Voynichese uses and what combinations they frequently appear in, while I began searching for grammatical patterns among groups of words. Statistics can be used to show us that something is significant, or that patterns keep reappearing which deserve our attention. If we find those patterns in Voynich like the ones I just described above, we could easily reduce the number of possible language families and maybe even pin-point the underlying language.
Both are excellent questions. I'll leave the first question to the others because the second one sounds like fun
Statistical analysis can help us because all languages have certain recognizable patterns. For example, if I sent you some Cicero in Latin, you'd see that almost all words ended in a very limited number of letters (-a, -i, -o, -m, -s) which indicates the use of case endings. If I sent you a paragraph of Turkish text, you could pick out the units that repeatedly appear in long words (-et-, -le-, -mek, etc.) and determine that the language is agglutinative (i.e. it stacks endings upon each other to form words). And if you didn't speak Spanish, you could observe the slightly-changing forms of hablar in a text (hablar, hablas, hablamos, hablan, hablo) and hypothesize that this may be a verb conjugation.
When we statistically analyze Voynich, we are looking for these types of linguistic patterns. Some of us (like Emma May Smith) search for phonetic patterns that may indicate what sounds Voynichese uses and what combinations they frequently appear in, while I began searching for grammatical patterns among groups of words. Statistics can be used to show us that something is significant, or that patterns keep reappearing which deserve our attention. If we find those patterns in Voynich like the ones I just described above, we could easily reduce the number of possible language families and maybe even pin-point the underlying language.