25-01-2016, 09:43 PM
(This post was last modified: 25-01-2016, 09:44 PM by Emma May Smith.)
Sure, I get that. But how do we measure that against other languages?
We can say that Voynich words get shorter but we can't say that they are shorter on average than words in other languages. The problem is that we may not be counting the same thing.
Think of it like this: Japanese written in hirigana combines a whole syllable into a single character, whereas Japanese written in romaji has one sound a character (roughly, for the sake of convenience we will say it is true). Romaji words are longer than the same words in hirigana by number of characters, but the same by number of sounds. Simply counting characters is not a linguistic fact so long as we do not know what those characters stand for.
One more example: English and Greenlandic use the same five vowel letters from the Roman script (a, e, i, o, u), yet while English has several times that number of vowels, Greenlandic actually has fewer (three vowels and a diphthong). They use the same script in different ways to display the vowels (or not display in the case of English), and so simply counting vowel characters would not even then be a linguistic fact.
What I ultimately wish to say is this: we must have a model for not only what we think the discrete characters are within the script, but also what they stand for, before we can make a comparison. That model may well be wrong (we can try lots of models) but at least it would make a comparison valid. We might believe that [daiin] is five sounds, three sounds, or even only two sounds, but each guess could be measured as to how linguistically natural it is. If all possible models are unlinguistic then it may well weigh against the natural language hypothesis, but if some are more linguistic than others then it may weigh in favour of that model over others.
We can say that Voynich words get shorter but we can't say that they are shorter on average than words in other languages. The problem is that we may not be counting the same thing.
Think of it like this: Japanese written in hirigana combines a whole syllable into a single character, whereas Japanese written in romaji has one sound a character (roughly, for the sake of convenience we will say it is true). Romaji words are longer than the same words in hirigana by number of characters, but the same by number of sounds. Simply counting characters is not a linguistic fact so long as we do not know what those characters stand for.
One more example: English and Greenlandic use the same five vowel letters from the Roman script (a, e, i, o, u), yet while English has several times that number of vowels, Greenlandic actually has fewer (three vowels and a diphthong). They use the same script in different ways to display the vowels (or not display in the case of English), and so simply counting vowel characters would not even then be a linguistic fact.
What I ultimately wish to say is this: we must have a model for not only what we think the discrete characters are within the script, but also what they stand for, before we can make a comparison. That model may well be wrong (we can try lots of models) but at least it would make a comparison valid. We might believe that [daiin] is five sounds, three sounds, or even only two sounds, but each guess could be measured as to how linguistically natural it is. If all possible models are unlinguistic then it may well weigh against the natural language hypothesis, but if some are more linguistic than others then it may weigh in favour of that model over others.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)