Mauro wrote:Actually, prefixes, infixes and suffixes, everything is possible. But one also needs roots! and this is the problem with Voynichese: after removing prefixes and suffixes most of the times nothing remains.
...That's only true if we keep looking at it through the lens of someone desperately searching for a spoken European language. But what if we try to look at it as a compressed data structure or a cipher? In such a system, a "root" doesn't necessarily need to be 3 or 4 letters long to trigger a word with complete meaning. Sometimes a single character in the middle (like a gallows) is enough to act as a pointer or a category index. Why do we have to fixate solely on classical phonetic linguistics? I really don't get this "therapeutic stubbornness", as if someone were forcing us to.
Mauro wrote:This has been proposed many times, up to Voynichese being a philosophical language. The problem is fleshing this idea out.
That's exactly the point "fleshing it out". And that's precisely what I'm working on. I'm not just spitballing hypotheses here; I've started measuring this mathematically. From my data tests, a crazy asymmetry emerges: if you change a word's prefix, the mathematical probability of a specific suffix attaching (instead of another one) completely flips. There is a rigid interdependence between the beginning and the end of the word. I'm finishing up the data prep and will publish it shortly, but I can already tell you that the numbers show they aren't just gluing pieces together at random. There is an underlying grammar dictating strict rules. Can I count on your help to "stress-test" and try to break my data with your analytical rigor?
Mauro wrote:Well, no. A language being agglutinative is one thing, while having productive word reduplication is a different thing. Neither implies the other one.
You're certainly the expert here, and I apologize for my "layman's" inaccuracies... from a strictly linguistic standpoint, the two things aren't necessarily linked. I misspoke. I didn't mean that agglutination causes reduplication. My comparison with Indonesian was only meant to show that both of these "anomalies" (suffix chains and doubled words) coexist perfectly fine in non-European languages. And they work seamlessly without having to drag in the usual excuse of a scribal error or a "distracted monk". There is conditional logic behind it... And if you ask me why Indonesian specifically, besides the fact that both indices—the VMS one and the Indonesian one—match up, my answer is that it's a natural language that uses reduplication as a standard grammatical rule (for instance, to form plurals: anak = child, anak-anak = children, or to intensify verbs). In European languages, repeating two identical words in a row is either a mistake or a statistical rarity (the rate is virtually zero). Instead, Indonesian scientifically proves that in a real, fully functional language, a reduplication rate around 2x higher than chance is completely normal and structured.
What do you think?
Alfredo