10-07-2026, 09:41 PM
Hi,
New user, I'm sure this idea has been debunked already but on the tiny chance that it hasn't been:
What if what we currently consider to be "letters" aren't letters at all but akin to "strokes" in hanzi? So no connection to phonemes, but each word is still a word, or at least a concept akin to a single Chinese character. This could explain why the inventory of characters is so low (and strangely distributed) for a natural language (Hanzi has around 8 or so basic strokes, which combined in 2d space make a character, Voynichese could be similar but in 1d), and no attempt at pulling phonemic values from them has been successful.
Obviously there is absolutely nothing in the historic record akin to this, and I'm not even sure if this has been repeated in the world of conlanging, but it could theoretically work as a system?
This would however make it significantly harder to actually solve, as the "words" are then relatively arbitrary when it comes to associated meanings.
Any thoughts or ideas as to how this could be proved/disproved?
This is pure and idle speculation, but I'm trying to think of ways that aren't the extremely debunked substitutions, but still would (I believe) conform with the statistical analyses.
New user, I'm sure this idea has been debunked already but on the tiny chance that it hasn't been:
What if what we currently consider to be "letters" aren't letters at all but akin to "strokes" in hanzi? So no connection to phonemes, but each word is still a word, or at least a concept akin to a single Chinese character. This could explain why the inventory of characters is so low (and strangely distributed) for a natural language (Hanzi has around 8 or so basic strokes, which combined in 2d space make a character, Voynichese could be similar but in 1d), and no attempt at pulling phonemic values from them has been successful.
Obviously there is absolutely nothing in the historic record akin to this, and I'm not even sure if this has been repeated in the world of conlanging, but it could theoretically work as a system?
This would however make it significantly harder to actually solve, as the "words" are then relatively arbitrary when it comes to associated meanings.
Any thoughts or ideas as to how this could be proved/disproved?
This is pure and idle speculation, but I'm trying to think of ways that aren't the extremely debunked substitutions, but still would (I believe) conform with the statistical analyses.