(12-02-2016, 06:38 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I more or less agree with your thoughts on vowels. My opinion is that [o] is a vowel and that [a] and [y] together make up some kind of vowel. You can think of [o] and [a/y] as the "cardinal" vowels which [e] and [i] sequences modify. However, both [e] sequences and sometimes [ch, sh] appear in the place of vowels because of [y] deletion. Once we have those basic identifications as vowels (whatever their specific values) we can syllabify.
It has occurred to me before that <y> could be some kind of variant of <a>, <e>, or perhaps both, since it does not occur in the same environment. Maybe it is a sort of "reduced vowel", like schwa or something similar, which <a> and <e> become in word-initial or word-final position. I will try to read over your specific ideas on this subject (I just saw your blog yesterday) and reply to them soon.
(12-02-2016, 07:01 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm afraid that I am of a rather different opinion. I hope that's OK
My main point is about realising what are deductions and what are assumptions.
That the MS has a text in some plain language is an assumption. One may (tentatively) justify this of course, but it remains an assumption.
That each 'word' in the MS represents a plain text word is a second assumption.
Well, okay, but arguably any idea about anything could be called an "assumption". At some point we consider the evidence for something strong enough that we treat it as a fact, even though we really never know anything with 100% certainty.
Basically, I see no evidence whatsoever indicating that the VMS is written in cipher, and about a million reasons to think it isn't written in cipher, so I don't have a big problem assuming that it's not written in cipher, just as I have no problem "assuming" that the VMS was not made by monkeys randomly flinging ink and paint at blank pieces of parchment, or some other such scenario.
By contrast, the VMS text clearly has many properties of unencrypted natural language text, and I don't see any compelling reason to think it can't be unencrypted natural language text.
Treating language and cipher as equally likely possibilities when the evidence clearly and overwhelmingly favors one over the other does not make any sense to me.
I also don't think it can be written in any known natural language, because VMS words have a clearly defined structure which does not seem to precisely match that of any known natural language. It certainly does not match any "major" language of Eurasia, as these have all been tried.
Realistically that leaves unknown natural language, artificial language, or language-like gibberish as the main contenders. I think other evidence strongly favors the first of these options, so I pursue that option, though realistically most of what I wrote above remains valid under any scenario that acknowledges that the text does in fact have at least some language-like properties.
To me, all of this is really just a matter of following the evidence where it leads, rather than ignoring the evidence or assuming that all the evidence is somehow just misleading us.