Folder: MAIL/folders-splitted/vm-folders/voynich-98 From jim@mail.rand.org Thu Oct 8 01:33 EST 1998 Message-Id: References: <361399B5.57FF3800@sprint.ca> <3614C69C.545F@alphalink.com.au> Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 23:23:18 +0200 From: Zandbergen@t-online.de (Rene) To: voynich@rand.org Subject: Re: The Nature of the Analyst (fwd) Frogguy replied to John Grove: > > [John quoting Currier:] All the letters containing an initial > > "c"-curve are also the only letters that can be preceded in the same > > word by the little letter that looks > > like "c," e.g. , . On the other hand, the letters and > > <2> (which have very high frequencies) can *never* be preceded by > > , *ever*; they are instead preceded by ." > > or . Exactly right. And in two sections of the Ms, can approach or <2> if there is an in between. There, and are quire frequent. (EVA: eol/eor, Currier: COL/COR). > > Now the fact that he saw these things as 'two-stroke' characters > > seems promising to me -- as it supports my observations. However, it > > may simply be that Currier was employed in roughly the same field as > > I work in - and thus analyzes things from the same perspective. What > > was his job? If he was a crytanalyst > > He was. But I am a linguist, and I reported the same phenomenon. I did > not know about Currier at the time, either. So that makes his > observation all the more credible. When results converge... > > > Jorge, on the other hand, has attacked the VMS from a linguistic > > point of view > > Jorge is a computer scientist. So now that's three viewpoints that > converge. So it makes plain sense. But of course, in the Roman alphabet, we see much the same. Letters are composed of a few basic strokes. Same with Arabic, by the way. It is even more true for cuneiform (anyone ever run Sukhotin on that?). I suspect it to be less obvious in the non-alphabetic scripts from the Orient. > > - there are just not enough characters in just the > > right places to form a simple alphabetic language > > Yes there are! Enough, yes! All transcription alphabets have between 20 and 36 characters. But perhaps that's because the people who designed the transcription alphabets wanted to have this number. > E.g. in Rotokas, t is pronounced ts or s before i. Very much like Dutch!! In the cases where English and French would pronounce the 't' as 's' or '', Dutch would use 'ts' which is reduced to 's' in day-to-day speech. (Examples: nation, emotion) > In Piraha t is pronounced either plain t, or t > accompanied by a bilabial trill (the choice is > apparently at the speaker's whim) What's a bilabial trill??? I think I could make one but I'd probably need to use my fingers... > > There are three things > > about the lines that make me believe the line itself is a functional > > unit. The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of lines are > > markedly different from the counts of the same characters internally. > > That is normal. The frequency counts of the beginnings and endings of > lines in Italian are markedly different from the medial ones. Why? Jacques, Jacques, do you know what you are saying? This is true for Italian sentences or words. But if a sentence wraps around to the next line, you don't expect any non-standard behaviour at the beginning of the new line. Now if the writer is recording phonetic speech and makes a mental pause at the start of each new line... > No, if there is a cipher there I think it can only be a Bacon > cipher, but not binary. Well, some of the statistics are just screaming out loud that there is a binary Bacon cipher beneath it all. Look at it like this. Given the current character, what can the next one be (in EVA): o/qo, ch/sh, o/a, in/iin, l/r, e/ee, y/dy, p/f, s/d... Still, I would agree that it's pretty far-fetched. Cheers, Rene