Re: AW: Voynichese = Old/unknown/extinct kind of Chinese dialect

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [stolfi:] Moreover, the very first sample of Chinese pinyin
    > which I got had this repetition on line 2: 
    > ... ping2 jia1 zhi1 yi1 yi1 ba1 ba1 yi1 nian2 chu1 ...
    > 
    > [Monsieur Jacques:] I cannot figure that out. This is half
    > Classical Chinese at least (zhi1 = modern de). But year
    > 11,881???? From the beginning of year 11,881? 
    > I throw the towel in.

Actually you got it almost right; the year is 1881. Try inserting a
full stop between the first two "yi1"s... 8-)

Sorry for wasting your time. But I won't apologize for cheating ---
recall that there is no punctuation in the VMs, nor (IIRC) in
Chinese texts of that period.

Here is the full quote:

  lu3 xun4 shi4 zhong1 guo2 jin4 dai4 shi3 shang4 zui4 you3 ying3 xiang3 li4
  de wen2 xue2 jia1 gen1 pi1 ping2 jia1 zhi1 yi1 yi1 ba1 ba1 yi1 nian2
  chu1 sheng1 zai4 zhe4 jiang1 shao4 xing1 yi2 ge xiang1 dang1 fu4 yu4 de
  jia1 ting2 li3 tong2 nian2 de shi2 hou yin1 wei4 zu3 fu4 ru4 yu4 fu4 qin
  sheng1 bing4 jia1 ting2 de jing1 ji4 qing2 kuang4 tu1 ran2 bian4 de hen3
  qiong2 kun4 zhe4 zhong3 you2 fu4 yu4 bian4 dao4 qiong2 kun4 de jing1 li4
  rang4 lu3 xun4 ti3 yan4 le bu4 tong2 de sheng1 huo2 zhe4 dui4 ta1 yi3 hou4
  de wen2 xue2 chuang4 zuo4 you3 hen3 da4 de ying3 xiang3 ta1 tong2 nian2 de
  sheng1 huo2 he2 hui2 yi4 dou1 cheng2 le ta1 xie3 zuo4 zui4 hao3 de cai2
  liao4 yin1 wei4 ta1 fu4 qin jing1 chang2 sheng bing4 lu3 xun4 cong2 xiao3
  jiu4 ren4 shi le bu4 shao3 zhong1 yi

The source is some Chinese reader for beginners, by the University of
Michigan --- which I once found in netland, but seems to have
disappeared. Anyway, it was probably not a good sample, since the
vocabulary must have been intentionally simplified.

    > What I find puzzling in VMS is that gallows may occur intruding
    > into ch or next to it. ch is, in my view, a single letter.
    > Gallows, then, should be a suprasegmental feature, like the
    > tilde in Portuguese indicating a nasal vowel.
    
Or, someone may well chose to write the "ts" phoneme as a T
superimposed on an S.

    > And there are four gallows.
    
It is not clear whether <p> and <f> are distinct letters. At present,
I would bet that they are merely "capitalized" variants of <t> and <k>
respectively --- except that the ones with hooked arm may stand for
<te> and <ke>.

On the other hand, for statistical reasons, I am almost convinced that
<te> and <ke> are single letters, as are <che> and <she>.

IIRC, there are no platform gallows (<cth> etc.) in the "key-like
sequences", which may be a hint that they are not single letters.

(There are no <ke> and <te> either in those sequences, which is bad
news; but the author probably viewed them as letter+modifier
combinations, like hiragana's "ga" or Portuguese "ã". Note that even
though "ã" and "á" are linguistically distinct letters in Portuguese,
I have never, never seen them used as labels in itemized lists...)

    > And they are almost always found on the initial words of
    > paragraphs (ever seen a paragraph without a gallows?)
   
In fact, as John Grove pointed out, the first word of a line often
looks like it had a bogus gallows tacked onto it. I haven't checked
(oops...) but it seems that this phenomenon accounts for a large
fraction of the "anomalous" words with two gallows.

Perhaps line-initial words get prefixed with other letters too, but
those cases would not look anomalous. Ditto for any words without
gallows that got "Grovified" with a gallows.

    > Quite some time ago, I had floated this idea that the gallows
    > had the same function as capitalizing the initials of words. And
    > that VMS had four sets of capital letters: masculine singular,
    > masculine plural, feminine singular, feminine plural. A gallows,
    > then, would be no more than "hit one of the four Shift keys".

It may be.  If it is an artificial language, anything is possible...

    > But the VMS has driven me insane, as it did Newbold and others.
    > Don't pay any attention to my ravings.

That's OK; I suppose the Egyptian hieroglyphics drove many people
insane, too.  It goes with the job...

All the best,

--stolfi