30-05-2017, 10:20 PM
(30-05-2017, 10:09 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.While there have been years of discussion whether the Voynich MS is cipher or language, it is always overlooked that the two are not contradictory. If it's a cipher, there is a language. Using invented characters to write a language is a cipher (simple substitution).
The alternative to language (for me) is: 'meaningless'.
I agree that it is possible to argue that a cipher text represents in some way language. But I wouldn't argue that the cipher text is language. You need to decode the cipher text to reveal the meaning of the text and if the cipher system is more advanced also to reveal the language like properties of the original text. Normally the level of coincidence is increased for a cipher text. For instance a polyalphabetic cipher can be used to equalize the frequencies of the letters used. Therefore a cipher text would look more random then a text using natural language.
Moreover a cipher text can use dummy letters and dummy words to obfuscate a code breaker. This is what D'Imperio means with a cipher concealed in a longer dummy message. The way she describes the generation of the dummy words sounds to me like a perfect description of the auto-copying method: "The scribe, faced with the task of thinking up a large number of such dummy sequences, would naturally tend to repeat parts of neighboring strings with various small changes and additions to fill out the line until the next message-bearing word or phrase" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. p. 31). If you assume that one line of the text of the Voynich manuscript encodes one plain text letter or word you would expect something like an auto-copied text.
I would not say that the alternative to language is that something is meaningless. Language is not the only way to transport meaning. For instance also a table with some numbers can have meaning if the context is known. It is also possible to use letters to draw an image. The most simple example of that type is an emoticon. In this case the result is also not meaningless.
For the Voynich manuscript the glyphs [p] or [f] are often used at the beginning of a paragraph. In this cases the gallow glyphs are used to highlight the start of a page or paragraph. Sometimes the gallow glyphs are even written in a weird form to amplify this effect. Other glyphs are common at the beginning or end of a line or at the start or end a glyph group. For instance most times the [q] -glyph is used word initial etc. Therefore the [q]-glyph stands at least for the beginning of a word. The question is if the [q]- glyph has some additional meaning. If this is not the case the glyphs are used to draw a picture of a text. In this case the glyphs just stand for what we see. A nearly perfect image of a text.