The Voynich Ninja

Quote:Anton: do you mean that the "i" shape is so uncommon in contemporary scripts?

Not that exclusively, rather that the pair of "c" and "inclined-i" shapes was picked out for serving as basis for constructing many shapes of the Voynich alphabet. Once again, the issue that I highlight is not whether the Voynichese glyphs do or do not appear in conemporary scripts. It is whether there is something special in the particular pair of "c" and "inclined-i" that it was chosen out of many other possible opportunities.

Quote:A person does have two hands all by himself.

That's true, but they can't be both left at the same time.

How do we know that the letter strokes and shapes are the same thing?

The letter o might be simply the shape of a circle which happens to be written with two strokes. The writer could have learnt to write one script and simply repurposed the strokes they knew to write the Voynich script.

We don't know that, but the discourse of this thread pre-supposes that they are.

Anton,
I'm also intrigued by the way that although most Latin hands of the time create a page in which verticals are strong, and give a page a structure that, overall, accents the vertical, the Voynich script doesn't.

'Humanist' hand doesn't so much, either  - but then positing a renaissance humanist hand pretty obviously conflicts with the resounding lack of the Renaissance elite's favoured themes and forms for imagery -  not to mention lack of their habits in page layout and so forth.

Other scripts also give even weight to vertical, horizontal and curved lines as the Vms script does.

Two obvious examples are  cursive Sephardi hand of the thirteenth century - and Greek.

Cursive hands, I think, are more likely to inform the Voynich text than formal book-hands and I don't think we can ignore, either, how very awkward it feels to write 'gallows' in the usual Latin left-to-right movement.  They just don't flow.  Most people I've seen actually end up writing them in the stroke order you'd write ideographs such as Chinese.

What I'm trying to get to ...  is that the two elements on which you concentrate should also be very common in any other informing script (such as cursive Greek, or -Hebrew etc.)

This because I suspect that wasn't so much the case that Voynich script was 'built' from those elements, but that a person trying to write the matter in the manuscript had to deal with wholly unfamiliar script themselves - and so by using employing elements already familiar from their own natural script, they were able to  render the appearance of the original fairly well.

That mightn't be too clear.  Let me give an example.  If you've never learned to write Chinese characters, then when you try to do it, it is natural to define what you see by breaking it down into things most like what you are used to writing.  So you'll define this element as 'a comma' and another as 'o' or 't with a crossbar'... and compile the figure in that way.. Your hand knows how to write 'comma' and 't' and so forth, and writing relies on muscle-memory quite as much as on what the eye sees.

 The  result of your efforts would be immediately obvious to a native as being written by someone unskilled - a child or novice. But to another person of the same level, or another foreigner, it might probably look pretty good. And I wish I knew who it was, but one researcher made the brilliant comment that Voynichese didn't act like writing but like drawings of writing.

So I think those two elements aren't the building blocks of Voynichese though they could be a useful indication of the original's provenance.

Personally, it's a real battle not to hypothesise publicly about whether the  Voynich script may not be a tidied-up version of cursive Hebrew or non-standard Greek script (not language).. perhaps from southern Italy... but I don't like theories, the script is nmb .. and who'd listen, anyway.

Well, once again, this thread purposefully pre-supposes that the characters are constructed: it's just a hypothesis trail to be explored. So, if they are not, then the whole discussion of this thread gets void.

But there is one point that favours the idea of the characters' being constructed. While "simpler" characters (like r, o, n, etc.) may just accidentally have the look of being constructed from basic shapes (or may have obtained that appearance due to the process that you describe in your example), there are rare "artifact" characters which... well, which pretty much look like they are synthetical indeed. And I mean not just benched gallows - just have a look at Wladimir's table in the parallel thread.

(12-06-2017, 12:09 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

That mightn't be too clear.  Let me give an example.  If you've never learned to write Chinese characters, then when you try to do it, it is natural to define what you see by breaking it down into things most like what you are used to writing.  So you'll define this element as 'a comma' and another as 'o' or 't with a crossbar'... and compile the figure in that way.. Your hand knows how to write 'comma' and 't' and so forth, and writing relies on muscle-memory quite as much as on what the eye sees.

...

It was clear the first time.


Having looked at every glyph in the manuscript at least three times when I was creating my transcript, I observed that the most naturally-written glyphs in the VMS, the places where the pen seems to stutter and hesitate the least, tend to be  EVA-y, the tail at the end of EVA-daiin, and, most of the time, EVA-ell and EVA-o. Unfortunately, this doesn't tell us much about the scribes' native scripts, since these shapes are common to many slphabets, including Latin, Greek, Arabic, etc.


I agree that these are scribes who write cursive rather than book hands. Those trained in book hands have quite different habits and the VMS scribes don't even hold the pen at the right angle to write book hand. One can learn book hand shapes (the marginalia on the last page has a combination of cursive and book shapes but decidedly does not have a book hand style) without necessarily being able to put them together in the right way for the result to be a book hand. The VMS scribes either don't know book hand style or probably aren't any good at it. Holding the pen correctly is the first thing one learns so that the thick and thin shapes are in balance and distinctive from one another, which is not the case in the VMS.


The "tick", the foot on the base of the ascenders is significant, however. I've spent years trying to figure out if it's meaningful because in some of the alphabets I've repeatedly mentioned in blogs, the tick, the "foot", adds to or changes the meaning of the letter, but... the added foot doesn't appear to follow any logical patterns in the VMS that I can tell so far.


However, if the tick mark is not meaningful in the linguistic sense, then it becomes very meaningful in the provenance/history-of-the-scribes sense, because if it's not meaningful in terms of altering how we are supposed to comprehend the ascenders (gallows) and some of the EVA-r glyphs, then it's a "tell" signal that the scribes may have been used to adding a tick in their native script because there would be no reason whatsoever for someone who WASN'T used to writing the tick to add "extra work" or to invent a foot to add to an encrypted glyph by adding a meaningless and very small tick. The ascenders are distinguishable from one another without the tick.


I'm also of two feelings about this because even though I'm fairly sure the tick on the ascenders does not denote a different character/meaning, it seems as though the tick on EVA-ell MIGHT. I am really not sure. It's another one of those drives-you-crazy details (NATVIEE–nothing about the VMS is ever easy) that's difficult to sort out.


In terms of line and letter spacing, the VMS script seems closer to Greek miniscule than most other forms but I don't know if this is an aritfact of writing in an unfamiliar script (encoded scripts often do not look like the person's normal handwriting) or because it's characteristic of the scribes' native script.

(12-06-2017, 06:56 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, once again, this thread purposefully pre-supposes that the characters are constructed: it's just a hypothesis trail to be explored. So, if they are not, then the whole discussion of this thread gets void.
.....

I'm not sure if i understand correctly. Do you mean geometric patterns combined to letters ? Or are "basic shapes" something else ?

(12-06-2017, 10:13 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(12-06-2017, 06:56 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, once again, this thread purposefully pre-supposes that the characters are constructed: it's just a hypothesis trail to be explored. So, if they are not, then the whole discussion of this thread gets void.
.....

I'm not sure if i understand correctly. Do you mean geometric patterns combined to letters ? Or are "basic shapes" something else ?

Just check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it'll make the approach clear. Specifically, in this thread, I'm speaking about e and i as base shapes. Adding modifiers transforms them into other glyphs. Like, e plus tail yields s, etc.

The term "constructed" is more applicable to scripts as a whole. Characters, which are graphs, are per se always constructed out of primitives. The shape, the way the scribe actually puts the graph to paper, hence "what it looks like" is called a glyph.

If you mean "invented", or "made up", that's an interesting point. Thinking of it, only two scripts are accepted to be original inventions, sumerian and early mesoamerican. Chinese and egyptian are up to debate. All other scripts are deemed evolved, derived or adopted from, or inspired by existing writing systems.

At a certain point in time someone sat down and constructed e.g. the glagolithic alphabet. It is assumed the person or group was literate in a previous writing system already, otherwise it would be equivalent to invent writing itself.

There are only so many primitives. It seems virtually impossible to invent a writing system out of the blue, without resemblance to anything already known.

All of this implies a writing system, not a cipher, and an underlying language, which of course may be constructed as well.

Of course I mean "invented", and when I say "constructed" it means not only "graphically decmposed to", but also "purposefully composed out of" (basic shapes as primitives).