(01-03-2018, 12:35 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I find it hard to understand all this enthousiasm.
I think they're wrong. But I like the Turkic theory and want to know how they've fared. If they've managed to mimic a language, even the wrong one, that's interesting.
Forgive me, but don’t Old Turkic scripts normally run right-to-left?
I get that agglutinative languages bear a superficial resemblance to Voynichese, but would anyone like to demonstrate a closer, structural similarity?
Quote:Hubert Dale: Forgive me, but don’t Old Turkic scripts normally run right-to-left?
The old Turkic language and the script are two different things.
The language can be written with a number of character sets, with Arabic (right to left) being the predominant one, but it has also historically been written to a lesser extent with Latin letters, which are read left to right.
Even today, in some parts of south-central Asia, there are languages that are written with as many as three (possibly even four) different character sets (usually Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic). Often ecclesiastics would use a different character set from those writing legal and diplomatic documents and would sometimes retain this method when those around them had migrated to a different character set.
In Africa, some of the languages are written with local alphabets, and with the Arabic alphabet.
If indeed written in old Turkic, wouldn't someone already have noticed this? FSG for example
(01-03-2018, 03:36 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
I wonder if the "u to ayi" thing might be one of those instances where they read a digit out fully, kind of like you'd spell "w8" instead of "wait". Just guessing..
Keep in mind that the letter they are interpreting as "u" is EVA-y (which is at the end of a disproportionately large number of tokens, just as "o" is disproportionately represented at the beginning of tokens). EVA-y is also fairly often at the beginning (and very infrequently in the middle). It is positioned in much the same way as the Latin "9" abbreviation which it resembles. It is not positioned like a normal vowel in natural languages. How many natural languages place "u" mostly at the ends of words, sometimes at the beginning and rarely anywhere else? I haven't found any.
So once, again, just as I illustrated above with the letter "i", the glyph they transliterated to "u", a vowel, doesn't behave like a vowel.
- If EVA-y represents "u" then why does it not show up much more frequently in the middles of words as it should in both old and modern Turkish?
- If EVA-y represents some unspecified ending (in the same way they expanded "u" to "ayi"), then which character actually represents "u"?
As soon as you try to decipher anything other than small blocks of text or labels, you have to find an explanation for these positional inconsistencies and ATA didn't address these problems in the video. Unfortunately, they didn't show how they got from their transliteration to their translation for the larger blocks of text so we have to wait and see, but they've already demonstrated that they are allowing themselves to change individual letters in two different ways, to create meaning, so perhaps they are also allowing themselves leeway with the grammar, as well.
Got to give them one thing though. Even if they made their "translation" up completely, they came up with the best text so far. They surely don't make any recommendations to the woman of the house to the priest about the men. Don't know if that's good news or suspicious
The video is a tease.
They say there are about 60 combination glyphs. This is AFTER identifying the two-dozen individual glyphs, but they only show one (and they give several interpretations for that one glyph).
So... you have to wonder, did they apply their substitution code to a sentence and discover it didn't create very many legitimate words, and then start adding "combinations" to explain or change the tokens that didn't translate?
If so... then they might have 2,000 "combination" glyphs by the time they are finished translating the entire manuscript. Unfortunately, once again, there's not enough info in the video for us to know.
JKP:
Thank you - I do understand the difference between a script and a language. I’d be most interested to see a fifteenth century instance of Turkish written left to right in Latin characters?
(01-03-2018, 11:03 PM)Hubert Dale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.JKP:
Thank you - I do understand the difference between a script and a language. I’d be most interested to see a fifteenth century instance of Turkish written left to right in Latin characters?
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These kinds of texts were especially popular in the 16th century because the invention of the printing press made it easier to create and disseminate mass-market books, but interest in this kind of thing started earlier.
You can also see charts of the old Turkic alphabet (which was used in the early medieval period) on Wikipedia:
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Note that many of the old alphabets that are somewhat Runic in nature were sometimes written in both directions. The old Turkic alphabet was
usually written right to left. When Latin characters were used to express a language, they were
usually written left to right. Old Turkic Yenisei inscriptions are sometimes written left to right. Some of the old Turkic inscriptions are in vertical lines (like Chinese).
It was pretty common during medieval times for languages to be written in more than one script. There was a lot more space in the middle ages, people were more nomadic then than now, and tribal and national borders changed all the time. Also, there were no public schools in the sense that we have them now, so people (tribes, kingdoms) made their own choices rather than being given a broader institutionalized choice.
Thanks - most interesting. So Turkish might be written in Latin characters by Europeans writing what were, basically, phrase books for people who didn’t speak Turkish. But that’s rather different from native speakers doing so.
Otherwise: Orkhon runes - right to left as far as I know, Arabic - right to left, Uighur - right to left...but Voynichese left to right.
Hmmm...