Mongolian is as interesting as Turkish, in my mind, because of the way the syllables are constructed and combined.
But you cannot get away from one essential fact. In the VMS, certain glyphs come at the beginning, certain glyphs come in the middle and certain glyphs come at the end, with very high frequency. Chinese, Thai, Mongolian, Persian, Korean, Amharic, Latin, French, Lithuanian, Swedish, Sanskrit, English, Welsh, Syrian, finnish, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and Armenian (name any other language you like) are not put together that way.
You don't have to be an expert in Chinese to know that there is flexibility in how Chinese syllables are combined, even though there are some systematic rules about how radicals are associated with the main characters... even in this they are nowhere NEAR as rigid as the VMS.
The problem is that that there are countless Asian languages, and the only good reason why they are of interest for the Voynich MS is the word-internal structure of "Voynichese" words.
Some (not all) Asian languages do something similar. Modern Mandarin is a good example, but it's not the only one, and other Asian languages that could be classified as "Chinese" and have such a word structure are completely different from Mandarin. Teochew may be a good example.
From what I have seen of Mongolian, it does not seem to have much of a word structure, but I could be wrong there.
Turkic languages seem to have no obvious word structure.
This doesn't mean that the base language of the Voynich MS cannot be Turkic, but one has to keep the logic in mind.
Much simplified:
The word structure is either primarily a feature of the source language directly, or it has been introduced by the 'processing' (encryption or whatever) of a text without such a word structure.
In the first case, it is worth looking at such languages (e.g. Asian) even if there isn't yet a good explanation how such a language got into this MS.
In the second case, there is no reason to prefer Turkic over Latin (or vice versa), because the 'processing' would work similarly on all languages without a word structure. Here, we haven't yet a good explanation how such processing would work.
The term 'processing' should really be understood in its most general way. "Writing with abbreviations" (as per Helmut Winkler's proposal) should be seen as one possible form of "processing".
P.S.:
In summary, we are without a good explanation either way.
But we knew that.
(24-04-2018, 02:41 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mongolian is as interesting as Turkish, in my mind, because of the way the syllables are constructed and combined.
But you cannot get away from one essential fact. In the VMS, certain glyphs come at the beginning, certain glyphs come in the middle and certain glyphs come at the end, with very high frequency. Chinese, Thai, Mongolian, Persian, Korean, Amharic, Latin, French, Lithuanian, Swedish, Sanskrit, English, Welsh, Syrian, finnish, Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and Armenian (name any other language you like) are not put together that way.
You don't have to be an expert in Chinese to know that there is flexibility in how Chinese syllables are combined, even though there are some systematic rules about how radicals are associated with the main characters... even in this they are nowhere NEAR as rigid as the VMS.
Sure, and in fact I agree with you which is why I started off with the steganography/auto copy thought.
You yourself said in another thread, something like, sometimes you wonder if only 30% of the VMS is meaningful.
Still DUE DILIGENCE, but I will not thrash the point.
.gestion.
(23-04-2018, 05:09 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there was a thread I think by Anton where there was a highly suspicious chunk of text marked out by pilcrows and with the same word along the diagonal
I remember seeing that post, but I cannot find it anymore. Does anyone please remember where it is?
(24-04-2018, 02:41 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You don't have to be an expert in Chinese to know that there is flexibility in how Chinese syllables are combined, even though there are some systematic rules about how radicals are associated with the main characters... even in this they are nowhere NEAR as rigid as the VMS.
There are of course two possible hypotheses:
1) that the Voynich MS text derives from some written Chinese text.
Such a text could then also be much older than the early 15th C.
In this case, the text would be based on the Chinese characters (shapes) and not on the spoken text.
I agree with the concerns of JKP for such a case. In general it seems extremely unlikely.
2) that the Voynich MS text somehow reflects spoken Chinese text.
This would obviously mean the involvement of a chinese speaker. The text would be 15th century.
In this case the Voynich text would be more similar to Pinyin (with several caveats), and here I see
less of an issue related to the word structure.
There was a long thread about this already, with lots of nice plots by Torsten.
(25-04-2018, 07:46 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (23-04-2018, 05:09 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there was a thread I think by Anton where there was a highly suspicious chunk of text marked out by pilcrows and with the same word along the diagonal
I remember seeing that post, but I cannot find it anymore. Does anyone please remember where it is?
Marco,
My apologies, it was WladamirD, and this is the thread I was thinking of
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Also I meant gallows not pilcrows but even that was wrong, I am a gumnut!
There was another longer thread too, I will try in a sec to find it.
Here 'tis!
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That must be where I got Anton and gallows from.
(26-04-2018, 06:05 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (25-04-2018, 07:46 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (23-04-2018, 05:09 AM)DONJCH Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.there was a thread I think by Anton where there was a highly suspicious chunk of text marked out by pilcrows and with the same word along the diagonal
I remember seeing that post, but I cannot find it anymore. Does anyone please remember where it is?
Marco,
My apologies, it was WladamirD, and this is the thread I was thinking of
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Also I meant gallows not pilcrows but even that was wrong, I am a gumnut!
There was another longer thread too, I will try in a sec to find it.
Here 'tis!
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That must be where I got Anton and gallows from.
Thank you, Donjch!
I cannot find anything "diagonal" in the second thread, but Wladimir's example from the first link is very clear.
I attach a comparison with a detail from the GermanYou are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. From the little I can understand of the German, the alignment is coincidental in this case, but a similar pattern might be caused by a recurrent phrase structure slightly shorter (or longer) than a line of text.
Thank you all for your replies. I will continue reading.
I recently read D'imperio ("Enigma" and the 2002 paper) and am working thru Nick's blog backwards to 2010 - where there was a mention of Chinese - phonetic alphabets of any kind seem to be a century after VMS so that's a fair point.
Also, I did not realise how bad the available transcriptions are - you could have a whole conference just on the correct folio order, let alone correctly recognising EVA a and o - no wonder statistical programs don't work very well on the whole corpus!
By contrast, I was impressed with the smaller and very carefully matched selection of input data used by D'Imperio.