The Voynich Ninja

(28-01-2019, 10:00 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Gavin Güldenpfennig Wrote: 1. Are there any language families, which are completely impossible as VMS language and if yes, why?

MarcoP wronte: Nothing is "completely impossible", but I think that American languages are nearly impossible. I tend to totally ignore that option.

Just to annoy MarcoP   I'll remind him that some people* say that if you consider a syllabic based language family then Hawaiian is a close match. 

Just to be equally annoying, Hawaii is in Oceania, not in America  
Not that I think Oceanian languages are much more likely. Anyway, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., it was clear that several American languages prominently feature the phenomenon. But there are other good candidates around the world (though nothing particularly "hot" in Europe).

(28-01-2019, 08:57 PM)Gavin Güldenpfennig Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why do you think, that American languages are nearly impossible and what do you mean by "American languages"? Only indigenous languages?

As Koen wrote,  there is plenty of evidence that the Voynich manuscript was written in Europe in the first half of the XV Century. Historically, we know that Europeans of that time had no contact with American cultures.
Imagining something different implies a major rewrite of the history of the word. It is comparable with the idea that You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: it is not totally impossible that this is the case, but making the idea plausible will require a huge amount of solid evidence (and currently there is zero evidence to support any of the two ideas).

@JKP

But you don´t rule out, that it could be a normally written old natural language without any code except maybe the alphabet itself, right? 

@davidjackson

Quote: Then it's not strictly agglutinative. It is synthetic. Synthetic languages form words by affixing a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme. (Most Indo-European languages are synthetic). 

Thank you for this definition. Such things we did not learn in our university time.     

Quote: So this fits with Stolfi's core / crust  / mantle theory - we are seeing modifiers to the stem. Agglutinative languages (think of German or Inuit) tend to produce very long words, which isn't what we see in the VM corpus. 

In a very mysterious way also the VMS did built very long words. I work at the moment with a four - line - transcription - system. Line 2 is the original transcription, which is directly based on the VMS, Line 3 is the medieval near form after the language developing process over the in-between-centuries.

One word consists in line 2 of two words, which are melting together into the line 3- variation. So it consists now of 13 or maybe 14 letters.

Quote: Actually, the opposite is often postulated to be true. Compare a modern language like English with Latin or Hebrew, Assyrian or ancient Turk. The subject is far too complex for me to boil down to a couple of sentences over my porridge, but it is often the case that the older a language is, the most rigid and complex it becomes. 

I think, that this is depending on the point of view. For me, a language becomes easier, when her rules becomes more clear, also when this makes the language more complex. But, I can imagine, that this isn´t the usual point of view.

@ Koen G

Quote: Unless you count the Vikings. But this scenario is impossible. There is no indication of either Nordic or Pre-Columbian culture in the VM. 

Today I read some articles about this topic. I will post the links to them here, later. It is proved, that the Vikings were in "Vinland" (today: the region around New Brunswick). Also there is some probability that, the Solutré people went over the iced ocean 20000 years ago and reach America. And there are some exploration candidates more. But these candidates I have to double - check once more. And I have another suspicion. But I have to prove this suspicion before I post it.

@MarcoP

Quote: but making the idea plausible will require a huge amount of solid evidence

And if there is no evidence we can throw these theories into the rubbish 

But maybe, someone will found a evidence for the non- alien- theory of them, we will see....  

(30-01-2019, 12:03 AM)Gavin Güldenpfennig Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@JKP

But you don´t rule out, that it could be a normally written old 

In a very mysterious way also the VMS did built very long words. I work at the moment with a four - line - transcription - system. Line 2 is the original transcription, which is directly based on the VMS, Line 3 is the medieval near form after the language developing process over the in-between-centuries.

One word consists in line 2 of two words, which are melting together into the line 3- variation. So it consists now of 13 or maybe 14 letters.

Sounds interesting but complicated. So you are saying it would have been a 3 line transcription at the time, an intermediary between voynichese and whatever language you are converting to?

@Linda

The problem with the translation is, that I'm not a native speaker of the VMS languages. You have to know, that at minimum one VMS language following my theory is dead, today. So you have to use a language sibling, like Polish and Czech are related to wach other. These sibling you have to use as a kind of mirror to get word roots, you can try to translate.

So the translation works as it follows:

Line 1: Unchanged VMS Script

Line 2: substition line
(VMS in latin letters, latinised Voynichese)

Line 3: root line 
(VMS language in latin letters mirrored through the language sibling, so you get a mix of the sibling language and the latinised Voynichese, you can translate)

 -> at the Check-Up by the "native-speaker of the language sibling it was called "a medieval version of his language written by an uneducated person". My check-up-person also speaks my language, so this check-up has a solid base.

Line 4: translation line 
(Most probable German meaning of Line 3)

How do you interpret the labels of stars (roots, plants ...) in this case?

The names of the plants you can mostly find with the explained method because they are used in the text of the folios. But some of them have unexpected names, which makes it difficult to define which plant it is.

The 10 zodiac labels which are written in latin letters, are written in an old dialect of an iberoromanic language, so we know what they mean, I think.

The star names and most of the month names seem to be written in another language then the plant folios. So I can't read them at the moment. But there is one calendar in the plant section, where my method works. So I can say, it's a calendar. I can even say how this calendar works. But I can't say where this thing comes from and how old it is.

Hi Gavin,
it seems you plan to apply the method I recently described You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..


It's a rightly popular choice: this system is guaranteed to succeed. It allows translating the Voynich ms using any language at all.

A few examples:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses vowelless pseudo-Latin.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses a different pseudo-Latin.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses bogus French.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. uses twisted Hebrew (plus Turkic / Greek?):

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. aka Rick Sheeger felt the need of inventing proto-Italic: a mix of words from an almost limitless number of languages (Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, French, Galician, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovenian and Spanish). What an overkill!

All these people seem very happy with their translations as I am sure you will be with your own. My only regret is that nobody seems to consider English as the original language of the VMS. In my opinion, the choice of little known or imaginary languages like Latin, Hebrew or proto-bogus-Italic doesn't help appreciating the creativity required by this method.

As you seem to have perfectly understood, the key to success is ignoring grammar. "A medieval version of [a dead] language written by an uneducated person" seems like the perfect context to pick random words and make up whatever meaning you want. It will be fun!

I think we can add to that list Janick and Tucker with a pseudo-Nahuatl blended with Spanish (and mostly ignoring grammar).

Quote:My only regret is that nobody seems to consider English as the original language of the VMS.

A modern English code base would make life simpler 

Gavin, I suggest that you propose your method in a structured version here so that we can impartially evaluate your mechanism. Giving us hints and suggestions just makes people lose interest.
We would be delighted to have a look at your method.

Quote: My only regret is that nobody seems to consider English as the original language of the VMS.
A modern English code base would make life simpler 

Gavin, I suggest that you propose your method in a structured version here so that we can impartially evaluate your mechanism. Giving us hints and suggestions just makes people lose interest.
We would be delighted to have a look at your method.

Ok I think it is time to give a little extract from my method. It seems to be necessary.

First I will give you two words from the calendar (57 v):

1. ofol -> olojai -> olojai (basque for english: feast of oats)
-> describes a lunar month between the 8th of July and the 5th of August
-> the last letter of the Voynichese word is mostly used as a double - letter like "ja", "ha" or "jai" (at the end of a word), but it can stand alone as a "j" 

2. aros -> arros  -> arrosa (basque for english: rose)
-> describes a lunar month between the 4th of September and the 3th of October
-> the second letter of the Voynichese word is a double "r"
-> there is another letter which is used as a simple "r"


And now I will give you a sentence from the page 2v:
You should know for this, that the water lily is also often called Nymphea. That´s her scientific name.
Also there is a handwriting problem in the script. You can hardly announce if the writer wrote "ir" or "h"

1. Unchanged Voynichese: 
kehfeor e+hy daiiin cheKoy se+hey dor ehol daiin dor chol chor chol keol


2. Latinised Voynichese: 
ñirfeor iry eaink hiñoy txirig eorr iroja eank eorr hoja horr hoja ñioja

3. root line (Voynichese mirrored through the Basque language):  
Nenufar irekiak hi txikik noiz orrirojek hor hoja hor hoja niojar.

loan words: roja = span.: red 
hoja = sp.: leaf / flower 
niojar = verb from sp. (enojo) = annoyance

3b: case line: 

Object in absolutive case (noun + adjective + suffix), subject in ergative case, verb (2nd person sg.), conjunction, subject in ergativ (double-word noun + suffix), adverb, object in absolutive case (noun + article + noun), verb (3rd person sg.).


4. German translation: 
Offene Seerosen schneidest du, wenn rotes Laub dort Blatt und Blüte ärgert.

5. English translation: 
You cut open water lilies, as soon as red leaves are annoying leaf and flower there.