Thank you for the welcome VViews!
I understand your point that the term glossolalia is anachronistic as applied to the Voynich ms text. I should have just used a simpler more neutral term like "meaningless text".
I'm glad you brought up the example of Lingua Ignota. We Voynich linguistic text analysts should probably study the example of that language more than we do. I will have to take a closer look at it.
About modern Christian glossolalia and "speaking in tongues", as I understand it, some of the ardent true believing glossolalia speakers actually believe that they are speaking a language that could be understood by somebody! Who this could be, and how, is not clear to me. But they believe it has meaning to somebody, even if they and their immediate audience could not tell you what that meaning is.
I don't want to institute a theological debate, but I think it is clear that nonsensical glossolalia is a New Testament phenomenon. 1 Corinthians 14 is all about speaking in tongues; the expression used is λαλεῖν γλώσσαις, literally to speak in tongues or languages. The word glossolalia is just an abstract noun formed of these two words. The whole chapter makes clear that this kind of speech is incomprehensible to others without an interpreter. (Interestingly, although the Greek just says speaking in tongues the King James Version consistently translates as speaking in *unknown* tongues.) St Paul is ok with speaking in tongues (and says he does it himself) but thinks prophesying is even better because everyone understands it.
The multilingual event of Pentecost (Acts 2) where the disciples are understood by everyone irrespective of their native tongue is apparently a different and unique phenomenon.
(06-03-2019, 03:59 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We would have to look up the details in the Samarin book to confirm or refute this.
Good idea. Sadly, the closest library having a copy of the book is 200 km from where I live (there are 3 copies in Italian libraries): so I am afraid I will be unable to check.
(06-03-2019, 03:59 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Regarding Zipf's law, we need to consider studies such as Wentian Li (1992) "Random Texts Exhibit Zipf's-Law-Like Word Frequency Distribution" (reference 11 in the Wikipedia article on "Zipf's law"). Quoting the article, "in a document in which each character has been chosen randomly from a uniform distribution of all letters (plus a space character), the 'words' follow the general trend of Zipf's law."
Thus, while it may be useful in some linguistic analysis of a known natural language text to consider the likelihood of the Zipfian distribution of the words in it, the converse may in fact not be true: The mere existence of a Zipf's law distribution of the words in a text of unknown character may actually not necessarily be indicative of an underlying natural language in the text.
This is well known, but it doesn't tell us anything about glossolalia following Zipf's law or not.
(06-03-2019, 09:53 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In order to address the case for glossolalia, I think it's important to consider basic statistical features.
E.g.:
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Is the exact consecutive repetition of the same word frequent?
If "the syllables are not organized into words" I guess that the answer to both questions is "no", but examining actual corpora would be more informative.
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Glossolalia and Linguistic Alterity by Evandro Bonfim) includes three short transcriptions of glossolalia from a Christian charismatic community in Brazil. All of them basically consist in the exact consecutive repetition of words: at least in this respect, this Brazilian glossolalia seems to be comparable with Voynichese.
(06-03-2019, 05:56 PM)VViews Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi geoffreycaveney (and a belated welcome to the forum!),
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For the middle ages, there are certainly instances of invented languages: Hildegarde von Bingen's Lingua Ignota is perhaps the most famous example. However, even the Lingua Ignota is somewhat rooted in latin, and certainly the sentences are structured in ways that are inspired by, and often mixed with, proper latin.
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Yes. It's a few years since I've looked at it, but I immediately noticed two things...
- The alphabetic cipher is easy to recognize and memorize because most of the shapes are minor morphs of Latin letters.
- The word groups are very organized, using common Latin endings to represent certain kinds of groups of plants, for example.
@geoffreycaveney
I enjoyed reading your long posting, and your thoughts are very recognizable.
However, with my methods to compare language text and the vast knowledge of all Latinized languages written and spoken, some variants of Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, and all these languages written in phonetical and numeric representation etc etc, I found only one handful of possible solutions based on characteristics.
Hopefully there will be some more time for me to look into those in detail, but I can confirm that I concluded there is no outcome that uses the text as it is written. But there is still hope, it has meaning.