Quote:2) My understanding is that handwriting experts have concluded that the author wrote the script as if he had mastered it. The "ductus" is smooth, as they say: the script flows smoothly from letter to letter. Whereas an author less familiar with the script would be expected to have written with more stops and starts, etc.
Well I must have said that I mean "mastering of applying the script" - that is, expressing one's thoughts in Voynichese or translating some plain text into it. I do not mean mastering of putting the glyphs down. The vast majority of Voynichese glyphs are just common written symbols of the time, so any educated person of that period would be comfortable with writing that. This letting alone the possibility that the text on parchment was prepared on some "draft" in advance and transferred to the parchment only later.
Quote:As for You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , that is only a tiny fragment of a few lines on the top of the last page.
It contains Voynichese, this is what makes it exceedingly important.
Quote:Can we even be sure You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was written by the same person or people who wrote the rest of the ms? I would be hesitant to base any general conclusions on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .
The hand in the Voynichese writing being similar, and the Voynichese being not very widespread language, that would be the foremost assumption for me.
Quote:meaningless text hypothesis is still a very real possibility that we have to keep in mind.
It is a possibility, but not "very" real, IMO. Both corpus-wide statistical calculations (Montemurro & Zanette) and many tiny local observations indicate the opposite. Like, both most frequent Voynich stars are mentioned in f1r, and I can provide more indications. The Ockham's razor is also turned against that.
TBH, I even don't consider that possibility seriously in my own research - not because I don't like it, but because I don't see how it would be real.
Like JKP, I'm a fan of Ockham's razor. If in the XVII century and in the XX and what we have from this century no linguistic solution has worked, why not try something else?
The 'otol' test that Anton proposes is flawed in advance because we mechanically think in letters and sounds. I think it is more likely that EVA-l to be the number 4 in its Arab shape. I'm a librarian, I've seen hundreds of times this number with this shape in manuscripts of the Voynich's time.
In volvelles from the same time I've seen the number 4 in its Arab shape stand for some Zodiac signs.
What I believe is that the labels of Voynich stars indeed are like names because they serve to identify, to mark positions in the space, in the celestial sphere. These names-like mark also herbs and tubes that depends on a star. That's why we see 'otol' marking diferent things. But I insist, 'otol' is not 'otol'. They are glyphs that stand for a place, a place in movement.
Hi Antonio,
The "otol test" is focused solely on the assumption of labels as designators. In fact, it is invoked as an illustration to disprove that assumption. What you are speaking about is not designation. For example, if we see a star and read its position nearby, then the label is not that star's name. It's some attribute or association. That's what I am arguing - that star labels (and possibly not only those) are not names, but some associations. In other words, they are not designators, but "pointers" or "referrers".
Whether "otol" is an "otol", or is not, is an altogether different question which is independent of whether labels are designators or not. Some do think of Voynichese glyphs as letters/sounds, some do not, but both those categories of researchers can consider labels as names or as not names. Those are just two different problems.
I have to admit, I have never thought of Voynich glyphs as sounds.
The first time I saw the text, I thought it was a cipher and ciphers don't have to correspond to human sounds even if they encode language.
Also, there are languages I can read that I have never heard, ever. I have no idea what they sound like, so I look at script as information that doesn't necessarily have to be connected to sound even if people in another culture connect it to sound.
After the first few days, I stopped assuming it was natural language (I thought it might be, at first) and simply tried to see it as information... whether that is language, pseudo-language (a made up language like twin-speak), echolalia, symbols, math, or whatever, I figure my job is to figure out what it is, not to try to impose expectations on the text. That means that even though I think it's possible that it's referential or symbolic, I still don't discount other possibilities (including natural language encoded in a unique way).
Let's put the paradigm in action and try to produce an illustration.
I have some paragraph stats gathered from the time when I was searching for PPNs, and thus I was able to quite quickly produce the following statistics. At present it is only for folios up to f46v, but it will be easily expanded to the rest of the botanical section, and I am also planning to extend it to the whole corpus, although the latter will require considerably more effort.
I examine all paragraph-initial vords. The idea is that we don't have any obvious sentence start markers, except that for starts of paragraphs. So each paragraph start is a sentence start.
In the folio range above specified, I count 185 paragraphs (I leave off two paragraphs with weirdos in f1r, since we don't know if those weirdos are part of Voynihese or not). 168 of those, or 90,8%, do begin with vords which begin with gallows. Let's call such vords "Gvords". Benched gallows are also included in this total count (let's call that "bGvords", and they are subset of Gvords), but their share is negligible - only five bGvords.
So Gvords are very, very popular to start a sentence, for whatever reason.
Next we check if paragraph-initial vords exhibit high degree of uniqueness. It turns out that (in the said folio range) 51,9% of all paragraph-initial vords are unique. We must be careful about possible inflexions, which may make these vords "not-that-unique", but generally this looks like what is a high figure. It would be less common, I think, to use unique verbs or unique words of other parts of speech for beginning of your sentence, so it is reasonable to suppose that paragraph-initial vords are, in their majority, nouns. Since they are mostly Gvords, then that makes gallows a noun-marker, be that explicit (like an article) or implicit (like a reference to a particular nomenclator), does not matter.
Now we move on to labels, the discussion of which in this thread stimulated this idea. We discussed that labels - at least some of them - do not look like plain designators. Instead they look like referrers. But very many labels start with "o", then immediately followed by gallows. Considering that a Gvord is a noun and the label is a referrer, this makes the "o" prefix a referral operator, something like "to", "related to" or "for", "intended for", "appropriate for". With this approach, the notorious "otol" is no more "otol", but instead it is "o tol" - that is, "related to tol". Notice that I don't touch the question of whether "o" is "to" or "for" in English, or "zu" or "fur" in German, I simply suggest a relational operator.
Next, there is an observation that quite often when we have the "o-Gvord", we also have the "qo-Gvord". And, in contrast to "o", "qo" is very rare to start labels with. I remember reading that "q-" signified negation somewhere in Middle Ages or that "q" is supposed to signify negation in the VMS. If we take this as working assumption, then "qo" would mean something opposite to "o". I suggest that if "o" is "to", "towards" or "for", then "qo" would be "from", "of" or "out of". Continuing the example, if "otol" is "for the tol", then "qotol" would be "from the tol". For example frequency counts, "tol" occurs 48 times in the whole corpus), "otol" - 86 times and "qotol" - 47 times. I think it makes sense to compare counts of Gvords to counts of respective o-Gvords and qo-Gvords, and to see if there is correlation. If the idea is correct, then there should be correlation, since if something is important in the context of narration (i.e. frequent), then it being an operand would also be important (frequent).
This interpretation of "qo" suits well the existence of quasi-reduplications such as "qo-this, qo-that, qo-whatever...". For example, a valid case is "this stuff cures from A, from B, from C, from D". Another possibility, - as discussed in the "function words" thread, - is "qo" as conjunction, but I like this option less, because it does not make sense in labels where "qo" does occur, however rare. Neither of the two options, however, explains away exact reduplications such as "qokeedy qokeedy", and one is left to write that away to scribal errors.
The "operator" approach easily suits the predominance of "qo" in Currier B, since it may be simply a matter of narrative that one needs "from" (or any other operator that "qo" stands for) much more often than in other thematical portions of the manuscript.
Next we move to the "y" prefix, which, by the way, is also not infrequent in labels. Developing this logic of operators, I could suggest that it could mean, for example, "with", although this is more speculative and basically just an idea out of the box. Then "qy" (7 occurrences in the corpus) would be "without". If "y" stands for "with", then probably it is "y" that would express conjunction (and not "q" or "qo").
Some further directions include:
1) Given a Gvord and its frequency count, check o-Gvord, qo-Gvord and y-Gvord and their frequency count. Perform contextual analysis of Gvords vs prefixed Gvords.
2) Given a Gvord, check the "vord" - i.e. the token with the leading gallows stripped.
Some questions that need to be addressed:
1) the gallows coverage is still untouched
2) treating leading "o", "qo" and "y" as prefixes will reduce character entropy. There may be some other major factor though, which would outweigh that.
3) exact reduplication of "qo-stuff" remains unexplained
4) it's not clear what to do with vords having gallows in the middle or in the end, such as e.g. "okchop".
5) the roles of different gallows are still unexplained
Another operator that would be needed in a text is "of". Given how the MS begins: "Fachys ykal ar ytaiin", I wonder whether "y" might be candidate for that, because an annotation such as "Book of kal and of taiin...." would appear just natural, in fact in the old times it was common for a book's title to be quite lengthy, representing in fact its annotation.
What is an important consequence with such prefix-based approach is that the VMS dictionary then probably shrinks from its originally Shakespearing scale.
(19-03-2019, 03:55 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Another operator that would be needed in a text is "of". Given how the MS begins: "Fachys ykal ar ytaiin", I wonder whether "y" might be candidate for that, because an annotation such as "Book of kal and of taiin...." would appear just natural, in fact in the old times it was common for a book's title to be quite lengthy, representing in fact its annotation.
I will have to read and consider your long preceding post more carefully, in order to respond with an intelligent analysis. But I have a few brief comments here for now:
The first line doesn't look like a title to me. It just looks like the beginning of the first paragraph. What does stand out is the one word at the end of the paragraph, separated to the right side (right justified) of the last line. This looks very much like the "attribution" stating the name of the person at the end of a quote. To me, the first page looks very much like a series of four quotes, as one often finds on the introductory page of a major work or ms.
I read the fourth word as "ataiin" rather than "ytaiin". It is not clear, as the bottom of the letter is obscured and also it runs into the tall gallows "k" in the line below.
I interpret "y" as Greek "s", and as a prefix it may often represent the common Greek preposition "se" or "s' ", meaning "to, at, by, in, on, onto, upon". This word is often prefixed to the following word as a contraction, often a following article. Thus we have "sten"/"stin", "ston", "stou", "stous", "ste"/"sti", "stes"/"stis", "sto", "sta". All of these forms can mean "to the", "in the", "by the", "on the", etc., with the following word in different grammatical cases, genders, and numbers, thus changing the form of the article.
In the case of "ykal", I read it as "stas" or "stes" or "stous", or if the [l] proves to be "n", then it would be "stan" or "sten" or "ston". (Once again, coming from the Judaeo-Greek literary tradition in the Hebrew script, the vowels would be ambiguous in this way, when the vowel diacritic dots are not written.)
In Greek "of" is not a single word, because it uses the genitive case to express the concept -- like Russian!
But in any case, the Greek definite article would be ubiquitous, and it can be "o" (masculine nominative singular), "oi" (masc. or fem. nom. plural), "e"/"i" (fem. nom. sing.), or it can begin with "t-" (all other forms).
The Voynich "o" prefix can definitely be the Greek nominative singular masculine definite article, or the Greek nominative plural article.
I believe the author used both "k" and "s" and sometimes "sh" to represent Greek "t" or "d" or "th". The "s" by itself or as a prefix would likely be one of the Greek article forms.
Quote:This looks very much like the "attribution" stating the name of the person at the end of a quote. To me, the first page looks very much like a series of four quotes, as one often finds on the introductory page of a major work or ms.
Of note, in the past You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. has been suggested to represent kinda "table of contents", with those right-aligned text blocks for section titles or designations, and the bodies of paragraphs for brief descriptions.
Quotations is an interesting idea, but I don't know if it was customary in 15c to include epigraphs, I have some impression that it is a later practice.
Once again, the whole approach that I'm proposing in this thread is to stay language-invariant. If you at once set yourself within the framework of Greek (why Greek, to begin with, and not Nahuatl, others claim that this is Nahuatl, some folks claim Latin etc.), - in other words within the framework of any particular lanhuage, you at once become a hostage of limitations of that particular language, and in order to overcome those you are then in need to admit exceptions and assumptions in order to relieve orthography and grammar. That's the weakness of the "concrete language" methodology. Instead of gradually working out its "true" language from the Voynich, people come and impose their favourite language unto it, or (which is worse) a mix of several languages.
(16-03-2019, 10:08 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Historically, attempts to intepret Voynich have been aimed at discovering the procedure with which one could map Voynichese glyph sequences to meaningful letter sequences in one of existing languages. This approach still prevails up to date. Simple substitution (with slight variations) attempts constitute the vast majority of the proposed solutions, and we are accustomed to hear of new solutions on a more or less regular basis.
Considering Voynich a more complex cipher basically falls into the same broad vein of investigation, - alas, with no success so far.
Of lately, I've been thinking if such approach is efficient after all. The issue is that there are some indications that the Voynichese text, while conveying pretty meaningful message, may not be what we are believing it to be.
One such indication follows from the work by Wladimir which suggests that no plant names are contained within botanical folios. The imagery which is manifesting its mnemonics supports this thesis. In a (supposedly enciphered) text, what reason would there be to exclude plant names? Nothing. The situation is quite different for the representation that relies on a nomenclator. If your nomenclator does not contain plant names, you won't be able to include them.
Another strange thing is the high degree of morphological similarity between vords being members of homogenous sets - such as my favourite "Voynich stars" (f68r1, r2). Of 53 Voynich star labels in total, 39 (or 74%) start with "o". Of those 39, 15 (or 28% of the total) start with "ot", and 9 (or 17% of the total) start with "ok". Those two subsets constitute 45% of all Voynich stars. In other words, notions homogenous in nature are designated by vords similar in morphology. This does not very much look like what we find in natural languages. This could be explained, however, by vords encoding positions in a nomenclator. Homogenous notions may have been grouped in a nomenclator. Encodings of their positions (close to each other) would then appear morphologically similar.
If there is no mapping between Voynichese and plain text on the glyph level but, instead, mapping exists only on the vord-to-word level, then all attempts at "deciphering" would be vain. What one should do instead is to shift from "decrypting" to "translating". Suppose extraterrestrials land and we are presented wtih their writings. We would not try to invent a procedure to decrypt their writings into English or Russian, that would be waste of time. We would seek a way to translate those instead, based on our understanding of what words of theirs map to what notions known to us. This is the direction that might prove fruitful for Voynichese. The problem is with the methodology, as always...
Anton ,you doing a great job....but there is no difficulties about f68r.Just a short story about a girl which was in slavery for long term and had a head lice.Holly doctor helped her by using a petrolium oil and brushed them out.She looked at the mirror and got surprised,because she never seen her hair that shiny.....thats all )))