15-03-2019, 09:10 PM
(15-03-2019, 05:36 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello Jeffrey,
sure, I am critical, but I am equally critical of my own attempts.
I can be more specific:
On the vagueness and (especially) inconsistency, the translation table you provided is not complete, of course, but already there are a number of unclear associations:
Voynich-t can mean two different things, and so can Voynich-e.
At the same time, two different Voynich characters both map to Greek tau.
Voynich-d is particularly unclear. I think I understand that Voynich-p is not an alternative for Voynich-d, that can be used in the first lines, but Voynich-d is an alternative for Voynich-p that can be used in all lines (first and later).
Thus, Voynich-d can always mean two different things, of which one is a consonant (pi) and the other a vowel (upsilon) ?
Voynich-i also has a context-dependent meaning.
Stand-alone Voynich-a is a but when followed by Voynich-i it is ei.
Even more important I consider the second problem.
I am trying to put myself in the position of the author/scribe. What did he really write down and what did he mean?
If he meant to write:
skiais tais eipan oun
then why did he not do that, but wrote instead:
skiiois tis epan oan
The grammatical issue is something I cannot judge, so I can only refer to Koen's comment.
Finally, it is *much* more difficult to reduce entropy in any significant manner, than just removing the distinction between a few consonants. And again, the word pattern is not addressed at all.
This last point about the word pattern by itself is sufficient to reject the proposed "solution".
Thank you again for the more detailed critical comments, Rene.
In my proposal the script does not distinguish between any voiceless/voiced pairs, so the same character will represent both /k/~/g/, another will represent both /t/~/d/, another both /p/~/b/, etc. The Linear B representation of Greek worked the same way. Yes, that was 2,000 years earlier, but the similarity is that in both cases we have a script that may not be well designed for the particular language that is being written in it.
The script does not distinguish between the vowels /i/ and /e/. This is actually quite consistent with this particular historical stage of Greek. Look up "iotacism" in Greek and you will see what I mean. At least five different Ancient Greek vowel and diphthong values all converged to the same pronunciation /i/.
Yes, I observe two different characters that can both represent Greek tau. I do note that Greek itself had tau and theta, and even more to the point Semitic scripts like Hebrew and Syriac had two distinct letters for "t": one was "emphatic" or "pharyngeal", but was often used to render Greek tau in borrowings. This may or may not be relevant to the Voynich script, but it is a known example of the phenomenon.
In my proposal Voynich-d has a core value of /u/~/v/~/w/. It is of course completely normal for a language to have one letter to represent all of these sounds. And yes, I propose that in many environments in the text, the scribe also wrote Voynich-d in place of Voynich-p to represent /b/ or /p/, and perhaps in place of Voynich-f for /f/. Again, the well-known "betacism" sound change by which the sounds /b/ and /v/ merge offers a parallel to the use of Voynich-d in place of Voynich-p in this scenario.
I would not say Voynich-i has a context-dependent meaning. In fact, if we used your Cuva transcription instead of Eva, this "Voynich-i" would not be an issue here at all! It would just be one value for Voynich-iin (Cuva "M") and a different value of Voynich-i before Voynich-r for example (Cuva "IR"). In fact, Cuva even uses a nasal letter as a symbol where I interpret it as part of the final nasal, and Cuva uses "I" where I interpret it as the vowel /i/ in a diphthong!
Yes, the vowel qualities are sometimes unclear in what I have so far. This is not at all unusual when writing a language in a script that was not designed or may not be well suited for that language. Jews wrote a wide variety of European languages in the Hebrew script throughout the medieval period, with a limited representation of vowels with a handful of Hebrew letters (vav, yod, aleph, ayn, he). So the representations of /ai/ and /ei/ may not be distinguished, and even /a/ vs. /o/ may be unclear in some places. Again, from the Semitic perspective such ambiguity is not at all unusual.
* To address your second problem that you consider even more important:
The most natural plausible explanation is that the author came from a Semitic literary background, the most obvious example being a Jewish person whose primary literary activity was in the Hebrew script, whether to read and write Hebrew, Judaeo-Arabic, Judaeo-Greek, Judaeo-Spanish, or what have you. (There were a great variety of such Judaeo-European languages and scripts in medieval Europe. Believe it or not, there even existed in the area of Torino and Asti a distinct spoken and written form of "Judaeo-Piedmontese"!!)
So, he wrote "skiiois" instead of "skiais" because Judaeo-Greek in the Hebrew script does not have vowels like "o" and "a" at all! In Judaeo-Greek they just wrote what they heard in the colloquial form of the local language in their area, and they used the Hebrew vowel diacritic dots to mark most vowels. It appears in my proposal that the scribe was trying to write the vowels, but perhaps he did not come from a literary tradition that typically did so. Also, scholars of the phonological history of Greek have actually noted that in some cases Judaeo-Greek reveals information about medieval and Byzantine pronunciation that is missing from most written Greek sources, because official written Greek tended to artificially preserve archaisms to make the text appear to be closer to classical Greek than the spoken language actually was. Judaeo-Greek simply wrote the colloquial language as it was spoken at the time.
Yes, one must be cautious with such an "unattested dialect" hypothesis, but one cannot rule it out out of hand. And a minor variation like "oi" for "ai" should hardly be unexpected. In fact, as part of the iotacism sound change, the entire Ancient Greek diphthong /oi/ reduced to /i/, a much bigger difference than the small variation here.
"tis" for "tais" is even more natural: The whole phrase is an archaism, but "tis" is the more modern form of the article that surely had long been current by the 15th century.
"epan" for "eipan": I mean, surely this is not a reason to reject an interpretation. Iotacism made all of these sounds very similar, the Hebrew script form of Greek did not distinguish them at all, and in my proposal this script does not even have separate characters for /e/ and /i/.
"oan" for "oun": This is the most significant discrepancy here. But I note that with my proposal, technically "un" should be written as [diin] in Voynichese, but we know that almost never occurs. So for some reason the scribe almost always chose to write [a] between [d] and [iin]. In the case of this particular word, he wrote [oaiin]. Again, as I noted in multiple places above, the vowel qualities are not entirely distinct in my interpretation here. Again, this would make a certain amount of sense if the scribe were a Jewish person whose background was in the Hebrew script, not the Latin or Greek script.
* About the word pattern issue: This is an issue that can only be resolved by attempting to interpret substantial amounts of text. As you say, the test will be consistency and quality when the amount of text is expanded. I understand and fully expect to run into difficulties in expanding the amount of text. My hope is that I (or others) will be able to develop new hypotheses -- whether about word play, syllable transposition, or what have you -- to explain the difficulties that will inevitably be encountered.
I emphasize that my proposal is not at root a "Greek hypothesis". It is a language-neutral hypothesis about the correspondence of the Voynich character inventory to a complete phoneme inventory (of any language) in a logical and plausible way. It seems to have some resemblance to the way that European languages were written in the Hebrew script, although it appears that Voynich made more of an effort to write more of the vowels, but in doing so it perhaps did not always distinguish each of them clearly. I repeat, Hebrew has "yod" for /i/, "vav" for /u/, and everything else is context-dependent: /o/ can be marked with a following "vav", but sometimes not; /e/ can be marked with a following "yod", but sometimes not; /a/ can be indicated with an "aleph", but sometimes not. "aleph" can be a place-holder for /o/ or /e/ sometimes as well.
This is all completely normal for Hebrew, and writing the vowels in this ambiguous way would have been completely natural to a medieval Jewish scribe, even in a European language.
* Here is an idea, for you or indeed for anyone: Find a piece of text *anywhere* in the Voynich ms that would seem to be particularly intractable and resistant to interpretation due to the repetitive words, restricted word patterns in it, and other such thorny issues that we are all well aware of. Challenge me to offer my interpretation of it based on my proposal here. I will have to maintain the consistency of my character and phoneme values, attempt to detect the underlying language (Greek, Latin, other Romance, Hebrew?, something else?), and attempt to produce a sensible reading of it. I will do my best to see how my system works with any line or paragraph that anyone suggests that I interpret for them.
At the very least, I hope we will learn something from this exercise, as I did from Emma's challenge about the 15 most common Voynich words. (I had not been thinking about Latin until "-ibus" unexpectedly came up as I worked through the list!)
Or in the worst case scenario, you may all get a good laugh from my interpretations if they get really bad
