The Voynich Ninja

(09-04-2019, 08:24 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(08-04-2019, 10:15 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.about the alternation of final [-y] and [-aiin] as suffixes of the same roots: Many researchers have observed that the glyph [y] has the shape of the common medieval Latin ms abbreviation for the "-us" suffix. If [-y] is also being used here to represent a suffix "-Vs", then this alternation could represent for example [-y] = nominative "-Vs" and [-aiin] = accusative "-Vn". In this case, the vowel is written as [a] in the [aiin] suffix, but not written separately in the [y] suffix. Such an explanation could be valid for this phenomenon in a number of medieval European languages.

Hi Geoffrey,
that idea is discussed by Jacques Guy inYou are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (1991). I think Guy's paper marked a significant step forward in Voynich studies: it is definitely worth reading. Guy observes that (in the part of the text he analyzed) -y 'accounts for 50% of word finals, an extraordinarily high proportion. Do folio 79v and 80r contain a text with every other word or so ending in "-us" or "-os", or even plain "-s"? Possible of course, but quite improbable and thus a poor working hypothesis'. Such a high frequency strongly suggests that y must be a vowel (if the script is phonetic and not an abjad).

Guy also mentions the well known fact that in Medieval Latin manuscripts the '9' abbreviation 'word-initially [represents] the prefix "con-" or its variants (com-, cun-, cum-)'.
Of course, if one thinks that -9 as a suffix works as in Latin manuscripts, an implication is that also 9- as a prefix does so. But evidence suggests that EVA:y represents the same sound word-initially and word-finally. In particular, words ending with -y are followed by words starting with y- less frequently than expected (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). This can be observed for all Voynichese symbols that can occur both word-initially and word-finally. In many languages, the consecutive repetition of the same sound across word-boundaries is avoided through alteration of one of the two words (e.g. in Italian word-ending vowels are often dropped before words starting with the same vowel). See also Emma's discussion of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Marco, thank you for the comment and for the reference. It is interesting. Perhaps my next task should be to attempt to read and interpret folios You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , as a test of my theory 

Seriously speaking, regarding the proportion of words in a text ending in "-s", here is an excerpt of 6 lines and 40 full words taken from a modern Greek text:

[attachment=2791]

You will see that 23 of the 40 full words (not abbreviations) in this excerpt of Greek text end in a final "-s".

So I do not think it is too terribly improbable for somewhat longer passages of text to contain 50% of words ending in "-s". In Greek, many nominative singular, genitive singular, nominative plural, and accusative plural forms of nouns end in a final "-s".

Geoffrey

Geoffrey forgot to link the source of the fragment on which he grounds his assessment of the statistics of Greek: boring. 
It comes from this You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

αντικείμενο κ.λπ.), με συντακτικές δομές (π.χ. κανόνες συμφωνίας, σχηματισμός της παθητικής φωνής, αποτύπωση των υποχρεωτικών συμπληρωμάτων ενός ρήματος στο σχηματισμό της πρότασης κ.ά.) και με σημασιολογικές αξίες (π.χ. χρονική τοποθέτηση ή τρόπος παρουσίασης ενός γεγονότος, σχέση κτήσης κ.λπ.). Αναφέρονται επίσης επιλεκτικά ορισμένες πραγματολογικές συνθήκες που

Slightly edited Google translate (the fragment selected by Geoffrey in bold):

In this way, the different forms that a word takes in inflection are combined with grammatical functions (e.g., subject, object, etc.), with editorial structures (e.g. agreement rules, formation of the passive voice, imprinting of mandatory complements of a verb in the formation of the sentence etc.) and with semantic values (e.g. time position or presentation of an event, acquisition relationship, etc.). Certain factual conditions are also mentioned that selectively determine the use of alternative formulas (e.g. courtesy, style levels, etc.).

Some observations:

• For no apparent reason, Geoffrey has excluded from his count the Greek forms corresponding to "etc" and "e.g.". If one includes them, words ending with -ς make up 46% of the text.
  
• The fragment is not grammatical: it is made of the end of a first long sentence and the beginning of a second one. Both are incomplete. 'Αναφέρονται' (are mentioned) was the single verb selected by Geoffrey (out of the four that appear in the two complete sentences). The result is that only 2% of the words are verbs.
  
• This fragment is mostly made of lists of items of the form "X of Y" (formation of the passive voice, imprinting of mandatory complements of a verb in the formation of the sentence) where X is in the Nominative case and Y in the Genitive (both cases correlating with -ς as mentioned by Geoffrey)
  
• In a grammatical modern Greek text (the four paragraphs before the table of content of the wikipedia You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) 22% of the words end with -ς (which is by far the most frequent word-ending character). This is less than half the value in the fragment chosen by Geoffrey.
  
• The frequency of word-final -y in Voynich Currier B (45%) is comparable to the value observed by Guy in the two pages he examined (50%).
  

TLDR the frequency of -ς in a grammatical Greek text is half that of -y in Currier B. It is slightly more than half the frequency of -y in the whole manuscript (22% vs 41%). Guy's conclusion that -y cannot correspond to -s / -ς is confirmed.

If one wants to believe that the VMS is a direct encoding of Greek, one is forced to go down the road chosen by Geoffrey and interpret the text as ungrammatical lists of words.

PS: I suggest we stay on topic and adhere to the assumptions that David stated in the first post, in particular:

• Voynichese will be a language that shares enough phonemes with our languages to be recognised in the modern era.
  

The idea of ungrammatical word-lists with arbitrarily skewed character distributions can be discussed elsewhere.

I will keep my reply very brief in order to respect the wish to keep the thread on topic. Voynich is a strange MS. It may have strange content with unusual or atypical features, including letter distribution features. It is fair to raise the frequency of final [y] as an issue, which is useful for all researchers to keep in mind in their work. Those who propose that [y] represents a consonant, such as myself, will need to explain this issue further. I will aim to do so in due course. At the same time, any proposal will need to explain [qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy] and similar sequences anyway, which may be related to the unusual letter distribution features. Those who propose that [y] represents a vowel, will need to demonstrate how the very limited inventory of other characters can possibly represent all of the consonant phonemes of a language. In my opinion, that challenge is equally as difficult as explaining an unusually high proportion of words ending in "-s" or some other consonant.

Geoffrey

(10-04-2019, 11:45 AM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At the same time, any proposal will need to explain [qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy] and similar sequences anyway, which may be related to the unusual letter distribution features.

The statement that the systematic exact repetition of words could possibly "be related to the unusual letter distribution features" seems quite obscure to me.

Quote:Those who propose that [y] represents a vowel, will need to demonstrate how the very limited inventory of other characters can possibly represent all of the consonant phonemes of a language. 

If you believe that Voynichese symbols are too limited to represent the sounds of a language, the problem is there independently on y being a consonant or a vowel. Not a good argument to disregard all evidence about y behaving as a vowel.

(10-04-2019, 01:08 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-04-2019, 11:45 AM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At the same time, any proposal will need to explain [qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy] and similar sequences anyway, which may be related to the unusual letter distribution features.

The statement that the systematic exact repetition of words could possibly "be related to the unusual letter distribution features" seems quite obscure to me.

Let me explain: If the author repeated certain words in the text extremely often, to a degree that is not typical of most written texts that we are familiar with, and if those certain words that are repeated extremely frequently happen to end in a final "-s" in the underlying language of the text, then this feature of systematic exact repetition of words could indeed also cause and explain an unusually high proportion of the total number of words in the text that end in a final "-s".

Example:

[attachment=2793]

Now it just so happens that "kai Theos" ("and God"), if written as a single word "ka'-Theos", could indeed be a reading of [qo-keedy] in my system. But this is just a passing observation, not yet a part of a systematic interpretation of any particular passage of text.

Importantly, I also note that if certain conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and other particles that are typically written as separate words in standard Greek text, are rather in the Voynich MS typically written as prefixed elements of the following words, then this could dramatically reduce the frequency of vowel-final words in the whole text, since many of these words are vowel-final, which could in turn dramatically increase the frequency of "s"-final words, for example.

(10-04-2019, 01:08 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:Those who propose that [y] represents a vowel, will need to demonstrate how the very limited inventory of other characters can possibly represent all of the consonant phonemes of a language. 

If you believe that Voynichese symbols are too limited to represent the sounds of a language, the problem is there independently on y being a consonant or a vowel. Not a good argument to disregard all evidence about y behaving as a vowel.

It is well known in linguistics that while vowel sounds are more important for recognizing words heard in oral speech, on the contrary consonant letters are more important for recognizing words that one reads in written text. This is why all-consonant abjads exist and have long existed historically, while nobody ever heard of a writing system that only represents the vowels and not the consonants. To see this, just compare "lng exstd hstrcll" and "o eie ioiay". 

The point is, if a particular writing system has the problem of a small number of characters to represent the entire language, it is much more important to reserve as many of them as possible to represent as many consonants or groups of consonants as possible, rather than to use too many of them to represent vowels. We can afford to sacrifice the representation of a vowel or vowels much more readily than we can afford to sacrifice the representation of a consonant or consonants.

Geoffrey

(10-04-2019, 01:54 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If the author repeated certain words in the text extremely often, to a degree that is not typical of most written texts that we are familiar with, and if those certain words that are repeated extremely frequently happen to end in a final "-s" in the underlying language of the text, then this feature of systematic exact repetition of words could indeed also cause and explain an unusually high proportion of the total number of words in the text that end in a final "-s".

Thank you for the clarification. I think the idea makes sense: it should also be possible to measure if -y words tend to repeat more often than other words. Exact repetition is too rare to have a significant impact, but maybe quasi-repetition could? Anyway, this doesn't tell us anything about the phonetic value of -y, so I am not sure it is relevant to the present thread.

(10-04-2019, 01:54 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Importantly, I also note that if certain conjunctions, prepositions, articles, and other particles that are typically written as separate words in standard Greek text, are rather in the Voynich MS typically written as prefixed elements of the following words, then this could dramatically reduce the frequency of vowel-final words in the whole text, since many of these words are vowel-final, which could in turn dramatically increase the frequency of "s"-final words, for example.

Again, it can be true that, for some languages, particles written as prefixes would significantly alter word-ending statistics. It could also be that in Greek this would lead to a higher frequency for -s, but that should be supported by actual numbers. Anyway we are again entering into subjects that are both very specific and very speculative and little related to a general approach to the phonology of Voynichese.

(10-04-2019, 01:54 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is well known in linguistics that while vowel sounds are more important for recognizing words heard in oral speech, on the contrary consonant letters are more important for recognizing words that one reads in written text. This is why all-consonant abjads exist and have long existed historically, while nobody ever heard of a writing system that only represents the vowels and not the consonants. To see this, just compare "lng exstd hstrcll" and "o eie ioiay".

The point is, if a particular writing system has the problem of a small number of characters to represent the entire language, it is much more important to reserve as many of them as possible to represent as many consonants or groups of consonants as possible, rather than to use too many of them to represent vowels. We can afford to sacrifice the representation of a vowel or vowels much more readily than we can afford to sacrifice the representation of a consonant or consonants.

The idea of an abjad could well be one of the most important aspects when considering Voynichese phonology.
If the writing system is not an abjad, vowels and consonant should alternate; they should cumulative have something (very roughly) comparable with a 50-50 share of character occurrences (not types: vowels will have less types, with more occurrences per type). That is basically the principle underlying both Sukhotin's algorithm and Hudson's OCP software (and possibly 2-states HMM as well).
As I wrote above:

Quote:I believe that, if the script is phonetic and it is not an abjad, there is little doubt that EVA: e, o, a, y correspond to vowels

This opinion is based on accurate analyses by several researchers, using different transcriptions and different methods.

On the other hand, if the script is an abjad, it might be as you say. I don't know much about abjads, but if vowels can sometimes be totally absent, then (if Voynichese is such a case) y would obviously represent a consonant. 
Abjads are a subject I would like to investigate more. For what is worth, the fact that Sukhotin's algorithm results in a higher Consonant-Vowel alternation rate for the VMS than for the comparison languages I have checked (German, Italian, Latin, English) suggests that Voynichese does represent vowels.

(10-04-2019, 03:43 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The idea of an abjad could well be one of the most important aspects when considering Voynichese phonology. 
If the writing system is not an abjad, vowels and consonant should alternate; they should cumulative have something (very roughly) comparable with a 50-50 share of character occurrences (not types: vowels will have less types, with more occurrences per type). That is basically the principle underlying both Sukhotin's algorithm and Hudson's OCP software (and possibly 2-states HMM as well).
[...]
On the other hand, if the script is an abjad, it might be as you say. I don't know much about abjads, but if vowels can sometimes be totally absent, then (if Voynichese is such a case) y would obviously represent a consonant.
Abjads are a subject I would like to investigate more. For what is worth, the fact that Sukhotin's algorithm results in a higher Consonant-Vowel alternation rate for the VMS than for the comparison languages I have checked (German, Italian, Latin, English) suggests that Voynichese does represent vowels.

There is one more possibility that needs to be considered as well - that of an "impure abjad":

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I quote:
"Impure abjads have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both. The term pure abjad refers to scripts entirely lacking in vowel indicators.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. However, most modern abjads, such as You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., are "impure" abjads – that is, they also contain symbols for some of the vowel phonemes, although the said non-diacritic vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularly You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that sound similar to long vowels. A "pure" abjad is exemplified (perhaps) by very early forms of ancient You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., though at some point (at least by the 9th century BC) it and most of the contemporary Semitic abjads had begun to overload a few of the consonant symbols with a secondary function as vowel markers, called You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. This practice was at first rare and limited in scope but became increasingly common and more developed in later times."

Thus, the choices do not have to be limited to the two options "all vowels represented" or "no vowels represented". In impure abjads, we have some of the vowels represented, but in a less consistent manner than full alphabets do.

Note in particular the statement in the quote about how "vowel letters are also used to write certain consonants, particularly approximants that sound similar to long vowels". Also note the statement about how "Semitic abjads had begun to overload a few of the consonant symbols with a secondary function as vowel markers". This concept of overloading symbols with multiple functions, representing multiple sounds and types of sounds, may be relevant to the Voynich MS as well.

Geoffrey

(08-04-2019, 08:09 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hulden defines the obligatory contour principle (OCP) as "a universal cross-linguistic tendency to avoid redundancy or repetition of similar speech features within a word or morpheme, especially if the phonemes are adjacent to one another".
The principle is that characters that tend to occur consecutively must have different sounds, while characters with similar sounds never or very rarely appear next to each other. At the light of this, it seems clear why q- and -in end up being considered similar: they never appear in consecutive positions. Similarly, gallows do not appear consecutively, so they must be similar sounds. 
The positional constraints of Voynichese are so strong that they make several consecutive combinations impossible or very rare: this could contribute to make the lower splits in this tree unreliable (because they depend on ridiculously small numbers). On the other hand, some of those constraints may very well be a consequence of the OCP.

Any analysis based on the OCP (which is admittedly a pretty strong cross-linguistic tendency) would have trouble accepting EVA-i as a speech feature, because it is often doubled and tripled up. This is why Hulden's analysis split them up. At any rate, the EVA-i is reminiscent of the minim and may just represent a stroke rather than a letter, making the real symbols EVA-in and EVA-iin, as in the analysis.

Alternatively, if the OCP violations can diagnose non-linguistic behavior, then maybe repeated EVA-e and EVA-i are numerals.

(06-04-2019, 08:26 PM)Common_Man Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe this isn't going to be very useful, but just consider this possibility..
What if the author consistently left out the first letter (or consonant) while writing to make it difficult to read for the people who didn't know the system? The idea obviously comes from Derek Vogt's findings (which I still cant get enough of, even though I believe he lost his way somewhere in the middle and ended up in no man's land), and maybe keeping this in mind might help those trying to assign sound values, and such a thing might give rise to a lot of single glyph words, which the VMS has in plenty.

I myself have tried it while trying to transcribe the MS in my own way, but it never really helped.. Maybe others trying to do the same can benefit by keeping this in mind..

Leaving out the first letter was actually a characteristic of numerous dialects and one sees it when reading labels in herbal manuscripts. Very frequently the first letter just isn't there (not just the "h", which is often dropped, but sometimes hard consonants as well).

Some of the Provençal dialects dropped many letters throughout the words. This happens in some of the small towns in Scandinavia, as well (still to this day), so it was not just true of the mid-southern areas.


So, leaving out the first letter might be a deliberate choice (and might affect every token), but it might also be a property of how a particular person learned to speak.

(07-04-2019, 05:26 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.All this is very similar to the classical example of the guy looking for his lost keys near lanterns only.

But never mind. The exercise, even if it has a serious chance of being meaningless, is still interesting enough.

This is really the heart of the matter right here, and sums up what is so attractive and unexpectedly wholesome about Voynichology.