The Voynich Ninja

My ignorance of German did not allow me to understand the contents of the interview and I must rely on Matthias' summary. Lisa's mention of the apparent phonetic nature of Voynichese can help keep our attention on some features of the text. While of course one cannot be sure of anything, there are phonetic-like effects in Voynichese. E.g. the alternation between few-but-frequent circle symbols (vowels?) and many-but-less-frequent other symbols (consonants?). Also, as first observed by Currier, the last character of a word has an influence on the first character of the next word. As Emma and I argued in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., this is similar to Sandhi-effects that happen in several languages.

These phenomena must be explained. It could be that Voynichese is a complex cipher which results in something that looks pronounceable. If so, this is probably the intentional result of a particularly clever design.

There are several facts that make Voynichese incompatible with the phonetic rendering of a European language, but in principle the "exotic" language idea is still open. Given the huge variety of linguistic phenomena, and how much the same language varies according to time, subject and style, I am not sure it will ever be possible to entirely dismiss this idea. We know that Lisa finds the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. promising. There could be other Eastern languages that one could consider (e.g. You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as pointed out by Donald Fisk).

Also, the distinction between "phonetic" and "linguistic" is an important one. The text of Liber Loagaeth by Dee and Kelley appears to be phonetic but non-linguistic (something like "written glossolalia"). Similarly, the VMS could be meaningless, as argued by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. but, instead of being based on the visual harmony of glyphs as they suggest, it could be based on the actual harmony of sounds (again, like Liber Loagaeth).

Of course, I am looking forward to read Lisa's paper. It is clear that Terra X, however nicely produced, is not the right place for in-depth discussion of technical details.

(20-01-2020, 03:39 AM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Linda and nablator, I agree that this statement is problematic, but not necessarily for the same reasons you do. I think it's just poorly worded. "Secret writing" is an imprecise term that begs for clarification. "A phonetic transcription of sounds instead of letters" comes off as semantic wheel-spinning that doesn't say anything new or meaningful. All letters in phonographic writing systems (alphabets, abjads, and syllabaries) are phonetic transcriptions of sounds, after all.

I have a hunch that what Ms. Davis is trying to say, is that the VMs' text is the result of a scribe simply echoing a speaker's speech in written form, with little to no consideration for what the speaker might have meant to say. In other words, the scribe was merely a scribe, not an editor or an interpreter. Think of a court stenographer or a medical interpreter, both of whom aim to simply echo what another person said, with as little of their effort evident in the finished product as possible. In the setting of a medieval manuscript, one possible scenario which would fit this model is that of a scribe attempting to record a spoken language (s)he didn't understand, especially a spoken language that had no tradition of being written.

It is certainly possible that all the variant spellings that we see in 15th century manuscripts make it difficult to recognize a language, even more so if it is a "dying unwritten language". I have nothing against the idea, it is possible. The problem is that it still contradicts the under-studied facts that very few people seem to notice: that there are many variations in statistical features in the VMS that make it very unlikely to be a "normal" unprocessed language, be it phonetically transcribed or not. Other than the huge gap between the two Currier "languages" there are less visible discrepancies at several levels: quire (for example EVA-ody endings almost disappear in Q13 when they are common everywhere else), page (for example, very common patterns totally missing or overused on some pages) and even sometimes paragraph (for example what ReneZ calls "type-3" and "type-4" words). Of course some statistical variations should be expected especially with small samples, but the variations obviously exceed what is seen in normal texts, where words are not selected for their spelling but for their meaning. A possible analogy would be the type of poetry that uses a lot of assonance and alliteration but the VMS goes far beyond that in scope and extent. The autocopy hypothesis could explain the local self-similarity, but a general drift (that ReneZ noticed in glyph bigram statistics and Torsten Timm and MarcoP saw in common words statistics) needs to be added to have the complete picture.

About the word structure problem that Linda mentions, I also don't understand how it could be solved by the hypothesis of a phonetically transcribed language.

(20-01-2020, 06:25 AM)Linda Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The idea of phonetic spelling might well be the case, my problem was with the statement  made so matter of fact-ly without indication of further explanation behind it or to come. I havent seen the video so don't know if there was more.

I’m sorry Linda, I should have been clearer that I’m merely speculating and brainstorming. I don’t have any definite answers, and didn’t mean to give the impression I did.

(20-01-2020, 02:37 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(20-01-2020, 06:25 AM)Linda Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The idea of phonetic spelling might well be the case, my problem was with the statement  made so matter of fact-ly without indication of further explanation behind it or to come. I havent seen the video so don't know if there was more.

I’m sorry Linda, I should have been clearer that I’m merely speculating and brainstorming. I don’t have any definite answers, and didn’t mean to give the impression I did.

No need to apologize at all, i am doing the same thing. I was referring to Lisa's statement, although it was not first person so i guess i just need to find out more. The statement as i read it was not in the form of a hypothesis, yet offered no hint of supporting material.

I didn't say it WAS a phonetic transcription, just that it MIGHT be. And I definitely didn't have anything to do with that Nostradamus silliness...

Also, my paleographical analysis was not complete when the ZDF program was filmed. I've distinguished five scribes and will publish my results, along with an analysis of the relationships between scribes, text, and quire structure, later this spring in the journal "Manuscript Studies."

(20-01-2020, 03:27 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I didn't say it WAS a phonetic transcription, just that it MIGHT be. And I definitely didn't have anything to do with that Nostradamus silliness...

Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression it was more than "might be".

nablator, while I think I’d get a C+ at best if I took an exam on Statistical Properties of the VMS today, one thing is undeniably clear: the VMS’s text is either atypical symbolic language, or atypical use of typical symbolic language (song lyrics or map coördinates, for example).

@LisaFaginDavis I’m looking forward to your upcoming presentation.

(20-01-2020, 03:27 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I didn't say it WAS a phonetic transcription, just that it MIGHT be.

In alphabetic scripts a grapheme often corresponds to a phoneme. Normally there is no grapheme for every phoneme since not every phoneme transports meaning and also grapheme combinations can be used to represent certain phonemes. See for instance the digraph <th> in english. 

Therefore, additional letters or markers are necessary for phonetic transcriptions. They are necessary since phonetic transcriptions transport more information. One puzzling feature of the VMs is that the entropy value is consistently lower than that of any known natural language. Therefore the evidence clearly speaks against the hypothesis that "the symbols represent a loud rather than a written letter".