If the manuscript were written by collaborators this would seem to mean people of equal status. This could be friends. Most organisations are hierarchical, so formal organisation seem less likely. Siblings as I suggest is an option. Communities without hierarchies can exist, but I would guess them rare at the time. I suppose there is scope for overlap between hierarchical and non-hierarchical relations. You can have brothers, but the older brother(s) may have influence over the younger brothers. You have friends, where one friend is deferred to more than others on certain tasks. You can have organisation relationships where employees are given more autonomy, though I think that probably rare at that time.
I like the idea that the manuscript is two people transcribing what an other was saying, without them necessarily knowing the language of this third person
(12-05-2020, 11:49 AM)elieD Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I like the idea that the manuscript is two people transcribing what an other was saying, without them necessarily knowing the language of this third person
I like the idea, but I'm not sure I like its implications. Transcription of a language one doesn't understand is almost always fairly lossy. I once briefly worked for a hospital that hired a second-rate medical transcription service. This service was based in a foreign country, where English is spoken widely but not natively. The company clearly did not vet its scribes for fluent English comprehension. Some of the mistakes I would find in the transcriptions of my notes were subtle and understandable, but made a crucial difference in the meaning. The issue was usually the scribe being unable to reliably distinguish between very similar sounds, that his/her native language didn't distinguish. "He had a pain" became "He had a pen", in one memorable example. Usually these problems could be sorted out and corrected by a native speaker who knew the context well. But when we're dealing with the VMs, we have very little context, and no indication of whether there are any native speakers of the original language behind it. If Voynichese really is a case of mis-transcription of a poorly understood language, it's not at all clear to me that the original text is recoverable.
Renegade, that is exactly what I think may have happened in the VM, since it might explain the reduced phoneme inventory and some of the reduced entropy. What keeps me from embracing the theory is that I don't see how it could lead to the positional rigidity. This feels planned rather than the result of loss-by-difficult-transcription.
(12-05-2020, 02:05 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Renegade, that is exactly what I think may have happened in the VM, since it might explain the reduced phoneme inventory and some of the reduced entropy. What keeps me from embracing the theory is that I don't see how it could lead to the positional rigidity. This feels planned rather than the result of loss-by-difficult-transcription.
That's how I see it, as well. A miscopied manuscript or mistranscribed oral dictation wouldn't come out like Voynichese. The VMS text is strongly positional and almost alarmingly consistent.
Another related Voynich question that troubles me, is for such an unusual and unique document why have we, as yet, found no contemporary references?
Things occur to me are:
1) It was intended to be secret and so very few people, deliberately, had any knowledge of it.
2) People who saw it thought it was unimportant and worthless, so there was no interest in it. It might seem to be a special document to us, but wouldn't have been regarded so at the time.
3) It was not intended to be taken very seriously. It was just a bit of fun, a side project just for entertainment.
4) All references to it were deliberately expunged from history.
5) It was somehow lost and forgotten, maybe as it was later.
6) Some combination of the above.
I daresay there are other possible explanations, but it just seems strange that something that contemporary people are fascinated by and is referred to widely, has no known references from that specific period.
The first guess has to be some effort to keep such an usual document secret. If people knew about it then it would have to have generated curiousity surely?
I have my own theory, but obviously that's just more speculation.
(12-05-2020, 02:42 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (12-05-2020, 02:05 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Renegade, that is exactly what I think may have happened in the VM, since it might explain the reduced phoneme inventory and some of the reduced entropy. What keeps me from embracing the theory is that I don't see how it could lead to the positional rigidity. This feels planned rather than the result of loss-by-difficult-transcription.
That's how I see it, as well. A miscopied manuscript or mistranscribed oral dictation wouldn't come out like Voynichese. The VMS text is strongly positional and almost alarmingly consistent.
@Koen and @-JKP-, both of you guys wrote in the Missionaries thread about how many writing systems were invented by missionaries, for the purpose of imparting scripture to illiterate peoples. I'm trying to square this in my mind right now with the idea of a scribe who speaks the language poorly if at all, and incompletely understands the language's phonology. In a case like this, the way he comes up with to put the sounds he hears into writing might be very systematic, but nevertheless based on a flawed understanding of what sounds differ from what other sounds, and when it matters. From what you've learned about the history of writing systems, is a poorly-designed
de novo writing system, that records a spoken language ambiguously but sticks around anyway, a thing historically?
One possible example I can think of is Wade-Giles Romanization of Mandarin Chinese. WGR levels the distinctions between a couple of palatal and retroflex consonants. When used without the apostrophe (often), it levels the distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants. When used without tone-marking diacritics (usually), it levels Mandarin Chinese's entire tonal nature. It's dying a slow death in favor of the far superior Pinyin, but I still encounter it every now and then. I can't imagine it would be easy for a native Chinese speaker to read a paragraph of nothing but WGR, for comprehension or out loud to other people. WGR is systematic. Characters in it are far more positionally rigid than in languages that natively use the Roman alphabet. But for all that beautiful rigidity, WGR is problematically over-simple, in a way that doesn't do justice to the phonology of Chinese.
Renegade: I'm quite fond of the structuring/oversimplifying missionary theory because it can integrate almost everything that's wrong with Voynichese into a historically possible scenario.
There is probably no true parallel though. Writing systems are like animals, if one doesn't function in its surroundings, it won't survive long. It has to be adopted in a systematic way to gain traction and reach us after 500 years.
So if Voynichese was a writing system once used to plainly write a language, it was probably a faulty one. Or a secret one. It's either faulty or secret
If only there was some way of knowing whether the Voynich script became widespread or was a dead-end experiment...
The idea that the script was invented to represent a previously unwritten script, or a not-very-accurate romanisation of an existing script, is interesting. It is one specific example of the option that the text largely represents spoken text.
This might explain the very existence of this particular text, and the fact that there is just this example. It might also explain to some extent why it has so far been impossible to understand it, or to match it to known languages.
However, this does not allow to explain a number of features that we are seeing in the MS. These are the features that are position-dependent, not inside words, but related to the written lines and paragraphs.
The fact that certain characters appear preferentially (but not uniquely) in top lines of paragraphs is not explained by a spoken text, but points to a written source. The same is true for the unusual behaviour at line starts and line ends, which are equally not black-and-white, but preferential behaviour.
So, even if the text is a rendition of a spoken, rather than a (previously) written text, at least there must have been a significant alteration as a second step, to introduce these features.