(17-06-2020, 04:08 PM)Ben Trovato Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...
On a character level, the most common characters (by far) in Hebrew are Waw, He and Jod. His findings for Waw and Jod are far from that in VMS, He excludes He, because the "ha-" article would not have been pronounced in the dialect he proposes. But what about the other words that begin with that letter? Among those there are some of the most important and common words like those for "he" and "she".
I think this kind of statistic is very important.
If there is an assumption that Voynichese is natural language, then a disconnect between letter frequencies in the VMS, and letter frequencies in the language of choice (in this case Hebrew), raises red flags. Hannig's paper does not discuss this problem.
I'm skeptical of this solution. It plays fast and loose with the vowels and gutturals. Sometimes the script encodes א, sometimes it doesn't. In one case he converts א to ה to get the word he wants. These are different consonants. These changes seem arbitrary.
I'm also suspicious because the solution does not present a continuous Hebrew text that can be read or checked whether the result makes any grammatical sense. Hebrew makes its inflections through prefixes, suffixes, and vowel ablaut: that would seal the deal if those can be identified (particularly since some of his translations are in the present tense), but I can't find anything about them.
Furthermore, Hebrew hardly repeats words and similarly spelled words to the extent as the VM.
Stephen Carlson Wrote:It plays fast and loose with the vowels and gutturals.
Yes, I noticed that too, and Torsten mentioned that Hannig uses his "vowel" glyphs as wildcard glyphs.
While it's possible that text could be enciphered with some vowel freedom, combining this with other subjective adjustments starts to add too many degrees of freedom.
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
Article in Dutch. I like how they consulted Lisa's twitter right away...
(18-06-2020, 06:53 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Yes, I noticed that too, and Torsten mentioned that Hannig uses his "vowel" glyphs as wildcard glyphs.
Hannig writes himself about 'o' as wildcard sign: "Den Platzhalter für einen Vokal repräsentiert das Zeichen 'o'".
It is often underestimated how difficult it is to decipher an unknown writing system using an unknown language (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It is a common misunderstanding that it would be enough to guess the language and to confirm this guess by presenting a meaningful reading attempt. Unfortunately without knowing the writing system and the language it is always possible to invent new writing rules or to postulate an unknown dialect to explain discrepancies away. With other words as less someone knows as more easy it becomes too read something into the text. This works like a pitfall. Every new word is seen as a confirmation of the language choice. But in reality the decipherer didn't know enough to detect any mistakes.
The only way to avoid this pitfall is a simple description of what is. If the description is conducted with care and attention and observes not only what is obvious but also the small details, then this description becomes a determination which recognizes the individual element as something distinctive; it penetrates. This way it is possible to find typical patterns and to compare this patterns with known writing systems. With some luck it is possible that the [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]patterns point to a certain language family or even to a certain language. The writing system used for the Voynich manuscript didn't behave like any known writing system or language family. There is far too much context dependency and far too much repetition.[/font]
That the VMS was written in Hebrew is probably not a new idea. On the net I came across James Finn and his book.
Quote:James Finn proposed in his book Pandora's Hope (2004) that the Voynich manuscript is in fact visually encoded Hebrew.
Unfortunately I could not find more about his theory until now. Otherwise one could have compared it to Hannig.
I guess it depends what he means by "visually encoded" Hebrew.
According to Haughton, Finn considered an/ain/aiin/aiiin to be the same, to stand for "eye". Why would anyone write "eye" multiple times per sentence for 200 pages? And if that means "eye" then what about the very short tokens or single glyphs in front of "eye"? It doesn't sound statistically plausible.
Hannig's idea is basically a substitution cipher.
I found Finn's website, but it doesn't say much about his Hebrew theory either. The rest on the website is pretty weird.
You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
Thanks for the link, bi3.
I still don't know what he means by "visually encoded". He describes a substitution cipher. It doesn't matter whether an/ain/aiin encode to the same thing, it's still a substitution cipher, and appears to closely follow the EVA transliteration system, with the exception that it is then converted to (mostly grammarless) Hebrew.
(24-06-2020, 01:55 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..... it is then converted to (mostly grammarless) Hebrew.
Based on the sparse explanation on Finn`s website, I would say that Hannig's concept, despite all the gaps und problems , is better thought out.