(09-04-2021, 06:28 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (08-04-2021, 06:37 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view."bieh cu ipH Htilie[18]"
A much closer reading would be: Vieh, Kuh, ich Otilie
which could be Otilie's moment of self-reflection:
I Otilie, I cow...
Of course, little to do with f66r.
I know you are joking, but I think there is much to learn from a serious comparison of your reading and interpretation with mine. So I may make a few observations:
1. Changing the consonant in "ipH" to "ich" is a much more drastic discrepancy from reading to interpretation than anything I did in my analysis. It seems clear
prima facie that "cu ipH" is much closer to "suyp" or "zuip" than it is to "Kuh ich". (The problem is the unjustified shift p>c. Reading "c" as "K" is much more reasonable. More on that below.)
2. In general, initial consonants tend to be much more stable over the course of historical language change than medial consonants and especially than final consonants. So I consider it much more reasonable to drop the final "r" in "bier" or replace it with "h", rather than to change the initial "b" to "v". I am open to the latter possibility, but I would prefer to interpret a unit like "Hb" or "bH" as "v". In this case, since German "v" is pronounced as voiceless /f/, a unit like "Hp" or "pH" may also be suitable. But with just the plain "b" unit here, I consider that "bieh" is closer to "bier" than it is to "Vieh", since it retains the exact initial consonant.
3. I am open to the idea of a vowel (you choose "O") appearing in the place of the "H" in "Htilie[18]". The phonetic value or effect of "H" (EVA [y]) in different contexts remains a quite open question in this hypothesis. However, it is difficult to interpret this vord without also resolving the unit [18], which is EVA [g]. There is also the question of whether the name "Otilie" was extant in the early 15th century, as opposed to "Odile" or "Odila". But I see this latter point as a minor issue, as I would consider it quite possible that "Otilie" may have been a local dialectal variant somewhere at the time, even if the name is not otherwise attested in this exact form in the written historical record in this period.
4. As I noted in point 1 above, I consider "Kuh" a quite reasonable reading of "cu" in itself. As I have emphasized many times, the greatest difficulty in developing any consistent interpretation of the Voynich character set to represent a language is the paucity of possible symbols to represent distinct consonant units. (This is why statistical analysis finds similarity between Voynichese and Hawaiian.) So yes, in fact, I do believe that this unit I read as "c" may represent both a sibilant value in some places, like a "soft c", and a /k/ value in other places, like a "hard c". Indeed this is why I chose the plain letter "c" to represent this unit in my rendition of this system, and I am glad to see that you also find it natural to read it as "K".
However, I must note that we are dealing with the extremely frequent Voynich vord EVA [daiin] here, and where it occurs as an independent unit rather than as just one syllable of a longer word, it is likely that in a large majority of instances it represents a very common preposition like "zu", reading "c" as a sibilant "soft c", rather than a particular noun like "Kuh", reading "c" as a velar stop "hard c".
5. Your reading and interpretation lacks any verb in the phrase, whereas my reading and interpretation at least contained some form of a verb, although the proper syntax in this particular dialect certainly requires much more investigation.
(By the way, it is not quite true to claim that nobody would ever write the combination "bier zuip": In fact, a quick Google search finds 459 hits for this combination, more than the 152 hits for "zuip bier". The combination "bier zuip" is written as part of such phrases as "ik ook bier zuip" and "wie van je bier zuip", etc. I understand that the phrase on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. lacks any words before "bier zuip", but nevertheless that particular word combination can indeed apparently occur in writing in certain contexts. Perhaps the words before this phrase are simply missing in the little snippet of marginalia that we can read on this part of this page.)
6. Nevertheless, I would not be so quick to dismiss the content of your interpretation as necessarily having "little to do with You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. ". A popular interpretation of the Latin script phrase on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. is "der mus del" or "der Mussteil", meaning "a widow's share". The Voynichese phrase we are discussing is written near this other phrase, apart from the rest of the text on the page. If "Otilie" were the "widow", your reading could be a rather crude insult that the writer used to describe the person. However, I repeat that I consider my own interpretation better and closer to this reading of the Voynichese phrase, so I do not actually believe that this "insult toward the widow" interpretation of the phrase is the correct one.
Meanwhile, although off the topic of You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. , I think my reading of the phrase next to the group of seven small stars on You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. 3 as "charh/H hasiez", and its interpretation as "schaar (=schare) hasies (=haasjes)", meaning "a crowd of little hares", may be even more interesting than the phrase we are discussing here.
![[Image: gByeTSL.jpeg]](https://i.imgur.com/gByeTSL.jpeg)