(19-09-2020, 04:31 AM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Nice work, Geoffrey. I'm intrigued and entertained. Whether or not it pans out, what you've built is a consistent, logical, testable model for phonetically mapping Voynichese characters, built on solid facts about the properties of the text. Also, from my perspective as a self-taught amateur at linguistics, I'm seeing a solid understanding of the basics of phonology. It's at least a good start; congratulations on constructing a model worth testing (and able to be tested!) at all.
This is probably a matter of taste and personality, but seeing people present fleshed-out ideas about the VMs, and then receive critical feedback, does not, per se, make me cringe. I only cringe when someone receives feedback on their ideas less than gracefully. Like in judo, there is much to be learned by taking a swing at the VMs and missing, understanding why you missed, and observing others do the same. I don't think anybody should be shamed for trying, as long as they receive all feedback graciously and seriously.
Thank you, Renegade. First of all, you deserve credit for being the one who called my attention to Koen's verbose cipher analysis lowering conditional entropy on his blog. I can't follow and keep up with everything, and I had been away from the Voynich ms for a while if and when these ideas were first discussed. I appreciate you for bringing it up again recently and linking to it. That was the spark that led me to develop this VCI transcription, for better or worse.
Quote:A couple of questions, Geoffrey:
I'm glad to see that you define "a couple" the same way I do
Quote:- Where do you currently stand on the idea of EVA [f] and/or [p] being top-line variations of another glyph? In your model, you equate [f] with [k] and [p] with [t]. Last year, you and I had been toying with the idea of [f] and [p] actually being top-line variations of [d]. What made you change your mind?
I want VCI transcription to be a tool that all Voynich researchers can use. The idea of [f]/[p] as a variant of [d] rather than of [k]/[t] had come to feel like a "pet" theory of mine last year, so I don't want to impose such a minority opinion of mine on a transcription system designed for general use. It seems clear that the general working assumption of most Voynich researchers has been that [f]/[p] are most likely variants of [k]/[t], so VCI is faithful to that consensus. At the same time, [f]/[p] are presented as capital letters in VCI. This gives researchers the flexibility to treat them distinctly, with case-sensitive analysis, and analyze any possibility, including [f]/[p]=[d] or other ideas, but it also makes it simple to treat them in the standard consensus manner, with non-case-sensitive analysis.
I also have to admit that there may have been an element of confirmation bias in my analysis of [f]/[p]=[d] last year, since that equivalence was part of the correspondence table of my Judaeo-Greek hypothesis at the time. That entire hypothesis suffered from excessive ambiguity in the possible phonetic value of each character, leading to extreme ambiguity in the possible reading and meaning of each word or vord. You will notice that I am not repeating that mistake in my current work with the VCI transcription and related analysis.
Quote:- I'm wondering if EVA [dch] also belongs in your chart, as /kʲ/
At this stage I don't want to force too many such n-gram=single unit equivalences into the system. The system already has plenty of them. As it currently stands VCI can read [dch] as <ki>, and I don't want to get rid of any more vowels than I have to. Of course if the text ends up being Arabic or Maltese, then maybe we don't need all those vowels. But if it ends up being Czech or Irish or Basque, then we should expect to see a normal amount of vowels. Also, it is easy enough to treat <ki> as <kj> at a later stage, if we want to go in that direction.
Quote:- What are your thoughts on the controversial but intriguing possibility of the equivalence of EVA [a] and [y]?
I think EVA [y], which is also VCI <y>, is a very important and complicated glyph in the ms text. I would not want to rush to equate it with EVA [a] and potentially lose essential distinct information that [y] actually contains and represents. If in the end [a] and [y] do prove to be equivalent, it will still be possible to detect that at a later stage in due time: "Linguy Latiny per se Illustraty, Pars I: Familiy Romany" is not a difficult cipher step to figure out. But if we equate them now, and [y] proves to be distinct, it will be more difficult to recover that distinction if we are all using a system that treats them and presents them as identical.
Quote:- Suppose for a moment that [a] with no glyphs attached to the right of it — to the extent that this glyph can even be said to have an independent existence — is the same as [y]. Koen and Marco have presented evidence for each in the series [a*] being a separate letter, and your model expands this series into a set of vowel sounds. Wouldn't it make sense, then, that isolated [a] and [y] have the same pronunciation, and both of them represent the most neutral or empty vowel possible? /a/ is definitely a possibility, but I wonder if some type of schwa or barely-pronounced vowel sound could also be it. I'm thinking of the way the Cyrillic alphabet's various yers have lost their status as true vowels, or the way Mandarin Chinese Pinyin Romanization uses "i" after a sibilant to indicate the near lack of a vowel. Or, for a more familiar example to many here, the way Germans pronounce the letter "e" at the end of a word. I also wonder if unattached [a] or [y] could be a wildcard vowel sign, which can be used to write a variety of different vowels, perhaps unaccented ones.
All of these ideas are possibilities. But I would be careful about the idea of a "wildcard vowel sign". In Arabic it might be possible to get away with this and still interpret the text coherently, but in European languages it runs a huge risk of introducing excessive ambiguity into the reading and interpreting of the text. Speaking of Arabic, it has a variety of letters such as 'alif, hamzah, 'alif maqsoura, ta' marbut.ah, that have various positional restrictions and may or may not actually be pronounced.
Quote:- If the series [o*] represents a series of voiced consonants, might there be a corresponding series of [y/a*], used to explicitly specify an unvoiced consonant? [yk], [yt], [yd], [ar], [as], [al]
Again I want to be careful about the risk of losing other distinct information that [y/a] may contain or represent, and I don't want to get rid of more vowels than we have to. [k], [t], [d] appear without a preceding glyph quite frequently, and it is natural to treat the voiceless obstruent as the default value.
Quote:- If [or] represents /l/, might [ar] then represent /ɫ/? This is a phonemic distinction in some of the languages under consideration, after all.
Yes, this is quite possible if the language has /ɫ/. But many languages do not, and I don't want to force the symbol for such a relatively uncommon phoneme as a value in the system unless and until we have some evidence that the language of the ms text may actually contain such a lateral fricative phoneme.
Quote:- I'm not quite following your logic behind [a] = /a/ and [l] = /s/, but then [al] = /a:/. I'm reminded of how in French, syllable coda "s" is not pronounced, but still lengthens the preceding vowel
Yes, I think I said in the post accompanying the VCI tables that [al] was the most difficult decision. The system is more internally consistent if EVA [al] = VCI <as>. But treating the bigrams [ol], [or], [al], [ar] as each representing a single unit was part of Koen's method in generating the 3.01 conditional entropy value for the ms text, and I aimed to have the VCI system respect that method as much as possible. I couldn't find any consistent way to force the treatment of [ar] as a single unit, so I let that go as <al>. (Please note that I was not even remotely thinking of Arabic when I made this decision--if anything, I was thinking of Slavic past tense verb endings!) But out of respect for Koen's method and raising conditional entropy, I forced EVA [al] = VCI <a> in the spirit of his verbose cipher analysis.
Geoffrey