(29-09-2020, 07:59 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That’s going out on kind of a slender limb, then, to allow this degree of freedom.
Let me be blunt: I was breaking my own rules of my own system to give you the quick speculative guess of the "without you" meaning for <béz bas>. I hope my system as a whole is not judged by this one possible little mistake of mine. I will try to be more careful.
Quote:Have you tried sorting the words of a Czech or Sorbian text from the Middle Ages by frequency rank order, converting this using your model to Voynichese, and seeing if words (well, vords at this point) occur with any regularity in the VMs? If so, do they seem to occur in similar line, paragraph, and page contexts as they do in your Slavic codex? Things should start looking pretty promising on these fronts pretty quickly, if this model is worth exploring and refining further.
That would be an excellent research project for me to investigate. But keep in mind that there are many different types of medieval texts, and some may match more closely with the Voynich ms text, while others may not. The classic examples of written Czech in the time period of the Voynich ms would be the works of Jan Hus. But Hus was not writing herbals or pharmacological manuals or recipe collections or astrological / cosmological works or stories about bathing naked women. Still, the comparison of word frequency ranks could be of general interest and relevance.
(29-09-2020, 07:51 PM)aStobbart Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I see you omitted the text next to the nymphs, the fact that the text is in a different orientation makes me think it must be related to the drawning. I allways tought of it as labels or maybe a description.
This is the text according to the Takeshi transcription:
Quote:sal okeedy
daly ychey
sols daro
ychty
saino
saldy
dainy
What do you think? Could you make an interpretation using your system?
Well, I can give you the Slavic VCI reading of this piece of text:
<ras déc#>
<cas# #je#>
<rzr calch>
<#ip#>
<roch>
<rasc#>
<co#>
Many of these vords do indeed look like West Slavic words or syllables, but again it is very difficult to make accurate interpretations of just a few words in isolation.
It is tempting to compare the first two vords <ras déc#> to the Russian verb "razdet'sja", meaning "to undress". Modern West Slavic languages do not appear to have a very similar word with a similar meaning. But it is possible that in the medieval period some similar word did still exist in a West Slavic dialect, since the Slavic languages were not as divergent then as they are now--as a reference point, scholars estimate some degree of mutual intelligibility among all Slavic dialects until as late as the 10th century or later.
However, this is speculation about just two vords in isolation. It might be correct, but it might not be correct. Caveat lector.
geoffreycaveney Wrote:Let me be blunt: I was breaking my own rules of my own system to give you the quick speculative guess of the "without you" meaning for <béz bas>. I hope my system as a whole is not judged by this one possible little mistake of mine. I will try to be more careful.
I can only speak for myself, but I'm not one to judge you for that. The worst that'll happen is your model is wrong, and being wrong and trying to understand why you were wrong is one of the best teachers. Trust me, I'm not trying to break your chops, and I apologize if I came across that way. I'm just trying to be helpful. It's always a heartbreaking to see a researcher waste large amounts of time and energy on a theory because they ignored early signs they were on the wrong track.
geoffreycaveney Wrote:That would be an excellent research project for me to investigate. But keep in mind that there are many different types of medieval texts, and some may match more closely with the Voynich ms text, while others may not. The classic examples of written Czech in the time period of the Voynich ms would be the works of Jan Hus. But Hus was not writing herbals or pharmacological manuals or recipe collections or astrological / cosmological works or stories about bathing naked women. Still, the comparison of word frequency ranks could be of general interest and relevance.
You have a good point about specimen selection, Geoffrey. I've noticed recently a number of statistical analyses of the VMs, both new and classic, have come under attack for questionable selection of comparison texts / control specimens, which is fair criticism. The problem is that without any certainty about the VMs's subject matter, it's very hard to know what natural language text, in what language and what genre of literature, would provide a reasonable apples-to-apples comparison for textual analysis. Good luck sourcing one; this is your project, but if it were mine, this would probably be my next step.
Just to give an example of what would be a tolerable amount of ambiguity in a West Slavic language written without the diacritical marks, I can present here a few examples from a message written by a Czech scholar in Czech. Clearly he typed the message on a keyboard without the diacritical marks available, but he still had no problem doing so and clearly did not expect other Czech speakers to have any problem in understanding his message.
For the Czech word "Vážený", he simply wrote "Vazeny"
For the Czech word "přátelskými", he simply wrote "pratelskymi"
For the Czech word "Váš", he simply wrote "Vas"
And so on for the entire message. Formally this simplified writing method introduces ambiguity into the meaning of the words: "Váš" means 'your', while "Vas" means 'you' in the accusative case. But the context makes the meaning completely clear to any Czech speaker.
And Czech is a language that is famous for the phonemic precision of its diacritical marks! And yet an obviously highly educated native speaker and scholar of the language has no problem at all omitting the diacritical marks entirely. He did not even feel the need to include a diacritical mark in the spelling of his own surname.
The diacritical marks in Czech are modern.
(02-10-2020, 06:53 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The diacritical marks in Czech are modern.
The diacritical marks in Czech were first introduced in
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., published between 1406 and 1412 and traditionally attributed to Jan Hus. In this orthography, "Diacritics replaced digraphs almost completely." (Wikipedia has a brief summary of the history of Czech orthography You are not allowed to view links.
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Well, there are two types of diacritics in Czech, to compress compound consonants and to indicate long vowels.
In documents related to the times of Rudolf II that I have seen, neither appear.
(02-10-2020, 07:11 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (02-10-2020, 06:53 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The diacritical marks in Czech are modern.
The diacritical marks in Czech were first introduced in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., published between 1406 and 1412 and traditionally attributed to Jan Hus. In this orthography, "Diacritics replaced digraphs almost completely." (Wikipedia has a brief summary of the history of Czech orthography You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..)
Not that the VM text needs any more unfounded speculation as to the reasonings behind its development, but could it represent some sort of parallel attempt at simplifying Czech orthography that did not catch on? The dates involved are appealing.
Are there other aspects of the book (besides this possible model of the text) that would point to a Czech origin?
(02-10-2020, 07:49 PM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (02-10-2020, 07:11 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The diacritical marks in Czech were first introduced in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., published between 1406 and 1412 and traditionally attributed to Jan Hus. In this orthography, "Diacritics replaced digraphs almost completely." (Wikipedia has a brief summary of the history of Czech orthography You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..)
Not that the VM text needs any more unfounded speculation as to the reasonings behind its development, but could it represent some sort of parallel attempt at simplifying Czech orthography that did not catch on? The dates involved are appealing.
Are there other aspects of the book (besides this possible model of the text) that would point to a Czech origin?
The strongest concrete evidence, albeit circumstantial, connecting the VM to Czech is that its presence is first documented in the historical record in Bohemia. Of course it could have come from somewhere else, but the first hypothesis for a place of origin should logically be in or near Bohemia, unless and until we have evidence to the contrary of its location somewhere else at an earlier date.
As for the connection to the Czech orthographical reform of the same time period, I would rather say, at most, that the VM could have been inspired by the same general social atmosphere in the region that inspired the tumultuous period of Jan Hus's life and the aftermath of his execution in Bohemia in the early 15th century. The Hussite Wars were one of the greatest and most significant social upheavals in all of late medieval Europe. The new orthography was related to demands for ecclesiastical reform and greater popular access to religious and other literature written in the spoken vernacular language of the people rather than in Latin. This went hand in hand with demands for reforms reducing the power of the church hierarchy and the clergy.
It seems historically plausible that a Sorbian speaker in Lusatia, for example, could well have been inspired by the social upheaval in Bohemia as well as by the popularization of literature written in the Czech vernacular.
Naturally this all remains speculation unless and until we can decipher the text in a convincing manner.
(02-10-2020, 09:01 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As for the connection to the Czech orthographical reform of the same time period, I would rather say, at most, that the VM could have been inspired by the same general social atmosphere in the region that inspired the tumultuous period of Jan Hus's life and the aftermath of his execution in Bohemia in the early 15th century. The Hussite Wars were one of the greatest and most significant social upheavals in all of late medieval Europe. The new orthography was related to demands for ecclesiastical reform and greater popular access to religious and other literature written in the spoken vernacular language of the people rather than in Latin. This went hand in hand with demands for reforms reducing the power of the church hierarchy and the clergy.
Thanks for that historical background, Geoffrey. It sounds like a similar reason for most spelling reforms I've heard of — a way to raise literacy levels and reduce errors and misunderstandings in written communication.
I brought this up when you were building your Judeo-Greek theory, but I'm reminded again of You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. My understanding of the Arabic writing system is that it's written like cursive Roman letters are supposed to be written: you draw one continuous line for a word, and then add in dots and other marks. There are a number of consonants in Arabic that are distinguished only by dots or lack thereof. Apparently someone who reads a lot of Arabic can read a text that contains only the lines, not the dots, and can guess based on context which consonants are intended.
Was, or is, diacritic-free Czech a similar tradition, that's well historically attested over a long period of time? I guess what I'm asking is, was there a long time period between native Czech speakers beginning to write to each other in their native language (instead of Latin), and folks like Jan Hus realizing that extant attempts to write Czech with the Roman alphabet were too ambiguous for effective communication? The Greeks and Italians both eliminated most of their diacritics in 20th century language standardizations and spelling reforms, which were no longer needed for written comprehension. Could the Czechs do, or have done, something similar, with no ill effects?