The Voynich Ninja

(21-07-2024, 05:15 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you started with simple words, then you should have a list of words. Which of these words is most prevalent in the VMs? Which page or passage from the VMs has the greatest concentration of words from your list? Does that result somehow inform VMs investigation? Are the VMs plant pages examples of botanical monographs or not? What's going on with potential historical and religious references in the VMs artistry?

If the written text was intended to make sense, it needs to say something that can be understood by the reader.

In answer to your question and to many others, I would like to point out that I am working on the system how to make non-Slavic readers understood the Voynich Manuscript from the multidisciplinary, as well as from the linguistic perspective, and how that relates to Slovenian language. There is no single grammar book that would explain the linguistic changes, most of the books and scholarly articles are in Slovenian, or Croatian. To prepare the grammar explanation, the material has to be translated and organized. I will organize them by the changes they require, and that takes time, by the word families, and by the frequencies.

I am working with a list of words that also includes photo-copies of each individual VM word, and I can tell you the word DAM (EVA daiin) is most common word. I showed some examples in my previous post, but there is a lot more to explain, particular the use of that word family in different pages. 
In my opinion, the text by the VM plants is related more to the symbolic use of plants than to their description. To properly interpret the text, which might be related to some property of a plant and its symbolic meaning, one has to have a lot of knowledge about the humanistic writing, symbols used by humanistic writers and the objectives they intended to achieve with hidden meanings. It also requires a lot of linguistic knowledge. For example: the word 'flower', was used for superlative quality of poetry, philosophy, alcohol, flour, medicine. 

Because of the complexity of the explanation, I will use my step-by-step system that would be easiest to understand by the readers. Be patient and you will find many answers.

Y, I and J words in the Voynich Manuscript

Since the question of initial and final vowels might seem problematic, it requires proper explanation. The author of the VM was using his own writing convention that would be closer to the Old Church Slavonic than to Latin and German.

Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets had special letterforms for semivowels, which were dropped by many early Slavic writers. This is particularly noticeble in the VM, so that Dr. Bax suggested the writing was abjad. In the VM, the initial and final i was written as y, but in contemporary Slovenian, used by VM computer analists, there is no letter y, because it was replaced by i, j,ij, ji. 

[attachment=8915]
In my list of unique VM suffixes, including word endings) the y predominates, while other vowels are very rare: 6 a-suffixes. 6 e-, 18  i-, 

In this post, I intend to focus on suffix i and on letters i, j, y
  
EVA y, SLO-VA i, j
EVA i, SLO-VA i
[attachment=8916][attachment=8917]

The spelling of the i, y, g was very concussing in the 14 and 15th century as the distinction between minims resulted in various letterforms, such as i with a dot, and y with dots to indicate sound, although such distinctions were not made consistently. Besides that, the Check influence, that extended also in Alsace, created confusion between g and 9-like y because of the similarity of the letterform and different sounds – Czeck g was pronounced as j (y).
 [attachment=8918]

Different letters for sound j in Czeck:
gey (jej), gest (jest), geden (jeden), i izekl - i izekel, svoj - svoj

The debate whether 9-like letterform could be transcribed as Latin y is still going on, while there is no question about the single minim used inside the words for Latin i.
There was a lot of confussion about this letter in the Middle Ages.
In Latin, y was named ‘Greek I’, pronounced similar as German ü or French u, (Note that Ardic transcribed it as u and ü,), but in Europe it also became pronounced differently. In Dutch it is equivalent to IJ. The original Greek name was upsilon/ypsilon/ipsilon is used for it in many languages.

  Slovenian language developed from the Old Church Slavonic, which was written with Glagolitic or with Cyrillic alphabet. Both alphabets had several distinct letters for half-sounds, most common of which were yat and yer. Yat was used for the sound ae or e (like in cat or egg)They were considered long vowels, which in Slovenian became ij or ji. Since the minim i was not used as a final, the y was used for initial and final yat.

The best grammar books on the development of Slovenian language from the OCS were written by Fran Mikloschich in various language, including German.  Some of them are available on line. It explains the strings of consonants caused by unwritten Slovenian semivowels, as well the strings of vowels caused by missing consonants as well as the problems with the semivowels.  (I will explain this separately with examples from the VM and Slovenian books.)
In the Voynich Manuscript, y was used for word initial and word final. However, in the 16th century, when Slovenian language became standardized, the y was replaced with i, ij, ji, and y, as well as aj and ej (in the word dy- daj, dej) depending on the way people in different dialect pronounced the words for which y was used. A general principle was that j was used where consonant, and i when vowel was needed.
In the Voynich Manuscript, there are about 1600 words that seem to start with y, and about 900 unique words (written only one time). Many of those words are considered y-pre-fixed by many VM researchers.
The fact is that y is not Slovenian prefix.
In the Voynich Manuscript, y stands for the contemporary Slovenian conjunction IN (English: and or German und.) In dialectal pronunciation, it is still pronounced as ‘an’. In the dialectal language of White Carniola (close to Croatia) the ‘i’ is still used for ‘and’, but in Croatian and Serbian, it is also used in their literary language.
The original Old Church Slavonic conjunction ‘and’ was ‘i’ as it is evident from the 10th century Freising Manuscript, first Slavic document in Latin letters. In the region where the Glagolitic liturgy was being practiced in the 15th century, including in parts of Slovenia, the letter ‘i’ was still used for the conjunction ‘and’, however the Protestant writers in the 16th century, adopted Germanized form ‘inu’, which was pronounced either as jnu, jn, an.
[attachment=8919]
The Freising Manuscript written in Latin letters does not have y letter. The conjunction i is very frequently used, mainly because of the nature of the text (listing the divine helpers). CH is used for h sound. The word ‘ili’ is used for the frequently used ‘al’ word in the VM.

Why are so few conjunctions y (and) in the Voynich Manuscript?
The reason for this is the Slavic style of writing which persisted up until the printing presses were used. Croatian linguist Denis Crnković used the term ‘word blocks’ for the short unstressed words written together with the host word as one word.

[attachment=8920]
In the above text written by Antol Vremec in the 16th century, the ‘i’ is written separately as conjunction ‘and’. The marked words can be considered word blocks; some contain two, some three words that were later written separately. This writing was written close to where I believe the Voynich Manuscript was written 100 years earlier. 
The word blogs, and perhaps the isocolic writing, also characteristic for the Slavic medieval writing, made it into the VM from the OCS.
In the 15th century, even the OCS Glagolitic liturgical books began to conform to Western practice of word spacing. According to Crnković, the graphemic practices in the late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern era are not yet sufficiently researched.
His study of the medieval Slavic isocolon revealed that the use of word spacing in various configurations played a significant role in guiding the reader.(This is also noticed in the Voynich Manuscript where spaces are used to indicate pronunciation.)
An accented word or an accented host-word with unaccented prepositions, conjunctions or other particles attached to it were termed 'word block (ŽAGAR 2000: 169). A word-block might show a preposition connected to the word it governs, a particle connected to a host-word. The word block or word unit is any word or combination of words separated from other words by a space. It is usually pronounced as one word.
In the VM Slovenian, as well as in Croatian, this was further complicated by missing vowels which made reading very difficult. Example: dbshu – da bi šel.
The separation of the text, and the word blocks first started in France and Germany in 11th century and became consistently used by mid-13th century.
At the same time, Crnković also pointed out many dropped vowels in the Croatian form of Glagolitic OCS (ns mlst– naši milosti, nbskih’ blag’ – nebeških blag.
Crnković observed that the books written before the printing presses contained 20 to 30%  word blocks formed of hostword + enclitic or proclitic.

The practice of conjoining prepositions and particles with host-words into so-called word-blocks was practiced in Slovenia as well, when using Latin letters. In the first printed books by Primož Trubar, this was done more consistently, but his followers began to insert the apostrophe, and later full spaces.
In the Voynich Manuscript, the conjunction y is sometimes attached to the next word, and sometimes written separately, leaving a narrower space in between.
[attachment=8921]
Besides the conjunction ‘y’, the verb ‘je’ – (he, she, it – is implied with the grammatical form je.) is also most often attached to the host word, because it contains a short vowel e, which in phonetic is often dropped.
While the use of a letter y is the same for i – in (and) and j- je (is) the correct meaning could often, but not always, be determined from the words next to in.
[attachment=8923]
In these words, i stands for IN (and), even where there is no space, because of other grammatical clues.

Because the verb and conjunction can have the same position in a sentence, and the verbal form JE (he is) contains short vowel, the word is often pronounced as j(e). In the Voynich Manuscript, it is spelled as y. The distinction can only be made from the context.


The author of the Voynich Manuscript was not using space consistently, particularly after a one-letter words, like y, k, s, h, v and the one-letter words in which the semi-vowel was dropped, like ch(e), t(tu), y (ye/je), s(sy), k(o). When the Slovenian words were first written, Latin had no letter for semivowel, and because of this, many semivowels and unstressed vowels were dropped. Slovenian linguist A. Bohori? insisted that the unwritten semi-vowels be replaced with vowels, and that prepositions be separated with an apostrophe.
[attachment=8922]
In the Voynich manuscript, the apostrophe is used only once.
In the VM, the Y (as a verb or as a conjunction) is written separately or together with the next word, so that the distinction can only be made from the context. For example:  ‘y ty’ cannot be read differently than ‘in ti’,  but then again, if the author made a space after y by a mistake, that would change the interpretation to ‘yty’ (iti – to go).
 
 
There are relatively few Slovenian words that start with i, and in the VM, there are really scarce. To mention a few: ykol -- ikol (ever), ydy -jedi (foods), yty -iti (to go), yt -yt  ( to go), yky - ikej (ikej – anyway).  

The assumption that personal pronoun must be next to the word DAM is based on narrow interpretation of the word ‘I GIVE’.
There are a few personal pronouns related to giving in the VM, but mostly, the words are related to things (dam reči – I preach; dam dar – I give gift; dam dol – I give down – I place; DAM R(A)D – I like to give); dam oam – dam vam – I give to you (pl.), tdam – ti dam -I give to you (sing.)
The reason why DAM had such high frequency in the Voynich Manuscript is most likely the versatile use of the word DAM. Several Voynich researchers have considered DAM as a suffix, however only --am is a suffix, and D belongs to the root. Because the peasant, and the religious language were to limited for the author who was a poet and philosopher, he had to invent many new words. One way to create new verbs was to combine a noun and verb DATI (in appropriate conjugational form. Some such words are still in use, but most of them were shortened. Examples: REČI DAM –   words give – REČEM (i say),  DARI DAL (gifts I gave) -  DARIL  (his word is used in both forms, except that DARIL is spelled as DARAIL). The principle is the same as English ‘take a look’.

Slovenian words did not start with lj, although this might be assumed from its capital Ljubljana. Many contemporary linguists are protesting this spelling, which crept into Slovenian from Croatian. In most early Slovenian writing, the word for people was LUDI, not LJUDI.  Even the ‘ilj’ suffix was not that common in early Slovenian but was used under Glagolitic Croatian influence, mainly to make a distinction in pronunciation of the letter L (the words taken from Glagolitic vocabulary were pronounced as l, while the words taken from other parts of Slovenian speaking lands, particularly Upper Carniola, the L was pronounced as w. While Croatians still write and pronounce the final l as l, or lj, Slovenians write it as l and pronounce it as u. For final Slovenian l/u the Serbinas use final o and also pronounce it as o. Some of o suffixes are even in the Voynich Manuscript.
There are plenty of words starting with b, however they are not recognized by the VM researchers, because when they are connected to the e or c/h, they look like EVA sh.
I did not find the initial n, and only a few initial m letters.  There is no initial v, because in early Slovenian, the o was used instead of v.

(21-07-2024, 09:35 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are plenty of words starting with b, however they are not recognized by the VM researchers, because when they are connected to the e or c/h, they look like EVA sh.

What is the difference between them and Sh? Is it the position or shape of the apostrophe/macron? The problem remains that there are few S that are not a part of the Sh-like ligatures. Probably around a dozen but I may have missed some.

Quote:I did not find the initial n, and only a few initial m letters.

There are some in this transcription of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (after Latin parts are removed): 45 initial n, 71 initial m, 28 initial v in 820 word tokens.

I guess any initial v before a consonant should be interpreted as u, but they are not all before consonants.

What is the difference between them and Sh? Is it the position or shape of the apostrophe/macron? The problem remains that there are few S that are not a part of the Sh-like ligatures. Probably around a dozen but I may have missed some.

To understand the VM letterforms it is important to understand how Latin letters were used in vernacular languages. I can explain this from the Slavic perspective.

Slovenian language developed from what is now known as the Old Church Slavonic, for which the special alphabet, Glagolitza, was developed in the 9th century by Slavic missionaries St. Cyril and Methodius who were invited to teach Slavs in Great Moravia in their native language.
The Old Church Slavonic was the first common litterary language of Slovenian tribes. A similar language was spoken by Slavic tribes in Thessaloniki, which is the reason why the Slavic prince Rostislav asked Bizantine Empeor  for religious teachers.

The Slovenian speaking territory was much larger in the Middle Ages as it is today, when only small Slovenian minorities exist in Italy, Austria and Hungary. In the Middle Ages, Caranthanians (as the Western Sloveni  were called under the common name) joined the Great Moravia and adopted Glagolitic writing and what was later called Old Church Slavonic language. 
[attachment=8942][attachment=8943]

The first document in this language, written in Latin letters are fragments of three pages, called Freising Manuscript. The relatively recently found ten numerals written in Latin letters in Slovenian in the manuscript in Heiligencreutz is attestation that in the 12th century, Slovenian speaking scribe left his mark in that place. Slovenian language was spoken also in Friuli-Veneto region in Northern Italy. Glagolitic can be found on the 15th century fresco in Hrastovlje (Northern Italy, now in Slovenia).
[attachment=8944]
Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets (used in the Middle Ages) had 44  letters, one for each sound, and several ligatures. After the use of Glagolitza was forbiden, the Western Slavs were forced to use Latin liturgy and Latin letters.
Since the language of the VM does not conform to Latin, Italian, or German, three of the most used languages in Europe at the time, it would be a reasonable assumption that its origin might be Slavic.
When the vernacular languages were written with Latin letters, the writers used various ways to adapt Latin alphabet to their languages:
a) Drop letters
b) Use one letter for more than one sound
c) Use a combination of Latin letters for a particular sound
d) Slightly change the shape of the Latin letter
e) Add diacritic markers to the Latin letters
f) Invent a new letter

The author of the VM resorted to all of the above to adopt Latin alphabet to Slovenian language.
Studying the Voynich alphabet, it is possible that the author was familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet witch was used by the Orthodox Church. By the time the Serbian Church had already separated and the Church reformers were still hoping that Basil Council will bring it back to the Roman Church.
Hoping to avoid ambiguous reading, the VM author most likely avoided the Latin letter forms that would overlap with other alphabets, particularly Slavic Cyrillic.
Latin B could easily be confuses with Cyrillic V, as was the case in Stična Codex, where  Bug (God) was spelled as Wug .
From the Latin writing convention, the author has formed ligature for ch which was pronounced as č. From the Czeck language, he used h or k for the sound g. Sloveni in the Alpine region of Europe were pronouncing final L as w, but in Glagolitic liturgical language, it was pronounced as L. Latin u was used mainly for v and u, but there are some words where v occurs as word final, while o is often used instead of v for word initial.
Latin j was not yet in use, so he used 9-like y for final or initial j, but not for final u, for which u or w was used.
Latin p was problematic, because the letterform was the same as Slavic r. Since Latin q was not needed, it was used for letter p.
Letter s was OCS c, which could have confused many Slovenian and Slavic people. There is some phonetic relationship between s, z, c. To distinguish it from Latin s, the author made it into the mirror image of s.

Like in the VM, the letter f is missing in Slavic alphabet. The author who analyzed this alphabet in the 19th century, pointed out that that the letter f was not original Slavic sound and was used only in foreign words, while in some native words the ph-like sound was achieved with v. In the Swabian manuscript, v was often used for f sound, including in the words ‘vish’ for fish.
The author of the VM invented two so-called gauge glyphs to capture the sounds sv, zv, cv and to avoid confusion with c, z, v sounds. Since the Latin letters k and t are missing in the VM, it is also reasonable to assume that EVA k and t stand for them.

a) The VM researchers are mostly concerned with the missing vowels, particularly as the finals, which would be unusual for a Slavic language. I have already explained how the semivowels were dropped because the Latin alphabet had no equivalent letters for them. As it is explained on many web pages, the Slavic yat and yer (in a red box) were dropped, and final y was used for initial and final i. The yat and year were in essence short unaccented ae or ea, so that when the letters for the missing vowels were inserted in the 16th century in Slovenian writing, either e or a was inserted, and when the semivowel was related to i, the either or j were inserted.

[attachment=8945]

The letters in red boxes are semivowels, the arrows are indicating pronunciation of certain letters.

OCS semivowels jer and jat were dropped as well as some other unstressed letters (vowels or consonants). This was pointed by many Slovenian and Croatian linguist as one of the distinguishing characteristic of Slovenian language, particularly Dolenjska dialect on which literary Slovenian language was founded.

b) The use of one letter for more than one sound: This was clearly the case for the letter y which was used for i, j, ij, ji; for letter w which was used for u and v; for s used for s, sh(š)  and z; z for c and z... This might work with the native speakers, but the written communication was ambiguous, particularly when the writing conventions became mixed and Italian C becomes Slovenian K or H.

c. Adopting new letter forms: In German writing, long s  was used in various combinations, and  the 3-like z was used to differentiate it from the Latin z. Three and even four Latin letters were used for one sound  (tsch for ch (č), sch for sh(š)).  

The author of the VM seems to be distancing himself from the German writing convention, since there are no obvious letter combinations, such as sch for sh (š), tsch for ch (č), no long s, nor z with a downward tail. Since the first Slovenian books in the 16th century were printed in Germany, the German writing convention was adopted. The main combined letters in the VM are EVA ch  (č) and sh (š), but they are connected into ligature. Also, the strike-through ligatures look like squeezed  letters or intentionally connected with a strike-through line.

d) slightly changed Latin letters: There are several VM letters that seem to be devised from changing the Latin letters: s and b seem to be mirror images of of Latin s and b; t seems to be slightly changed double tt (TT), connected with two loops to make it easier to write with one stroke; VM letter R seems to be the right part of the Latin capital R (similar, but not as tall, glyph was also used in other manuscript); VM letter k seems to be simplified German letter k that could be written with one stroke.

c. diacritic markers: Unlike many other languages, the VM did not adopt diacritic markers for the vowels, however there are markers over the ch (bench) gliph which EVA designated as sh (Slovenian š). Several VM researchers pointed out slightly different shape and location of the plume over the ch ligature. I suppose even J.K. Petersen, who pointed out many of those differences, did not notice that the upper part of the VM letter b might be mistaken for a plume over ch.  Also, there is almost no research into the similar plumes over a few other letters, where a plume might indicate a stress. This might even be a case in EVA sh, which could stand for stressed cc/ch or for stressed z (to indicate the ž pronunciation). The rationale for this could be the Czech alphabet (Orthographia Bohemica) developed by Jan Hus, but not used at the time. Hus placed a marker over c, s and z to turn them into č, š, ž. If N. Kempf was the author, he could have learn about Hus and his alphabet from the Czech monks.
Before that, Czecks used German writing convention, as attested in the Stična codex  and in Golden Legend.

The Orthographia Bohemica, proposed by Czeck Jan Hus in the early 15th century was the first alphabet that adjusted c,s, z for the sounds č,š,ž, which also are part of modern Slovenian alphabet since the 19th century. 

[attachment=8946]
The most complicated letters in the Voynich manuscript are the strike-through glyphs and EVA sh.




Letter b – EVA  - SLO-VA b


Historicaly, the letters b and p were used for the same sound, as attested by the variety of spelling for the ancient people- Bryges (named after their hillside settlements, Bryg- Slavic word for hill) who migrated from the Balkans to Greece and further to central and western Anatolia (present day Turkey) where their name was changed to Phruges or Phryges.
In a similar way the word BEL (white) changed from (bel, beli in ancient European languages, hence the name of ancient Belovaci - Veneti tribe) to pale (whitish in English). In the Swabian dialect p was often used for the b sound, as J.K.Petersen pointed out and as it is attested in several 15th century manuscripts, where Steinbock is spelled as Steinpock.

B also changes to p under certain condition, causing many spelling mistakes in Slovenian: Rop -rop (robbery), rob – (pronounced as rop) – edge  - na robu (at the age).
Many grammatical rules must be observed to properly read VM words containing letter b.

We can better imagine how the b letter was connected to the next letter, if we turned it into a mirror image, as I did. Of course, the computer generated mirror image only works for straight letters, like that of Alphabetum and the alphabet of Heinrich von Laufenberg.[attachment=8947]


As shown in the above examples, the letter ‘b’ starts with the upper loop and ends as a small circle-like loop. When connected to the next letter, the loop continues in straight horizontal line to the next letter.
In the ZL transliteration, there are only 14  words containing b as a suffix, and out of these three are marked ambiguous. The transcribers were confusing the last minim in w for b, because there are not many manuscripts containing clear w that has such upward flourish. The Latin writing by one particular scribe in Tractatus shows consistent use of such shape of w.
[attachment=8948]

Because the author used u interchangeably for u and v sound, he used w to make a distinct sound u.

Why was the initial b not recognized by the ZL transliterators?
In many European manuscripts at the time VM was created, the cursive writing was in the development stages from Gothic where there was no distinction between different minims. One of the difficulties was how to connect the letters: ch can be explained as two cc letters connected with a straight line at the top, u looks like two minims connected at the bottom with a rounded line. There are many examples in the VM where the letters are connected with a horizontal line at the top. The letters t and k were connected with the crossbar in the middle to the adjacent letters.

How could the b be connected?
[attachment=8949]
This is not to say that ch with a plume can not be used for the sound sh (š). This would explain different positions of the plume. Slavic languages differentiate hard and soft sh (č),
Because of the ambiguity, the words need to be read in context. Since the letter b conforms to many Slovenian (and Slavic) words, it is reasonable to assume that many initial letters transcribed in ZL transcription are be, bu, bh, bi.



From the Slovenian Etymological Dictionary:  
bom prih. glagola bíti lat.eesse’, boš, bo, bova itd., tudi bodem itd., velelnik bódi (15. stol.). Enako je stcslovan. bodo, 'bom’, hrv., srb. budem, rus. búdu, Češ. budu. Sloven. bom, boš itd. ustreza le kajk. bum, buš. Pslovan. bodo, 'bom’ je prihodnjik, tvorjen iz ide. baze *bhuah- 'rasti, nastajati, uspevati, obstajati’ i 

[attachment=8950] 
This b is not as clear as some other b glyphs, but since it is not attached to c, it cannot be mistaken for EVA- sh. Since it has been established that the 9-shaped VM glyph stands for y), This word reads by and is most often used as a helping word in conditional mood. In Slovenian language, the ‘y’ was replaced with i or j, after the letter j became in use (This was a gradual process from 16 to 17th century on). While in Slovenian, ‘bi’ stood for bodi, the English equivalent was be.
When the printed letter b was converted to cursive, it became cumbersome to connect to the next letter.
There are four words in the VM where letter b is followed by y, indicating that b is actually a separate letter. In EVA transliteration, only b in these words is properly transliterated, but the ones followed by c, c/h, e or u are regarded as sh.
BY is Slovenian word most freequently used to form conditional mood, an equivalent of English would.


Because the EVA sh is also used for š sound which in some words sounds like č, š or ž, the  VM author did not use this by glyph consistently.

[attachment=8951]
The frequency of words from the BITI (to be) family in different conjugations and different spelling (Croatian bu, Slovenian buo) indicates the language is Slovenian. I will analyze individual groups of words at another time.

[quote="Koen G" pid='61312' dateline='1725973428']
I just uploaded the first part of the third episode of Voynich Talk!
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.



Hi, Koen, congratulation on your video. I watched it with great interest and I feel I need to offer my opinion  that would disprove two of the claims made in that video, mainly that the substitution for VM glyphs is not possible and that there is no language in the word with such a high predictability. And at the same time I would like to explain the high instance of EVA qo.
I can best illustrate the predictability with the Slovenian folk song that is used to teach children the various pronunciations of vowels in different Slovenian dialects. It is comprised with one sentence in different dialects, Translated into English as: The fly had flown on the wall, fly on the wall, fly on the wall

Priletela muha na zid, muha na zid, muha na zid.
Priletela muha na zid,
muha na zid.
 
Pralatala maha na zad, maha na zad, maha na zad.
Pralatala maha na zad,
maha na zad.
 
Preletele mehe ne zed, mehe ne zed, mehe ne zed.
Preletele mehe ne zed,
mehe ne zed.
 
Prilitili mihi ni zid, mihi ni zid, mihi ni zid.
Prilitili mihi ni zid,
mihi ni zid.
 
Prolotolo moho no zod, moho no zod, moho no zod.
Prolotolo moho no zod,
moho no zod.
 
Prulutulu muhu nu zud, muhu nu zud, muhu nu zud.
Prulutulu muhu nu zud,
muhu nu zud.
Priletela muha na zid

For those of you who want to know how it sounds, various version of this folk song could be found on YouTube, just look under Priletela muha na zid

The song is showing the richness of Slovenian sounds, where each vowel could be substituted with another vowel. Of course, this applies for the Old Slovenian and dialectal language and does not reflect Slovenian grammatical rule, but rather a possibility how to understand old dialects.
How about that for entropy! 
Your rationalization of q and qo does not work, because that VM glyph is not q, but p. Together with o, it forms one of the most frequent Slovenian prefixes PO- which among other things is used to form perfective verbs, which can be in present, past and future tense. Such prefixed words can also be used for derivates, such as adjectives and nouns.

[attachment=9172]

Back to the substitution: Voynich glyphs can be transcribed into Latin letters with one-to-one substitution, except for a few VM glyphs, like EVA m, p, f, which I read as il, sv, cv, with the SLO-VA alphabet and may or may not produce valid words. After that, another transcription alphabet is needed to transcribe the text into Slovenian. This is the trickiest part, because different writers used different letter combination for the same sounds, and many words overlap. The only way to compare the spelling is to use Latin one-to-one transcription for the common denominator. The Slovenian alphabet is closest to EVA.[attachment=9173]
The alphabet can be used for other languages as well, and might yield some meaningful words in different languages, although the meaning might be different.
And now, to your entropy argument. Thanks to Nobletar, I have started to experiment with entropy calculation. One-to-one transliteration (which is still not even 80% correct because of the ambiguous reading of VM glyphs, like minims, b, z etc.) comes to about h2 2.50 and with replace button, I can transform ZL transliteration into Slovenian text with  h2 about  2.43. Various medieval Slovenian texts from the 16th century, which were already somewhat standardized, com to about h2 3.00. Since the VM lacks certain important glyphs, such as j and long s, and since w and y, and some i minims were replaced with u or v, and j and i, the rest of the transformation must be done manually. It is therefore easier to transform Slovenian text to VM-style. This lowers the h2 of medieval Slovenian texts to about 2.5. I am still working on the step-by-step manual transcription, however the number of the Slovenian words that can be translated with one-to-one substitution alone is very impressive and it is not just a coincidence.
Of course, the simplicity and simple substitution applies only to about one hundred unique words (including many most frequent words, such as DAM, DAR, DAL, POL, POT. Most of the words still have to be adjusted according to grammatical rules for the missing vowels, or consonants in some cases, for the pronunciation, for the sound changes, and for the updated spelling and in some cases inappropriate or changed. suffixes. Since the words in the VM text are in the grammatical forms, they are not found in dictionaries, and even in the written  texts they are hard to find in those particular forms and spellings. 
In short, language is to complicated to be analyzed with computers.

I would also like to thank Koen for the video. I didn't understand too much because of the English, but the meaning is clear.
I'll wait until the AI also does (spoken) language translations.

@cvetkakocj
What the video is trying to say for me.
‘For me it clearly has to be Latin, nothing else is an option’ Why? I've never tried anything else either.

As for your example with the lexicon, I can do that too.
The example of Bern from the language lexicon on pages 1-56 shows words that begin with ‘ch’. Is ‘4o = ch’ now?
‘chuderwälsch and chrüsimüsi isch wie risibisi’
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

There are even songs that begin with several ‘Q ’s.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

If I were to claim that the VM text is in Schwiizer Tütsch, I could fall back on many dialects. If it were simply from Switzerland, then there would be 3 more languages.

That's why it's important to get the harmony right. As soon as you force it, it's already wrong.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

(10-09-2024, 06:17 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Together with o, it forms one of the most frequent Slovenian prefixes PO- which among other things is used to form perfective verbs, which can be in present, past and future tense. Such prefixed words can also be used for derivates, such as adjectives and nouns.

Yes, but there are far more entries in this dictionary (dated 1781) for words starting with PA, PE, PI, PL, PR, PU, PY. This is exactly what Koen's video is about: the next letter given the current letter is much more predictable in Voynichese than in any European language. I haven't seen any evidence that P is almost always initial in some dialect of 15th century Slovenian, that it does not use (or rarely uses) A E I L R U Y after initial P or that most of them can be written O without loosing meaning. Why would they even consider doing that in a supposedly unenciphered/unobfuscated text? Compressing the alphabet does help reduce the entropy but it is not a reasonable option.

You need to see the actual evidence in existing 15th century Slovenian manuscripts: letter statistics do not match Voynichese, not even remotely. Contrary to popular opinion, there is such a thing as negative evidence. To have a balanced opinion you need to consider all the evidence, not cherry-pick the evidence that seems to support your claim.

Quote:Thanks to Nobletar,

yOU4R WELCOME§

(10-09-2024, 06:17 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am still working on the step-by-step manual transcription, however the number of the Slovenian words that can be translated with one-to-one substitution alone is very impressive and it is not just a coincidence.

Many solvers disagree because they have their own impressive-looking list of words in their preferred target language, being as convinced as you that "it is not just a coincidence".

I don't know if it's true or not but according to Katie Tucker:

Quote:Without understanding the key, the MS 408 can function in any language by at least 30%.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(10-09-2024, 11:20 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I were to claim that the VM text is in Schwiizer Tütsch, I could fall back on many dialects. If it were simply from Switzerland, then there would be 3 more languages.

I am not using those two examples - prefixes and sounds for the vowels as a proof that the VM text is Slovenian. I am really not that stupid. There are specific grammar rules that I can only discus in this form in bits and pieces. If you are interested, I can sent you hundreds of pages of grammar articles, comparing VM text with Slovenian, but also my comparisons to the studies on Voynich that had been published so far. In most cases, I can proof or explain things that are still mystery to most researchers. 
You know how difficult it is with experts in German linguistic background to transcribe the few sentences in Marginalia, claimed to be in German. Countless of German texts from different regions were examined until some approximate word was found and everyone is convinced that the language is German.
What I intended to show with those examples is that the SLO-VA transcription of Q as P works for the EVA qo- ands solves that problem, and that this letter also works in other languages, just as it does in Slovenian. But in Slovenian, it also works for many different words. 
I did not say that I have not say that I reached the point where my theory does not work anymore. It just requires a lot more work to prove it because of the complexity of the language and other reasons. The way I started with the most simple words to the more complicated where many words are overlapping. 
So far, I did not see any proof for your abbreviated Latin theory. Can you list and explain the QO words according to your theory?

(11-09-2024, 07:58 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Cvetka: that's what all theorists would say about their chosen language or method. Can you provide a longer text file for analysis?

Slovenian language existed as an oral language and Slovenian people used Glagolitic Old Church Slavonic (Croatian adaptation) for liturgy, the German nobility imposed German as official language. There is only a few fragments written in Slovenian with Latin Letters, mostly by German or Italian priests. The two-three page long texts mostly include the same prayers. 
According to official history, the Slovenian literacy started in 1550 when the first book in Slovenian was printed in Tubingen. However, there are several references that the Slovenian dictionary and grammar book was written by 1470, but since it was lost, nobody can prove that it existed. Could that be the VM?

Whatever the case, many of the linguistic features displayed in the VM, were changed by the 16th century and references to them existed mostly in the 18th century  linguist, many of them in German.  
I have just recently started to work on larger texts for entropy. This means that I have to retype the Slovenian text from several different digitalized books, while at the same time I have to adjust the VM transcription for the changes that were imposed in the 16th century. It is a lot of work, because because my computer skills are limited. There was a lot of reading and translating from Slovenian scholarly articles before I have prepared and written the rules for adjustments, and translate them into English, so that I would be able to explain the required changes. 
I would be more than glad to share hundreds of pages of my research where I try to analyze the text step by step, from the way I developed the transliteration/transcription alphabet to individual grammar articles, comparison with other researchers and theories, languages etc. Just give me a few day so I can load the articles on my Drop box. 
I am not forcing anybody to believe my theory, but I am convince that time will tell. For now, I feel that my research would be of great benefit for the future VM studies.