(25-06-2022, 05:50 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.none of the proposed solutions manages to distinguish itself from the others
The aim of a translation is to understand the meaning of the text correctly, not to distinguish it from other translations.
(25-06-2022, 05:50 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If it's speed you're after...
You've got it all right; I am in a hurry to get to the end.
(25-06-2022, 05:50 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Grammar in the form of coherent sentences is the main indicator...
If you are an expert in ancient Greek, you are welcome to help distinguish between coherent and less coherent sentences, because I don't know this language, moreover I don't know any ancient language.
(25-06-2022, 07:56 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But since spelling irregularities are to be expected in a medieval manuscript, grammar really is the more reliable indicator.
I don't quite understand your sentence: are you opposing spelling and grammar?
(25-06-2022, 11:46 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A concordance for the VMS is available here
Thank you very much!
I have downloaded the (extremely heavy) file. I looked at the words with the letter "o", because I was looking for the words opche- and ocphe- and well, my own list is more complete.
(27-06-2022, 12:33 AM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (26-06-2022, 11:58 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Under the hypothesis: The whole VM is written in the same natural language with the same homophonic cipher system.
Comparing texts with similar contents, the differences between scribes will be the homophonic parts of the cipher, as if every scribe enciphered what he/she wrote using the homophonics at will.
I'm not completely sure about it being predominantly homophonic, but my "headcanon" is that there is a certain amount of flexibility in the system for the scribes, and that this would go a long way to explaining the scribal differences and also variety within the same scribe. But there are other problems that would need to be considered with it being homophonic or indeed other mechanisms that would generate that same flexibility.
My starting hypothesis is a simple one in order to understand how a flexible system is used to create the differences. More elements can be added gradually: polyphonic, braquigraphy (I am thinking on latin), abreviations, and adding null letters to the plaintext. A mix of them can explain the caracteristics of the vochinese and the difficult of the deciphering.
(27-06-2022, 07:22 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (25-06-2022, 05:50 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.none of the proposed solutions manages to distinguish itself from the others
The aim of a translation is to understand the meaning of the text correctly, not to distinguish it from other translations.
The first accomplishes the second. And having something to distinguish it from other theories is what will allow a theory to be taken seriously. No theory so far to my knowledge has provided a translation with coherent grammar, and many not even a translation.
If my memory serves me right, all the proposed translations used different alphabets and different languages. I don't know if an alphabet has already been tested on several languages or a language has been tested with several alphabets.
So, in my opinion, the translations were, perhaps, not mature enough for the grammar check stage.
I came across the translation of a sentence: "and them as no one called they turn to ...."
How do I know if the rules of grammar have been applied ?
I'd say that at least the "them" is ungrammatical. The rest of the sentence might make sense in some context. But the context you would need for this sentence to make sense, both grammatically and content-wise, is quite extensive: you cannot have this kind of sentence without a narrative flow. It presupposed an aforementioned "they". It presupposes an expected call - who was supposed to call? Who did they turn to?
Now, if you want to really focus on the grammar alone, the question is not if you obtained a grammatically sound sentence in English (how did you obtain this sentence?). Rather, the question is if the original sentence has the degree of grammaticality we might reasonably expect of someone scribing a text in this language, either as a native speaker or someone who learned Latin or Greek as a second language.
I had been giving this some more thought, and actually this string of words could be made grammatically sound in English, and indeed a proper sentence. For that, we need to assume that the object "them" has been fronted. This would be called a "marked" word order. The unmarked word order would be something like:
"And, as no one called, they turn to them".
If you want to stress the "them", you can move it to the front, out of its neutral position: "And them, as no one called, they turn to".
So I think it is probably grammatical, although it still sounds weird, especially in isolation and with Ruby's punctuation.