The Voynich Ninja

(12-12-2022, 06:58 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't quite understand your example, are you trying to show that languages belonging to different families can have homophones?

No -- I was trying to apply the decipherment technique you've been using to another set of data in which I know that the script doesn't match the language.

You've been able to match individual Voynichese words to individual Greek words, and I've been able to match individual Slovenian words to individual Turkish words.

What differences do you see between my strategy for matching Slovenian to Turkish and your strategy for matching Voynichese to Greek?

(12-12-2022, 06:58 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.For example, the twelve most frequent Greek words, which you quote, in my opinion, provide very little information and in a very ordered text, such as a collection of recipes, for example, would perhaps be in the minority.

Perhaps, if the whole text consists of stuff like "add three teaspoons oregano, one tablespoon coriander, then whisk vigorously until well mixed"; but even then, wouldn't the list of most common Currier B words ([chedy], [Shedy], [daiin], etc.) still provide an enormously important clue?  Maybe even more of a clue than it otherwise would?

(12-12-2022, 07:41 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe the problem is that we have to guess the rules or read hundreds of posts (if they are all written in your blog posts, I don't know). Some rules may apply only in some contexts. Some rules may take precedence over some other rules. How are we to know if they are not all written down in a single place?

Indeed, to understand my approach you should read my messages, in which I share all my ideas.
I didn't start by establishing the rules of reading, except the rule of trying to save consonants.
I'm comparing the words in the manuscript with Greek words in the dictionary, learning a little grammar in the process, and I hope to be able to generalise at the end.
You can imagine, though, that glyphs transcribed as EVA "y" will necessarily mean several things, placed between words, at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of words?

About replacing ro final with sigma final, I think it works pretty well, it could be the rhotacism of the B language dialect, as in lakonian/tsakonian, for example?

(12-12-2022, 08:26 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What differences do you see between my strategy for matching Slovenian to Turkish and your strategy for matching Voynichese to Greek?

The number of words

(12-12-2022, 08:26 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.wouldn't the list of most common Currier B words ([chedy], [Shedy], [daiin], etc.) still provide an enormously important clue?  Maybe even more of a clue than it otherwise would?

It is the words chedy and shedy that prove that it is not Greek?

(13-12-2022, 12:09 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(12-12-2022, 08:26 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What differences do you see between my strategy for matching Slovenian to Turkish and your strategy for matching Voynichese to Greek?

The number of words

Fair enough.  But there's a list You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of what are supposedly the 2000 most common Slovenian words.  I just chose the top ten for my earlier example, but I suspect it wouldn't be difficult to find hundreds more "matches" with Turkish words, especially if I allowed more flexibility in what counts as a "match": for instance, if I speculated that Slovenian [b] could represent not just [b] in Turkish, but also [p] or [m].  The eleventh Slovenian word in the list would have been [njegovo]; that's a tricky one, but perhaps I'd try matching [nj] to Turkish [ş], and [g] to Turkish [h], and then start examining Turkish words that begin with [şeh-], such as [şehiri], "his city," and see where that took me.
 
As you've probably guessed, I didn't choose Slovenian and Turkish arbitrarily: those are two other languages in which people have identified hundreds (I believe) of individual "matches" with Voynichese words.  So:

Q. What are examples of languages for which hundreds of individual word matches with Voynichese can be identified, given a transliteration scheme that's flexible (i.e., you couldn't just substitute characters using a strict one-to-one mapping and reliably get a valid word) but is still consistent enough to satisfy whoever's doing the research?

A. Greek, Turkish, and Slovenian.

Q. Given that information, if all we know is that someone using a flexible transliteration scheme has identified hundreds of individual word matches between some language and Voynichese, what's the maximum probability of this discovery corresponding to a correct language identification? 

A. ~33%, if one of the three language identifications cited above is correct.

To be clear, this doesn't disprove your Greek hypothesis (or the Slovenian or Turkish ones).  But it suggests that finding even hundreds of word "matches" has a high likelihood of being a false positive.

This is relevant to your question, I think, because if there are some "clues" in favor of Greek and other "clues" against Greek, I assume we'd want to weigh the reliability of the different kinds of clue involved.

(13-12-2022, 12:09 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(12-12-2022, 08:26 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.wouldn't the list of most common Currier B words ([chedy], [Shedy], [daiin], etc.) still provide an enormously important clue?  Maybe even more of a clue than it otherwise would?

It is the words chedy and shedy that prove that it is not Greek?

"Prove" is a strong word -- you only asked about "clues."

If you were tentatively to identify the most common Voynichese words with Greek words for "the," "and," and "but," that could be somewhat persuasive.

If you were tentatively to identify them with Greek words for, say, "stir" and "mix" and "boil," that could still be thought-provoking.

If they don't seem to match any Greek words at all, or if you tentatively identify them with words for, say, "gimlet," "bog," and "dolphin," then perhaps there's a problem.

(13-12-2022, 03:44 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But it suggests that finding even hundreds of word "matches" has a high likelihood of being a false positive.

Since there is a talk about Slovenian language, let me give you my opinion. First of all, do not trust Google and do not compare present day Slovenian with 15th century Slovenian. 
Because of high inflection and major spelling changes the Slovenian language is hard to translate with Google and hard to computer analysed.
Matching 100 words letter -to- letter, using any known or unknown VM transliteration or translation alphabet is not as easy as one would think, because many words are not found in dictionaries or recognized by Google.
Besides, the even the 100 exactly spelled words are not proof that the language is Slovenian, Turkish, Greek or any other. 
To look for matching words, the similarity of spelling is not always the best way. The changes have to be supported by rules that applied in the 15th century.
Finding approximate matches is a lot easier. If Slovenian language contains about 600 Sanskrit words, and Greek and Turkish contains them, the chances are that all three languages contain 100 similar words with similar meaning. After all, Greek was spoken in Anatolia, where Slavic language was a second language, and Greek was spoken in parts of Slovenia after the Roman Empire was divided. Greek and Latin was taught at schools up to the Second World War.
I believe the grammar is much better indicator of language, but this can also be problematic, because most Slavic languages have similar grammar, such as suffixes, prefixes, inflections, even vocabulary.  The distinction can only be made by the process of elimination of as many things that do not belong to a particular language that matches the VM. For example, the absence of G in the VM (noted also by dr. King), is not a proof that the language is Czeck.
The comparison cannot be made if different researchers use different transcription alphabet. Although EVA has a potential of being transcription alphabet, some improvements are needed.

(13-12-2022, 03:44 PM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you were tentatively to identify the most common Voynichese words with Greek words for "the," "and," and "but," that could be somewhat persuasive.
If you were tentatively to identify them with Greek words for, say, "stir" and "mix" and "boil," that could still be thought-provoking.
If they don't seem to match any Greek words at all, or if you tentatively identify them with words for, say, "gimlet," "bog," and "dolphin," then perhaps there's a problem.

In which case do you classify my proposals for identifying the most frequent words?

(13-12-2022, 09:54 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I believe the grammar is much better indicator of language

This is certainly true. All of us, whatever language we speak, know many Greek words, learned at school in maths, physics, chemistry etc; without necessarily realising it. I am aware that we need more elements to determine the language of our text

(14-12-2022, 03:53 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In which case do you classify my proposals for identifying the most frequent words?

I just found your You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and some blog posts more relevant to this specific vocabulary -- sorry for having missed them earlier.

Here's an attempt to summarize your main readings of the twelve most frequently occurring words in Currier B.

1. chedy = *γέτος = ϝέτος, variant of ἔτος, most often "year" but also "cycle," "period," etc. (discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).
2. shedy = σχέδη (or Latin scheda), "papyrus strip, piece of paper"
3. daiin = των, "the" (masculine accusative)
4. qokeedy = δονειται (δονεω), "he/she/it shakes."  6. qokedy, 7. qokain, and 9. qokaiin are also identified with different grammatical forms of the verb δονεω.
5. ol = οἱ, "the" (masculine nominative plural), plus a few other possibilities, some of which are in distinctive dialects, including ἁ for ἡ, "the" (feminine nominative singular).
8. qokeey isn't in the word list but is discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as perhaps a part of [Δω]δωνης.
10. aiin = οὖν, "therefore"
11. chey and 12. ar aren't in the word list.

Thus, of the twelve most common words, it looks like you've formally proposed readings of nine -- is that correct?

I see a couple issues with your proposal for chedy.  Digamma (ϝ) was pronounced like English "w," so in spite of its name, it seems unlikely to be represented by the same glyph as Greek γ and κ (your usual readings for ch).  Moreover, both the digamma sound and letter were already obsolete in mainstream "literary" Ancient Greek.  The form ϝέτος turns up in a few early dialect inscriptions, and the pronunciation "wetos" might have survived in Aeolic Greek into the Hellenistic era, but I doubt there's any trace of it being used in writing or speech within a thousand years of the Voynich Manuscript being written.  On the whole, this first identification seems a bit improbable.

Your proposals for daiin and ol seem like plausible common words, but if these variants of "the" occur so frequently, then the absence of other variants of "the" among the very most common words might become harder to account for.

I could see "therefore" (aiin = οὖν) being a pretty common word; it's #41 in that other list I shared.

Beyond that, we round out the top twelve most common words with one word for a sheet of paper and four forms of the verb "shake" (a whole lot of shaking going on?).

It makes for an interesting mix.  Which of my three categories would you put it in?

We seem to have enough vocabulary here to try deciphering some phrases, e.g., qokedy.chedy.qokedy = "a shaken year was shaken" (if we assume one qokedy is the passive aorist and the other is a past participle).

One cause for concern might be that definite articles don't seem to match their nouns in gender, number, and case, as they typically would in Greek; for example daiin.chedy = των ϝέτος (accusative "the" + nominative "year").

(15-12-2022, 12:52 AM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One cause for concern might be that definite articles don't seem to match their nouns in gender, number, and case, as they typically would in Greek

You underline here the known difficulties, if they did not exist the text would have been deciphered long ago.

P.S. Thank you for visiting my blog

(15-12-2022, 08:14 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(15-12-2022, 12:52 AM)pfeaster Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One cause for concern might be that definite articles don't seem to match their nouns in gender, number, and case, as they typically would in Greek

You underline here the known difficulties, if they did not exist the text would have been deciphered long ago.

Exactly! One cannot expect much new information here, since this old basic method has been debunked so many times during the last century. Simple substitutions failed over and over again with several European languages, Greek included, and we know why. As you say, if this simple method worked, the text would have been deciphered long ago.

Simple substitutions of European languages are therefore excluded. Research can follow three other directions:

• A complex cipher. In this case the underlying language might be any artificial or natural language. In particular, we cannot exclude that the underlying language is Greek.
  
• The text is meaningless gibberish (there is no underlying language).
  
• A simple substitution / phonetic rendering of an artificial language or possibly an exotic language (e.g. a monosyllabic language, as proposed by Stolfi).
  

The first two possibilities are currently the most popular and were discussed in several of the talks at the recent Malta Conference. But useful research can also be (and is being) done by adding to our knowledge of Voynichese, without making assumptions about which of the three options is correct; this line was also amply represented at the conference of course.