(02-03-2016, 04:22 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I liked Bax's "down to earth" approach, but it suffers from a number of bad assumptions, which make his glyph values unreliable.
(For example, why assume that the first word is the plant name? Why assume SOV word order? Why assume that the word appears in a more or less neutral form, unaltered by grammar?)
I'm hoping to remedy this in my paper, but I'm stil ironing out the final bumps.
I am now very curious to read your paper
I don't remember reading that Stephen assumed a particular word order or the absence of morphological variation.
About the relevance of the first word in a page, he was explicit in his 2014 paper (A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script):
p.11:
"Characteristics of mediaeval herbals: ... the plant name is frequently the first word of the accompanying paragraph".
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(03-03-2016, 09:39 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't remember reading that Stephen assumed a particular word order or the absence of morphological variation.
About the relevance of the first word in a page, he was explicit in his 2014 paper (A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script):
p.11: "Characteristics of mediaeval herbals: ... the plant name is frequently the first word of the accompanying paragraph".
Having looked at more herbals than I can count (and not just those that are illustratred) I would say that it's frequently the first two words. Even in the very old Greek herbals, plantname
agrestis, plantname
domestica, plantname
sijlvatica (sylvatica/silvatica) were common naming conventions.
I'm sure it was noted when Voynich first discovered the manuscript, and in the 1940s code-breaking attempts by expert code-breakers, that the first characters on each plant page are patterned differently from the rest of the text on the page. It's common sense to examine whether they might be names. So far no one has decoded any of them.
JKP
There are still interesting cases writing benches.
Figure 2 - On the second floor of the bench immediately written two characters.
Figure 1 - the left leg of benches written with a gap. This may be related to the formation of glyphs Figure 3, 4, 5, 6. Moreover, such a gap is used in in the same word Figure 5, Figure 6. And Figure 4 differs only in of the gallows.
I think this is an argument, that the text is meaningful.
Those are some interesting examples, Wladimir. Wouldn't this be an indication of "conscious, creative" ligature use?
Look in good quality on page f93v. The right-hand loop many gallows K and T intentionally painted over.
(08-03-2016, 08:49 PM)Wladimir D Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Look in good quality on page f93v. The right-hand loop many gallows K and T intentionally painted over.
In many places the loop on the gallows (or on the "d" shape) fills in due to the extra ink in the pen, but on this page, I think you are right... The filled in part looks filled in and the ink color is slightly lighter than the letter-loop around it.
I have no idea why anyone would do that. The only thing that comes to mind is the old Carolingian documents where loops and vowels were almost randomly filled for artistic effect but... they usually used a different color.
Filling in with the same color is quite odd.
I also can't think of any reason. The manuscript has been "touched up" by people who didn't fully know what they were doing though (for example, the male nymph being given breasts later, as mentioned in a recent thread). Maybe there's just no other reason than that - later owners messing around.
I think, that a deliberate shading the loops of gallows occurs not only on You are not allowed to view links.
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And it's not the only way to the variation of gallows using loops. In the loops are writing point (Figure 1, 2, 3).
Perhaps, these variations work similar diacritic symbol.
It seems to me that the gallows closer to the hieroglyphs than to the letters of.
In addition, it seems that in some cases, an error occurred while filling. Figure 4 have written gallows thin font and weakly painted over. But then the author the bold around the loop, so that it seem empty.
Similarly acted in Figure 5. Then, have put point.
PS
Intuition tells me that shaded loop is relevant to the notion of "bright".
Koen,
I wouldn't get distracted by additions to the imagery; there's enough evidence that the manuscript's imagery was first drawn by the scribe(s) and then that some monitoring-type of person went over it and made corrections and changes for ideological reasons. I think the added breasts (whose absence from the original forms Nick Pelling was first to notice) were added then. No long time need have intervened, and the ms might not even have been bound before the corrections were added, sometimes in ink, and other times with colour.
The script is quite another matter; because those corrections aren't made change it to suit theories, but but to make the copy even more exact and true to the original.
One of the curious things I've noticed, too, is that the 'galllows' seem to have been written to a kind of stoke-order. Perhaps someone else has already noticed that before. I know that Julian Bunn once said that it wasn't writing but "drawings of writing". As a rule, stroke-order only applies to ideographs, I think.
But the linguists (and any epigraphers here) will know best on this point.
Koen,
the "pi" looking letter resembles among other things a double "t" from some scripts.
Sam - you know I have a great deal of respect for your analytical approach, but d'Imperio isn't the bible, and in the end that group got no "for'arder" than best-guess, from premises which have rarely been considered in depth and are badly in need of a cool re-appraisal.