(20-06-2025, 02:24 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Thank you! I could only read one of the references up to now (three of them are books), I think I'll open a thread later in "Off-topic", in the improbable case someone is interested in the linguistic classification of Venetian
(19-06-2025, 09:46 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
Almost all of the Romance languages spoken in Italy are native to the area in which they are spoken. Apart from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., these languages are often referred to as dialetti "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.", both colloquially and in scholarly usage; however, the term may coexist with other labels like "minority languages" or "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view." for some of them.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The label "dialect" may be understood erroneously to imply that the native languages spoken in Italy are "dialects"
[..]
Saying 'these are just some dialects pretended as languages' is, I'm sorry to tell you, offensive, both for the languages itself and for their speakers, past and present.
[..]
I just wanted to make clear that it's not true, at all, that geminated consonants are important for all Romance languages: they actually have zero importance in some.
(*) to be completely honest, some orthographies of Eastern Lombard indeed use two doubled consonants: -cc for the phoneme [ʧ] at word final, and -ss- for intervocalic [s].
With just a short glance at it, I find doubled consonants at every corner of today's Friaulian, Lombardian and Venetian.
The quite flat claim "they have (nearly) no double consonants" it's just not true, otherwise I should eat some baccalà at a venetian campièllo after a Lobardian primavera strabella, and so on.
About dialects: how could I ever have imagined that Italians are so easily to offend...?
But earnestly -- these may not be dialects from Italian, but a quite similar thing from their Latin base, with some Langobardic or other influence. The dialect question is by far not finally cleared, and totally irrelevant here.
(By the way: how is your word "dialetti"
written in Venetian and Lombardian...?)
You both can dump lots of Wikipedia links for this, but it will not change anything and will not answer
- when these north-italian idioms developed this way
- when and how the writing/spelling was "degeminised" as a standard to all(!) writers
(19-06-2025, 10:01 PM)davidma Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (19-06-2025, 09:54 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't mind some off topic, but as far as my investigation goes, the double consonants or vowels are not a problem at all. Most kinds of one to many ciphers can and will hide their presence.
The urbino court ciphers had glyphs for doubles that were variations of the singles, so I agree that it would've been easy for "normal" ciphers of the time to disguise double consonants. I don't think the absence of double glyphs in the VM can be taken at face value as a proof that it isn't a romance language.
If there is a simple way to encrypt/code double consonants: why was there never any valid deciphering/decoding of them in the last 500 years? And we have computers meanwhile...
At this point, we meet again the "magic cipher" and have to wait for the wonder of finding a "key" somewhere.
(20-06-2025, 06:05 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If there is a simple way to encrypt/code double consonants: why was there never any valid deciphering/decoding of them in the last 500 years? And we have computers meanwhile...
This is a very good question. However, this reasoning can be applied to almost any hypothesis, except the hoax/meaningless scribbles kind. How come it hasn't been decoded/read/translated/attributed, etc.
(20-06-2025, 06:05 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.At this point, we meet again the "magic cipher" and have to wait for the wonder of finding a "key" somewhere.
For some reason your comments feel as if my tinkering with ciphers somehow hinders your investigation of Crimea and unknown languages. You find my approach flawed, I'm not yet convinced of yours, and I see no problem with this. It's not like we have to fight for funding or something
(20-06-2025, 06:54 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
For some reason your comments feel as if my tinkering with ciphers somehow hinders your investigation of Crimea and unknown languages. You find my approach flawed, I'm not yet convinced of yours, and I see no problem with this. It's not like we have to fight for funding or something
No, we are not on "Voynich War" with each other...
If you care to know why I did not "make advance" in the 5 weeks since I published the
location of VMS map as Crimean (but not necessarily a -known and existing- source language for VMS from there):
it took more than 3 weeks to do a complete rework of the v101 transscription data, as that file was coming with heavy misreadings, misunderstandings at least to folio 85, and even a (small) text block missing.
The last 2 weeks I was searching for a manuscript I saw ~3 months ago and didn't save it, which is becoming a key document probably.
And yes, the source language is still unkown to me by this.
But back to topic:
problem with VMS letters is, that you are able to find them anywhere, so they could mean everything or nothing:
[
attachment=10854]
You may see (or not see) some characters that clearly remind of VMS. But this does not make it easier.
The last image is from modern calligraphy, but I found the idea funny that someone may write the 'G'/ Г as a "9" in capitals and an "8" in small letters -- another one could have had a similar idea with 'K' just long before...
The whole discussion about doubled consonants is relevant for simple ciphers of the type that barely change the text beyond some basic forms of substitution. These are already known not to work.
It is not just doubled consontants that are the issue. The entire statistical distribution of all character pairs is completely changed in the Voynich text.
At the same time, it is factually incorrect that there are no simple ciphers that can remove or hide doubled consonants. Transposition ciphers can do this very well. The more complex diplomatic ciphers that are contemporary with the Voynich MS include many that specifically substitute doubled characters to remove or hide them.
(19-06-2025, 09:46 PM)Mauro Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm sorry (and I'm also sorry for being off-topic), but you are very wrong on this. Italian languages are true, bona-fide languages. From You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. [...] They are true languages, not mutually intelligible at all neither with standard Italian nor among them. [...] just wanted to make clear that it's not true, at all, that geminated consonants are important for all Romance languages: they actually have zero importance in some.
I can confirm that. My native language is Venetian, and I learned Italian at ~8 to read children magazines. I cannot understand a word of Genoese or Sardinian, nor maybe 50-70% of Lombard. Ditto for Neapolitan, even though I have translated a couple dozen Neapolitan songs with the help of dictionaries...
And indeed Venetian does not have the geminated consonants of Italian, not at all: You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view.
How would XV century ciphers encode numbers?
Numbers in texts can be a good starting point when cracking a cipher, but they can be a challenge when using statistical methods. If numbers are expressed as the Roman numerals using normal letter codes (MDCLXVI), then even 5-10 numbers per page will introduce many unusual bigrams and trigrams, not seen in normal text (XXII, III, CCXX), complicating the deciphering. If numbers are expressed in the modern Hindu-Arabic form with separate codes for 1234567890, the plaintext character set will expand and there will be a separate set of bigrams and trigrams. As far as I understand, sometimes numbers were also encoded in a Hindu-Arabic base 10 scheme, but using plaintext letters instead of digits (say, if we use ABCDEFGHIK, then 1420 could be be ADBK, or BECA). In which case the character set stays the same, but adding combinations of letters not normal for a text, an effect similar to the Roman numerals, but with less repetition (unless there is a sequence of numbers with some increment).
Are there any known examples of ciphers from roughly the Voynich MS era with some numbers present in the plaintext (of some provision for encoding numbers)?
Hope the paleographers will respond. My impression is that by around 1500 people in Europe still generally used Roman numerals, while in the 1600s many already used the "Arabic" (Westernized) numerals. At least literate people, like Barschius and Marci.
By the way, while browsing the Kircher letters, years ago, I saw one where some cardinal or bishop described to Kircher the binary number system...
(30-06-2025, 10:34 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.How would XV century ciphers encode numbers?
Roman numerals. For example: Zaninus-Conradinus (1424) letter 3: "equites ccc et pedites d" = "300 cavalry and 500 infantry".
Maybe there are exceptions but I don't know any in ciphers before 1450. Probably later in more advanced ciphers like Alberti?
In normal texts (not ciphered) they used both the modern Hindu-Arabic form and Roman numerals, often together.
BTW, there are several suspicious sequences, like "
o l r " in f111v.18 and f115v.38.