(03-03-2025, 09:51 PM)ginocaspari Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Understanding what a shorthand is and how it functions is nonetheless a requirement for even being open to such a solution displaying different statistical properties.
I'm still waiting on a concrete specimen of the type of Italian "shorthand" these researchers have in mind. However, the question of the statistical properties of vernacular "shorthand" systems is an interesting one, so I'd like to go ahead and share an example of my own for consideration here that isn't as old as the Voynich manuscript, but that's conveniently written in English, so that most people who read this forum should have the basic linguistic background needed to grasp how it works.
As I mentioned earlier, "shorthand" generally implies that simpler characters have been substituted for the conventional letters of the alphabet. But this wasn't invariably so. Histories of English shorthand -- which include the earliest known vernacular shorthand systems purposefully devised since classical antiquity -- start in the late sixteenth century with Timothe Bright and Peter Bales, with some uncertainty as to which of them came first. Bright used arbitrary marks somewhat similar in character to the You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. written about by David A. King, while Bales reportedly used
conventional letters of the alphabet with dots in various positions around them. Both systems seem to have followed the logic of the codebook. Thus, all words beginning with B would be listed in a loose kind of alphabetical order under "B," and would be written as "B" plus a mark indicating the
number of the word. In Bright's system, for example, we have Banish = B1, Bargaine = B2, Beare = B3, Beast = B4, Beate = B5, and so forth. To keep the vocabulary manageable, Bright also provided a list of rough synonyms, so that "Abashe" could be written as Blush = B24, "Abbote" could be written as Bishop = B18, etc. As far as I can tell, the first English shorthand systems that pursued any
other approach didn't arise until a couple decades into the seventeenth century.
I've read that, outside of instructional manuals, there's only one known manuscript text in Bright's system, and none at all in Bales's system. I'm not sure whether that's strictly accurate or not, but it seems there's not a vast quantity of true shorthand text from this early period to analyze.
So on to my example. I recently acquired a 738-page manuscript compiled in 1637-38 by William Jewell at the school of Langford -- or so a couple of Latin inscriptions in it state, although I haven't yet been able to identify either the person or the place any further than that. The handwriting is
tiny, and except for a few titles, quotations, and notes in Latin and Greek, it takes the form of a very heavily abbreviated form of English. Much of the content follows the texts of two printed books:
An Explanation of the Generall Epistle of Saint Iude by Samuel Otes and
Christs Victorie over the Dragon by Thomas Taylor, both published in 1633. However, both books were themselves based on earlier public lectures, and Otes's at least must have been taken down in shorthand or something similar (on December 24, 1601, he was in the middle of one lecture when an earthquake struck, and he immediately pivoted to an extemporaneous talk about earthquakes which he can't possibly have prepared in advance). The versions of the texts in my manuscript are worded differently than the published ones, and in ways that suggest they're based either on separate records of the lectures or on different "readings" of shorthand notes (where, for example, one source might have had "Abbote" while the other has "Bishop," since both words would have been taken down identically in Bright's system).
I wouldn't say my manuscript is written in "shorthand," exactly, but it's more heavily abbreviated than any other English writing I've seen from the time. Here's one typical page, numbered 707, corresponding to a passage in
Christs Victorie over the Dragon beginning at page 828 (if you want a crib -- through comparison with the printed text, I've been able to decipher all but about half a dozen words). I chose this page only because it was easy for me to scan without risk of damage: it's the first page of the last signature, which is detached from the rest.
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attachment=10167]
The marks for some words seem arbitrary (the = "o.", perhaps reflecting Bright's use of a circle for this word; that = "+"). Others are simply truncated with a period (e.g., "bo." = "body"; "so." = "soul"; "beli. & li." = "believe and live"). An overbar at the end of a word generally indicates an
m or
n somewhere towards the end (e.g., "dn." with overbar over the period = "dragon"; "destr." with similar overbar = "destruction"; "y" with overbar = "then" or "them" depending on context). A superscript letter placed above the period usually indicates the last letter of a word (e.g., "wr." plus superscript "h" = "wrath") or a letter near the end (e.g., "wh." plus superscript "c" = "which"). As with "then" / "them," there are numerous abbreviations that need to be disambiguated from context or memory; another such example I've noticed is "tho." = "those" / "though." In one other passage, I see that "b." = "bird"; but I doubt the single-letter abbreviation "b." was universally assigned to that reading, since single-letter abbreviations seem mostly to have been limited to words used very frequently (e.g., "G. o. f." = "God the father").
I'm putting this forward as a concrete example of vernacular writing that has been
very heavily abbreviated. I'm guessing that this is more or less the kind of model the "lingua volgare" researchers have in mind, except for it being in English rather than Italian.
For what it's worth, I believe words
do tend to follow a more rigid structure here than they do in English longhand. But I'm not sure how best to calculate entropy or other useful statistics -- as with Voynichese, there are some features of the writing here that could be transcribed in a variety of ways with different results. For example: how would we encode a superscript character
per se? Superscripts are almost always word-final or word-penultimate.