It is well known that some symbols only appear at the end of words, the beginning, or followed or preceded by some specific symbols. This is often used to argue that voynichese can't be a real language because no language behaves this way, but what if these aren't different symbols? What if symbols change shape depending on where they are in the word?
This is something that happens in many real scripts, such as Arabic, Mongolian, Syriac and a few others. Letters have often three or four forms: initial, medial, final and sometimes they also have an isolated form. These shapes are often similar, but they can be quite different in a few cases. This is called "positional allography"
However the reason these scripts have this feature is because they are "cursive" in a way, they are designed so that people need to lift their pen as little as possible when writing, which required letters to "flow" into each other and thus change shape
The voynich script is not like this, so it wouldn't need to behave like this... But what if it does anyway?
What if the Author was exposed to Mongolian or Arabic or whatever and that inspired them to make a script in which letters changed shape depending on their position?
This would reduce the number of letters, but it could increase clarity. Also, we could look at letters that never appear at the end or beginning of words to look for the other shapes of those letters
Thanks for reading!
(11-03-2025, 07:40 PM)Frigorifico Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is well known that some symbols only appear at the end of words, the beginning, or followed or preceded by some specific symbols. This is often used to argue that voynichese can't be a real language because no language behaves this way, but what if these aren't different symbols? What if symbols change shape depending on where they are in the word?
I'd say the puzzling thing is not certain symbols or sequences appearing at the end of words, this commonly happens in many languages. E.g., "-ing" is mostly EOW in English, abbreviate "ing" as some symbol (say, ŋ) and it will mostly appear at the end of words.
The puzzling feature of Voynichese is that some symbols or combinations appear predominantly at the end of lines and some other symbols or sequences have higher occurrence near the beginning of lines or beginning of paragraphs. This is called line-as-a-functional-unit or LAAFU, as far as I know.
(11-03-2025, 09:00 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd say the puzzling thing is not certain symbols or sequences appearing at the end of words, this commonly happens in many languages. E.g., "-ing" is mostly EOW in English, abbreviate "ing" as some symbol (say, ŋ) and it will mostly appear at the end of words.
Strong disagree here. In your example, words like singer, singing, slings, brings, bringing, bringer, winged... Would all be difficult to form. Let alone the fact that EVA-n would be more akin to the "g" in your example. "G" appears all over the place in English.
(11-03-2025, 09:46 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Strong disagree here. In your example, words like singer, singing, slings, brings, bringing, bringer, winged... Would all be difficult to form. Let alone the fact that EVA-n would be more akin to the "g" in your example. "G" appears all over the place in English.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you disagree with and what your examples are supposed to show. I can run the numbers on some corpus, but I doubt it will disprove that "ing" in English mostly appears at the end of words. Every single one of your examples actually supports this, all of these words are made by adding a suffix to some common word that ends in "ing", producing a somewhat less common word not ending in "ing". There are words like "inglorious" or "ginger" that have a proper internal "ing", but these are quite rare, I think.
I never said that "ing" only happens at the end of words in English, if that is what you are trying to disprove.
I'm not sure what EVA-n has to do with this.
Yeah, I guess I should have been more clear. The way I understood your post is that apart from LAAFU stuff, Voynichese positional rigidity can be compared to English -ing. I just don't think that's true. Even omitting the admittedly more bizarre LAAFU shenanigans, Voynichese is still absurdly rigid.
(Also, the system is a black box to us so whether or not something is a suffix doesn't matter. In Voynichese, we don't see the difference between the ing in starling and that in gnarling.
And what do you think of my idea of positional allography?
(11-03-2025, 10:40 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yeah, I guess I should have been more clear. The way I understood your post is that apart from LAAFU stuff, Voynichese positional rigidity can be compared to English -ing. I just don't think that's true. Even omitting the admittedly more bizarre LAAFU shenanigans, Voynichese is still absurdly rigid.
(Also, the system is a black box to us so whether or not something is a suffix doesn't matter. In Voynichese, we don't see the difference between the ing in starling and that in gnarling.
Here I agree with you completely, positional rigidity/word grammar(s) in Voynichese are not compatible with most written natural languages. Maybe something like Chinese/Vietnamese rendered in Latin script without tone marks could come close. Personally, I think all these features are the result of the specific cipher being used and not related to the properties of the plaintext language.
(11-03-2025, 10:52 PM)Frigorifico Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And what do you think of my idea of positional allography?
Personally, I don't think any method that "would reduce the number of letters" is a good candidate for explaining Voynichese. I think Voynichese is either a cipher or generated nonsense, rather than some natural language expressed via an invented script.
What's against reducing the number of letters? Especially if all hopes of simple substitution have been abandoned?
Have you ever seen Roman numerals in a manuscript? Usually, the final "I" gets a swoop added to it. It's effectively a positional allograph. Why would one argue I'm favor of it being a separate numeral, just to increase the size of the set?
In verbs I have found that the glyphs with the opposite "C" and a different number of streaks (1 to 4, can be) use to bend words