10-03-2016, 10:42 PM
10-03-2016, 11:08 PM
Everything I see points to alphabet (i.e. 1 glyph = 1 segmental phoneme, basically)
- Number of glyphs matches alphabets
- Apparent pronounceability and consonant/vowel alternation when viewed as alphabetic
- Apparent derivation from Roman alphabet and Latin abbreviation means the script creator was familiar with alphabetic writing
- Structure and symmetry of the glyph set is similar to what is seen in phoneme inventories of natural languages
- Word length
10-03-2016, 11:14 PM
Sam, your opinion is near to mine. But if you had to imagine a next-best explanation for the script, what would you go for?
10-03-2016, 11:20 PM
Well like you said, logographic can basically be ruled out, and realistically so can syllabary, so beyond alphabetic or "sub-alphabetic" (say if some of the glyphs were functioning like diacritics, which the repeated sequences of <i> and <e> might actually be doing) I'm not sure what possibilities there are.
10-03-2016, 11:25 PM
(10-03-2016, 11:08 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Everything I see points to alphabet (i.e. 1 glyph = 1 segmental phoneme, basically)
...
- Apparent pronounceability and consonant/vowel alternation when viewed as alphabetic...
Can we be sure of that?
I created an alternate alphabet for the VMS characters to see if it behaved the same way in our minds if the symbols were not so vowel-consonant shaped (and added a character to represent the spaces).
This is actual VMS text, rendered with different glyphs, and even uses some of the same shape relationships as the VMS. I created this to ask the question, are we imagining the vowel-consonant balance or does it actually exist:
![[Image: VMSCipher.jpg]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/VMSCipher.jpg)
10-03-2016, 11:53 PM
You could do the same thing with English or any other language. Try it with that script. That doesn't mean that the consonant-vowel distinction in English or other languages is not meaningful.
11-03-2016, 12:21 AM
(10-03-2016, 11:53 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You could do the same thing with English or any other language. Try it with that script. That doesn't mean that the consonant-vowel distinction in English or other languages is not meaningful.
The vowel-consonant distinction is meaningful in English and other languages.
That does not mean glyphs that look like vowels in the VMS are vowels and yet I see a very high proportion of people assuming they are. It could be an abjad, with some of the consonants shaped like vowels. It could be digits, with some of them shaped like vowels. The vowel shapes could be nulls or modifiers rather than vowels.
It's very important, in analyzing the text, to get away from the idea that vowel shapes are vowels until there is other evidence to confirm that they are.
11-03-2016, 03:17 AM
(10-03-2016, 11:08 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Everything I see points to alphabet (i.e. 1 glyph = 1 segmental phoneme, basically)
The only other possibility is that glyphs represent sub-alphabetic units. Stolfi thought the words were likely monosyllables, apparently because many words have a tripartite structure which could suggest that a word represents a CVC syllable. Actually that's just a guess since I haven't yet found where he laid out his reasoning for his view in detail, if he ever did. I can maybe imagine that a medieval Latin scribe might have chosen to represent a complex monosyllable by way of analogy with a multisyllabic word, but my guess is that words actually are multisyllabic in many cases.
- Number of glyphs matches alphabets
- Apparent pronounceability and consonant/vowel alternation when viewed as alphabetic
- Apparent derivation from Roman alphabet and Latin abbreviation means the script creator was familiar with alphabetic writing
- Structure and symmetry of the glyph set is similar to what is seen in phoneme inventories of natural languages
- Word length
Picking this post as the most suitable basis for a general reply.
I do not feel certain about just about anything.
The number of characters is clearly in the range of a normal alphabet, even if we can't be certain about the exact number.
In the majority of alphabetic scripts, one has a mixture of several things:
- one symbol representing one sound
- several symbols together representing one sound (consonant or vowel)
- one symbol representing a sequence of sounds (vowel, and more rarely consonant, e.g. Greek psi).
- the sound of a symbol depending on context (neighboring sounds)
Of course, modern alphabetical conventions should not play a role.
The biggest 'problem' with the Voynich alphabet, in my opinion, is the funny behaviour of Eva 'ch', I could imagine many things, for example in case the text is a phonetic rendition of some language foreign to the author/scribe:
Eva-'ch' could just be aspiration, like the 'h' in English. 'ch' and 'sh' could be different types (real or perceived) like the two different sipritus symbols in Greek.
ckh and cth could be aspirated versions of unaspirated consonants k and t. (all Eva)
I know some details of only two (largely) monosyllabic languages, and they are already quite different. The syllable structure can still vary considerably from the main CV and CVC patterns.
On another note, as an illustration of the many different things that one may expect or should beware of is the interesting phoneme 'ng' which is written with this pair of characters in most modern languages.
Equally in most of these languages, the character sequence n-k is to be pronounced as ng-k.
Furthermore, this phoneme does not occur at the start of words.
But there are exceptions.
In (classical?) Greek, gamma becomes 'ng' before kappa.
In Thai, n-k remains n-k and ng-k also exists. There are 'minimal pairs' with this combination.
In Thai and Vietnamese, 'ng' can occur at the start of a word. I know some people learning Thai who can't get the hang of this, and in some regions even Thai people can't and it's pronounced as 'h'.
I'm not saying that any of these last points has a direct bearing on the Voynich MS text, of course. Just examples in the good old spirit of Jacques Guy, about the many, many unexpected things that may occur.
11-03-2016, 10:00 AM
(11-03-2016, 03:17 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The biggest 'problem' with the Voynich alphabet, in my opinion, is the funny behaviour of Eva 'ch', I could imagine many things, for example in case the text is a phonetic rendition of some language foreign to the author/scribe:
Eva-'ch' could just be aspiration, like the 'h' in English. 'ch' and 'sh' could be different types (real or perceived) like the two different sipritus symbols in Greek.
ckh and cth could be aspirated versions of unaspirated consonants k and t. (all Eva)
I think something like this is probably correct. My only question here is whether this particular interpretation makes phonological sense given that we also see <chk> and <kch> in addition to <ckh>. I'm not sure whether it does or not, but it seems important that whoever devised the script wanted to be able to distinguish between these three forms. In fact it seems that the reason why the scribe chose tall shapes for the gallows letters is so that they could be combined with <ch> in a way such that neither precedes the other.
Quote:I'm not saying that any of these last points has a direct bearing on the Voynich MS text, of course. Just examples in the good old spirit of Jacques Guy, about the many, many unexpected things that may occur.
Speaking of that, do you know whatever happened to Jacques Guy?
(11-03-2016, 12:21 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(10-03-2016, 11:53 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You could do the same thing with English or any other language. Try it with that script. That doesn't mean that the consonant-vowel distinction in English or other languages is not meaningful.
The vowel-consonant distinction is meaningful in English and other languages.
That does not mean glyphs that look like vowels in the VMS are vowels and yet I see a very high proportion of people assuming they are. It could be an abjad, with some of the consonants shaped like vowels. It could be digits, with some of them shaped like vowels. The vowel shapes could be nulls or modifiers rather than vowels.
It's very important, in analyzing the text, to get away from the idea that vowel shapes are vowels until there is other evidence to confirm that they are.
I went over the reasons for thinking that the vowels are actually vowels in the other thread. Not gonna repeat it all here, but saying that the shapes of those letters resemble vowels was not my entire argument at all.
11-03-2016, 10:33 AM
"I went over the reasons for thinking that the vowels are actually vowels in the other thread. Not gonna repeat it all here, but saying that the shapes of those letters resemble vowels was not my entire argument at all."
I wasn't pointing fingers at any particular person, it's just a tendency I've come across frequently (the assumption that the VMS vowels are vowels).
If the spaces are contrived and there are one or more null characters then it's very easy for nonvowels shaped like vowels to appear to behave like vowels.
I wasn't pointing fingers at any particular person, it's just a tendency I've come across frequently (the assumption that the VMS vowels are vowels).
If the spaces are contrived and there are one or more null characters then it's very easy for nonvowels shaped like vowels to appear to behave like vowels.