(17-06-2025, 08:35 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (16-06-2025, 11:17 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the word structure (quite unlike that of "European" languages, but just like that of the "Chinese" languages);
What do you mean exactly by "the word structure"? In all flavours of Chinese a word /correction/ syllable consists of an initial sound, a vowel and a final, as far as I know.
Actually the initial "consonant" can be up to two phonemes, like pinyin "q" = [You are not allowed to view links.
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= pinyin "shuài") and a final (pinyin "n" or "ng"). There is also a weak syllable "ér" that seems to be a suffix of some sort that I think I have seen described a part of the previous syllable. And then there is the tone.
Other languages may be more complicated, with more clusters at the beginning an consonants at the end.
The key point is that the "Generalied Chinese" words, being either single syllables or compounds of two such words, have a fixed sequence of slots, where each slot can be filled with a small and different set of phonemes.
Quote:In Voynichese the structures of words /correction/ or parts of words are much more complex than that, and you certainly are aware of this, because there are very well known "Stolfi's" models of decomposing Voynichese words, that do not conform to a simple clean prefix-infix-suffix model.
I suppose I made it seem more complex than it actually is. Basically, the "normal" Voynichese word too has a fixed number of slots, and each slot can be filled with a small and specific set of glyphs.
Unfortunately, there is a large number of schemes that the Author may have chosen to map the structure of a "Chinese" language to the structure of a VMS word. Even for a single language, at a single stage of evolution. The Author may have decided to use a singe glyph to encode the
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] of Mandarin, as pinyin does. Or, conversely, he may have used two glyphs for a single phoneme, like the English use of "sh".
And then there is the tone. In Mandarin, is not a property of any specific vowel, but of the syllable as a whole. Therefore, if it is indicated by an explicit glyph in the VMS, this glyph may be inserted anywhere in the word, with the position changing randomly between occurrences of the same word. Or in some more complicated way.Check You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to see how insanely complicated the scheme could be.
Pinyin (PY) and the national Vietnamese script have settled to use diacritics over a specific vowel to indicate the tone. Another scheme that was used for Mandarin, in pre-Unicode days, was a digit placed at the end. Tibetan used a silent consonant prefixed to the syllable.
Another scheme, used for languages with many tones, or to compare tones in different languages, is to use digits 1-5 to denote pitch, and a sequence of digits to denote the pitch profile of the tone. Thus, for example, the flat tone of Madarin in PY jīng could be written as jing3, the ascending tone of míng as ming25, the dipping tone of shǒu as shou213, etc. And these digits could be inserted anywhere in the word, e.g. sh2o1u3.
Quote:I'd say if Voynichese was a phonetic representation of Chinese of any kind, this would be very obvious.
Well, it now looks obvious to me...
Quote: (16-06-2025, 11:17 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.the lack of identifiable articles, copula verbs, inflections
There is lack of identifiable anything in the Voynich MS. Statistically it's not similar to any language, including Chinese.
Articles in Romance and Germanic languages, as well as in Greek, Arabic and (I suppose) Hebrew, are easy to spot under any encoding scheme that maps every occurrence of each lexeme (entry of the vocabulary) to the same encoded string. Because they
- are a small set of very commonand hence very short lexemes, usually the most common
- regularly occur in front of certain lexemes (nouns, adjectives) and never in front of others (verbs)
- each is paired with a specific set of nouns (gender/number agreement)
People have looked hard for article-like words in Voynichese, and found none. But the "Generalized Chinese" languages don't have articles either.
A distinctive feature of Indo-European languages is that the endings of of nouns, adjectives, and verbs are changed to indicate grammatical gender and number, with agreement between the three when used in a sentence. People have also looked hard but in vain for similar features in Voynichese, Guess what, the "Generalized Chinese" languages do not have inflections, gender, and numer either.
The earliest missionaries who studied Chinese would say that "Chinese has no grammar". I understand that it does, but it is quite subtle. I doubt that someone could deduce it just by analyzing a pinyin text, without a dictionary and a grammar tutorial.
Quote: (16-06-2025, 11:17 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. the relatively large number of duplicated words, like chor chor
Duplicated words are not a feature of Classical Chinese, as far as I know. In the manuscript that you mentioned as the possible source I've only found 43 instances of duplicated character tokens. ... [font=sans-serif]After removing punctuation, I've found 15 instances of repeated words in Opus Magus
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That version of the SBJ has ~11000 words (a fraction of them being two-syllable compounds). How big was your Latin sample?
Quote:[The Zodiac diagrams] are the only pieces of evidence for the Chinese theory so far that I personally would call specific. Is there a long form explanation of why these point to the Orient?
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Quote: why was there at all the need to put European Zodiac signs onto the Chinese Zodiac?
Because the Author must have been told the time of the year covered by each diagram, understood that the 24 diagrams roughly corresponded to the 12 sign of Western Zodiac, so he indicated that information in his copy.
Quote:We don't actually know the number of entries in the [Starred Parags section] of the Voynich MS.
As I wrote before, we can estimate how many entries there were in the missing folios by the average number of entries in each page of the section. The total should be between 330 and 390, depending on whether the missing folios have no recipes or all have the average number of recipes per page. See my other post earlier today.