Yes, that is another option. In Spanish, 'en' means in or on, depending on context. A lot is possible with these little words, and types of texts are certainly imaginable where a token count could be inflated that way.
Add to that the fact that in those days spelling was often more phonetic, so there would be less artificial differences like 'of' versus 'off' in English , another factor influencing token count.
(28-05-2016, 10:17 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-05-2016, 08:18 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Think about it... if it DOES mean something different when attached or unattached, then is the token as common as it seems at first glance!?
The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. daiin and aiin are common: they cumulatively occur about 1300 times. I cannot see how our hypotheses about their meaning could influence this count.
Are you considering
an,
ain, and
aiin to be the same thing in making that count?
I guess I should read the article but, unfortunately, I have to run again and won't have a chance to look at it until late tonight or tomorrow (I have a seven-day work-week at the moment).
(28-05-2016, 11:21 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-05-2016, 10:17 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. daiin and aiin are common: they cumulatively occur about 1300 times. I cannot see how our hypotheses about their meaning could influence this count.
Are you considering an, ain, and aiin to be the same thing in making that count?
No, these are the numbers from Voynichese.com for the isolated exact occurrences of
daiin (864)
aiin (470)
(28-05-2016, 11:27 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-05-2016, 11:21 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (28-05-2016, 10:17 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. daiin and aiin are common: they cumulatively occur about 1300 times. I cannot see how our hypotheses about their meaning could influence this count.
Are you considering an, ain, and aiin to be the same thing in making that count?
No, these are the numbers from Voynichese.com for the isolated exact occurrences of
daiin (864)
aiin (470)
Thanks for the clarification Marco. It's always easier to have a good (productive) discussion when we're on the same page.
It is really pitty you guys never did take the time to look into my You are not allowed to view links.
Register or
Login to view. method,
then this discussion about possible other languages, dialects etc. would have been finished perhaps.
But of course everybody is free to investigate.
I already investigated many languages, although not every one, not the Asian ones, but it's so easy to do and to compare differences in languages.
Then you guys could focus on real intrinsic textual research in those languages where i have zero knowledge.
For example the Eastern (Asian) languages i really would love to do, but i have big (software) troubles with the characters and fonts in those: last time i installed a font, my harddisk crashed. Not sure if it was because of it or a virus that came with it or just a hard disk failure, but fact is that it is extremely time-consuming to get the right text (i can tell you what i need in a pm) in the right font / format. Most of the time it takes me a week for 1 language, if i work concentrated.
Any help there would be extremely appreciated on that.
When I started working on the Voynich, I began wondering if it might not have been solved a dozen times already, but been in a language so obscure that no one recognized it as a correct solution.
Some languages like Gothic or Hebrew or even Old Norse don't look like real words to someone who isn't familiar with them.
Also, I keep getting a sense that a lot of the people running text analyses might be forgetting to use Medieval languages instead of modern forms... I remember a guy who did a list of word endings and was clearly using Modern English for his comparisons, lacking a lot of verb endings that were common in Middle or Early Modern English (-est and -eth, for example; and also not thinking to include the letters thorn and yogh in his letter frequencies.)
What language do you have in mind?
Ps. I am currently working on Old English, Middle English, Gaelic old and current Scottish, Irish Gaelic, Scots, Manx and old Welsh.
Oh, I'm just talking in speculation -- early on I did try a few possibilities like Hebrew and fast realized someone else would have to solve it, if that were indeed right, because I wouldn't be able to recognize a correct answer if it were. "Avee-noo she-ba-sha-mai-yeem, yeet-ka-desh sheem-cha" would just look like new gibberish and probably be assumed, at best, to be another 'layer of code' to be broken... and it seems like if some too-little-known tongue is the correct answer, then indeed the code might have been broken before by others who didn't realize they got it right.
But otherwise, I do often see articles and blog posts where people go on about letter and language frequencies in the Voynich and yet are obviously making the error of using modern languages instead of old ones.
(My own guess for the most likely language is Latin, and German my second guess -- and maybe it's even like in the Codex Buranus or Trithemius's codes where it's a combo of both German and Latin.)
(30-08-2016, 05:28 AM)Botis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Oh, I'm just talking in speculation -- early on I did try a few possibilities like Hebrew and fast realized someone else would have to solve it, if that were indeed right, because I wouldn't be able to recognize a correct answer if it were. "Avee-noo she-ba-sha-mai-yeem, yeet-ka-desh sheem-cha" would just look like new gibberish and probably be assumed, at best, to be another 'layer of code' to be broken... and it seems like if some too-little-known tongue is the correct answer, then indeed the code might have been broken before by others who didn't realize they got it right.
But otherwise, I do often see articles and blog posts where people go on about letter and language frequencies in the Voynich and yet are obviously making the error of using modern languages instead of old ones.
(My own guess for the most likely language is Latin, and German my second guess -- and maybe it's even like in the Codex Buranus or Trithemius's codes where it's a combo of both German and Latin.)
I think you are on to something here, i.e. to remember that any solution is going to look at a medieval language. Thus, even Hebrew would have to be looked at as the Hebrew of Obadiah the Bartenura (15th c. Italian rabbi) and not the modern language. That being said, Hebrew contains way too many digrams to be the basis for Voynichese, although its word length distribution is dead on.
By unexpected language, it may be that no known language is going to match the statistics of Voynichese because we haven't looked hard enough at medieval versions.
Even if it is a constructed language or language isolate, there will have to be borrowed words or cognates.
Matthew,
Do you happen to know the word length distribution for Aramaic? I have no opinion here, but it's a language that was in constant use in medieval Europe, and is always overlooked.
PS - I'd also remind members that linguists such as Georg Stolfi ran tests on all the usual and unusual languages. Stolfi concluded it might be a central Asian language such as Jurchen.
Philip Neal has always said the text behaves like Latin.
As far as I know, there has never been any statistical or linguistic text which gave results for any form of German. Others may know differently and be able to point to where the evidence and data can be found.