The Voynich Ninja

(10-09-2016, 05:14 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I understand that you are speaking theoretically and, from that point of view, it's a good answer, but it's not enough for them to look like words. If you feel this is a natural language, then you need to identify it (or them). Much of the VMS can be resolved into syllables that look like words (or are words). It's even easier if the door is open to the words being from different languages, but that's not the same as resolving them into actual sentences or meaningful text.

It seems that one has to use about three or four languages to resolve this list into words. Perhaps you can fill in the gaps and explain all of them in a more cohesive way. If they can't be explained, there's a possibility they are just patterns and need to be dissected in another way in order to be understood.

Oh, absolutely, abso-bloody-lutely. The examples are just for the purposes of exposition, and I think they may be wide of the mark (I'm in the dark as to how gallows work). Too often linguistic researchers get a handful of values by some dubious method, look for a language which fits their partial results, then plough on assigning the rest. A single mistake brings down the whole lot because it was just self-reinforcing nonsense in the first place.

I'll plainly state that I'm not sure of the specific sound value for a single character, the meaning of any word, or the identity of the language it has been written in.

However, I think I can argue which characters are vowels and break words into syllables based on them. I feel that the resulting model is at least as good as anything I've seen. I believe it has the potential to inform further research. I've only used the evidence in the text itself to do this, and no "this is a vowel because it looks like Syriac" or "this is a consonant because we have to spell the word Taurus".

(10-09-2016, 05:11 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the by, I do personally think that initial [q] and final [l] are likely to be morphological markers. I just can't prove it. I don't think we're at the point where we can understand the text and underlying language well enough.

I think the fact that q is almost totally absent from the labels points toward it being a morphological marker of some kind - you don't need it to label individual items, but you do need it to write complete sentences.

Quote:I think the fact that q is almost totally absent from the labels points toward it being a morphological marker of some kind - you don't need it to label individual items, but you do need it to write complete sentences.

That's an excellent consideration. Is q really absent from labels? Could anyone please derive the "alphabet of labels" - which glyphs are used and which are not?

(10-09-2016, 06:45 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:I think the fact that q is almost totally absent from the labels points toward it being a morphological marker of some kind - you don't need it to label individual items, but you do need it to write complete sentences.

That's an excellent consideration. Is q really absent from labels? Could anyone please derive the "alphabet of labels" - which glyphs are used and which are not?

I can say, from analysis of the labels, that they exhibit a number of differences from the main text, one of them being the lack of 4o (I can't remember if 4o was completely absent from labels without double-checking, but I believe they were).

I considered for a while whether they might be "et" (&) signs (which would more likely show up in regular text than on labels) but they don't show up in all the places one would expect them in the main text if they were.

Here are a couple of q-labels, but I cannot generate the alphabet at the moment.

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I agree that the "40" could be something like latin -que but then stuck to the beginning of the second word.

From my own experience, I believe I have some insights into the labels in the small plants section. Insights meaning a fairly good idea for two or three gallows and a handful of other "single" glyphs. I think there is more going on in combinations of glyphs than simple digraphs, but I won't go into detail here to not confuse the thread further.

When I apply my understanding of those labels to a block of text, though, it doesn't work very well. Hence I would definitely not be surprised if very different kinds of information or indeed different languages are represented.

The "different languages" hypothesis might explain the "why" of the script actually. Perhaps someone did not want to bother with all kinds of different scripts (Greek, Latin, Hebrew ??) and came up with some way to write down the sounds of these various languages. The approach was then clearly not to assign a glyph to each different sound, but on the contrary simplify the whole thing and work with sound approximations. This is very close to what I believe at the moment.

(09-09-2016, 12:07 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A relatively small community lives somewhere in central-southern Europe. Their language or dialect is different than that of those around them. This was not uncommon in the times before standardization and the eradication of "les patois". Their language is entirely unknown to us, and it was likely an isolate like Basque. Somewhere around the 13th century, they adopted the Latin script for writing in their own language, though over the centuries they made numerous alterations to express different sounds. The result was Voynichese. Since they were a small community, they only produced a small amount of manuscripts, and their language and script were wiped from the face of the earth when the renaissance desire for national unity started imposing standard language forms within national borders. Only one manuscript remains today, and nobody knows how to read it.

While this story is possible, I think it adds some unnecessary complexity. E.g. the existence of other manuscripts, the progressive deviation from the Latin alphabet, two centuries of written history completely disappearing.

Considering examples like Hildegard von Bingen and Giovanni Fontana, I would say that the alphabet was created by a single person in the XV century. The "small community" speaking an "isolated language" still fits the story of course. 
If I remember correctly, both Hildergard's and Fontana's newly created alphabets are documented in more than one manuscript. Voynichese could be another example of alphabet infant mortality.

(10-09-2016, 06:45 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:I think the fact that q is almost totally absent from the labels points toward it being a morphological marker of some kind - you don't need it to label individual items, but you do need it to write complete sentences.

That's an excellent consideration. Is q really absent from labels? Could anyone please derive the "alphabet of labels" - which glyphs are used and which are not?

Here's an alphabetized list of all the labels (taken from the interlinear file):

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There are 10 labels beginning with q listed here, four of which are from the column of words on f66r.  Compare that to the number beginning with o.

I suppose it should also be pointed out that q is also missing from f1r, and possibly other pages (I can't remember).

(10-09-2016, 07:26 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....

Considering examples like Hildegard von Bingen and Giovanni Fontana, I would say that the alphabet was created by a single person in the XV century. The "small community" speaking an "isolated language" still fit the story of course. 
If I remember correctly, both Hildergard's and Fontana's newly created alphabets are documented in more than one manuscript. Voynichese could be another example of alphabet infant mortality.

One thing I noticed about von Bingen's code (not the constructed part, but the alphabet substitution code) is that it's designed for ease of reading.

• b and d are normal except they have an extra flourish (which is easy to ignore) and the d is mirrored
  
• p and q are like b and d in the sense that one is mirrored and the other has an extra flourish
  
• the l (ell), like the b and d, has an extra flourish (which can be ignored)
  
• u is simply slanted
  
• r simply has a long ascender
  
• x has the crossbars offset but still resembles an x
  
• the y is mirrored in the vertical direction
  
• i has two extra ticks that can be ignored, and o similarly has two extra flourishes that can be ignored
  
• f and t are similarly easy to see/remember—the f simply lacks a crossbar and the t is normal except for an extra wiggle in the crossbar
  
• the s is substituted with a z, which is easy to remember because of sound similarity
  

There are only a few letters that are distinctly different. You could learn to read it in 10 minutes and could probably write it from memory in 20.


What makes it a tough code is that the words themselves have been substituted with von Bingen's own constructions. In other words, the shapes are not especially different from Latin glyphs, just as the VMS glyphs are not particularly different from Latin letters/numbers/abbreviations, but the underlying words are not German or Latin, they are Bingenese, and a glossary is needed to keep track of them and discern their meaning.

Even with that, the code was probably not intended to be used for entire manuscripts, since the "secret" (encoded) words in Bingenese, that were found in a fragment, are in the minority, mixed in with Latin. It's very much like diplomatic and personal letters of the time that were mostly readable but had the sensitive parts (gossip, people's names, strategic info, etc.), encoded while not obscuring the rest.

If <q> is a morphological marker or an "and/+" at the beginning, one thing that may need explaining why <qo> can appear by itself as a separate word - here are three examples but there are 29 occurrences:



There are also 20 <oqo> occurrences (starting with f10r) and 12 other <qo> occurrences inside words - here are 3 examples:




This is why I viewed <qo> as its own separate unit with a separate function, but as others have said there may be problems with that analysis. Either way, food for thought!