I am often a bit confused when people argue about whether the VM text is a cipher or not. It is not at all clear what is meant with a cipher, and where the line is drawn.
I made this thread in the hopes that especially those "old timers" who have been involved with the text might clarify a few things for me.
When someone says "it is not a cipher", I guess they mean that no uniform system was used to purposefully transform an understandable text into something that needs to be "deciphered" by the reader - right?
On the other hand, it seems like not many people believe that this was a "normal" script that was used by a community in their everyday writing (like Latin, Greek, Arabic scripts).
Let's consider this hypothetical scenario. This is not something I (or anyone?) believe, it is just a thought experiment:
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.
So my question is: only looking at the origin of the script, is such a scenario possible? Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this?
And if it is not possible, then is it a cipher?
And it if is neither, then what is it?
Although this is rehashing old arguments, I don't think anybody can say that the Voynich text is not X or not Y. We can only either offer reasons for or against, or state the assumptions we are using in our research. There won't be much movement either way unless somebody make a considerable breakthrough which renders a lot of existing knowledge void.
It is something we simply have to accept, as researchers, that others have fundamentally different views on the same object. I tend toward ignoring a lot of research which is cipher-based, but others may have different ways of dealing with it.
(09-09-2016, 12:07 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am often a bit confused when people argue about whether the VM text is a cipher or not. It is not at all clear what is meant with a cipher, and where the line is drawn.
I made this thread in the hopes that especially those "old timers" who have been involved with the text might clarify a few things for me.
When someone says "it is not a cipher", I guess they mean that no uniform system was used to purposefully transform an understandable text into something that needs to be "deciphered" by the reader - right?
Basically. Use the term "procedure" instead of "cipher" if that helps. Voynichese could not have been produced by applying some kind of procedure to a text in Latin or other European language. It's not really a matter of whether you call such a nonexistent procedure a "cipher" or not.
The only real exception to this would be a "procedure" equivalent to translating a text from one language into another, i.e. one that involved at least word-for-word, and more likely concept-for-concept, substitution. And then the resulting text could be understood by someone who understood the language it had been translated into, without needing to "decrypt" (translate) back to the original language.
Quote:Let's consider this hypothetical scenario. This is not something I (or anyone?) believe, it is just a thought experiment:
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.
So my question is: only looking at the origin of the script, is such a scenario possible? Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this?
Basically, no, there's no real problem with it.
Actually there's been a thread about that: You are not allowed to view links.
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Quote:Voynichese could not have been produced by applying some kind of procedure to a text in Latin or other European language.
As I have wrote elsewhere, I have never yet seen any analytical proof of this kind of statement.
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Currier A and Currier B is a thing to be explained within any natural-language approach.
(09-09-2016, 12:07 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this?
...
It depends on whether or not you consider the word breaks as natural breaks.
If you assume they are, ask yourself the question, "How many natural languages have certain letters that occur only at the beginnings or endings of words and never (or almost never) anywhere else, compounded by the fact that certain letters occur only in the middles of words and never anywhere else?"
You also have to ask yourself whether any of the characters are null characters. Unless the subtle differences in letter shapes are representative of different letters, the alphabet is very abbreviated, about 17 to 20 common characters depending on how you evaluate them. If you then assign some of them as nulls, the alphabet becomes even smaller. It would be difficult to represent a natural language with so few sounds, unless it were an abjad or some similar system.
You also have to account for the very high level of repetition... not just when the same words are next to each other (which might happen in poetry or lists) but the high level of similarity of letter order in words that occur frequently.
(09-09-2016, 10:45 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (09-09-2016, 12:07 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Is there anything in Voynichese that argues against this?
...
It depends on whether or not you consider the word breaks as natural breaks.
If you assume they are, ask yourself the question, "How many natural languages have certain letters that occur only at the beginnings or endings of words and never (or almost never) anywhere else, compounded by the fact that certain letters occur only in the middles of words and never anywhere else?"
Do you mean script or language? There are multiple scripts with different forms for characters depending on where in a word they occur: Arabic, Hebrew (limited), Syriac, Mongolian.
If you mean language, then we're speaking about sounds, and the answer heavily depends on what you believe the words represent. If you think the words are single syllables, then there are definitely many, many languages which only allow certain sounds at the beginning or ends of syllables, and there is essentially no problem.
If the words are multiple syllables then the answer is more complicated but still ultimately resolvable. Some characters (I'm thinking particularly of [i] and [n]) could represent vowel quality and only occur in stressed positions. If stress is mostly fixed on the final syllable then these characters will mostly occur at or near the end of a word. The character [q] may represent a sound such as /h/ which is only realized in a very limited environment and deleted elsewhere.
Quote:You also have to ask yourself whether any of the characters are null characters. Unless the subtle differences in letter shapes are representative of different letters, the alphabet is very abbreviated, about 17 to 20 common characters depending on how you evaluate them. If you then assign some of them as nulls, the alphabet becomes even smaller. It would be difficult to represent a natural language with so few sounds, unless it were an abjad or some similar system.
You also have to account for the very high level of repetition... not just when the same words are next to each other (which might happen in poetry or lists) but the high level of similarity of letter order in words that occur frequently.
I don't think null characters are a problem of natural language theories. Indeed, it is the opposite, with most natural language theories I've read attempting to incorporate the whole text, and cryptological theories using null characters.
But your two points seem to potentially answer each other: too few characters to fully represent all sounds and lots of repetition. This is suggestive that the characters may represent the sound of the language only imperfectly, not drawing all the distinctions that are present in speech. The reader may have had to fill in some details such as the precise quality of a vowel or the voicing of a consonant. This is not unknown in examples from history.
(10-09-2016, 12:45 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a problem if you look at the VMS statistically—it occurs to an unusually high degree that is not reminiscent of natural languages. I think it's possible that certain glyphs could stand for multiple characters, but that too reduces the number of glyphs in between that might represent individual letters and we're back to the same problem... unusually constrained glyphs that follow a strict set of rules beyond that of natural languages, a characteristic that argues against them corresponding to sounds if the word breaks are to be believed.
I'm sorry but I don't follow your point. I don't understand what you're saying here. Can you give a specific example to illustrate?
If your objection is based on the strict word structure, then I can half agree. I don't think that the syllables of words are too structured, but the way in which syllables combine into words is.
Quote:I'm not sure if it's what you intended, but the way you worded your statement makes it sound as though you are putting natural language and cryptological theories in two different boxes. Natural language theories and cryptological theories are not separate problems since many enciphered documents are encrypted natural languages. The one that differs is constructed languages. They don't have to follow natural language rules or use the kind of alphabet that would be needed to represent a reasonable number of sounds.
I'm making a point about the surface features. By 'natural language' I mean those theories which state that the underlying language is not greatly or deliberately obscured. By 'cryptological' I mean those theories which state that the features of the underlying language are partly or wholly obscured. I believe that a statistical analysis of the Voynich characters is, in itself, a linguistic analysis.
Though I must object that constructed languages don't follow natural language rules. If they can be spoken or used by humans, then they most certainly do. Phonology and grammar follow universal tendencies. They could be very constrained in their sounds and grammar, but they would still adhere to some underlying principles.
-JKP- Wrote:I think it's possible that certain glyphs could stand for multiple characters
-JKP- you've probably heard me say this before, but an easy solution could be that
combinations of Voynich letters encode multiple characters. Take the signs
e o a r and
l. Just 5 Voynich signs could make 25 combinations (
ar = a,
or = b,
er = c etc.) and that would solve the constrained alphabet problem (and the low entropy problem). This is why I think that Voynichese is a mix of 2-sign combinations and some letters that stand alone (maybe [y], [s] and [d]).
Emma May Smith Wrote:Phonology and grammar follow universal tendencies. They could be very constrained in their sounds and grammar, but they would still adhere to some underlying principles.
Ah, a fellow Chomskyan linguist
(10-09-2016, 01:40 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Though I must object that constructed languages don't follow natural language rules. If they can be spoken or used by humans, then they most certainly do. Phonology and grammar follow universal tendencies. They could be very constrained in their sounds and grammar, but they would still adhere to some underlying principles.
I should have been more specific. When I refer to constructed languages in the context of the VMS, I mean written languages, a system that does not need to be spoken.
A constructed language doesn't have to follow natural language tendencies for grammar. As an example, mathematics is a form of constructed language that is well understood by mathematicians, so well that they can write jokes to each other in "math' that can't even be translated into regular English (programmers have these kinds of jokes too, humor that simply isn't explainable to a nonprogrammer) but it doesn't follow natural language rules of grammar and many aspects of it can't easily be expressed in words (which is why students of math have to learn the symbology in addition to listening to lectures on the concepts). In fact, different branches of math and physics have different "grammars" and a mathematician specializing in one can't necessarily read the others.
A constructed language to explain plants and cosmology (assuming the text is meaningful and in some way related to the images) probably wouldn't lean toward the math side, it would probably lean more toward the linguistic side, but it's still possible to describe things in ways that are quite different from natural language grammars (which, in themselves, can be quite variable).