This is amazing. I was just about to post on the parallel references to astronomy and geography in folio 5v, and in particular about the old site of Dioskurias, where seventeenth and eighteenth century sources say the population was then Mingrellian.
I'd even linked to the Omniglot site - while noting that as far as we know Mingrelian was not a written language until the 19thC when the ethnologists rendered it into written form.
Also, I dispute that ether is one of the elements here.
As far as the history of the manuscript's study goes:-
Rich Santacoloma was, as far as I can discover, the first person to sense that the diagram pictured a system of elements. Rich supposed ether included.
I reached the conclusion, independently and without knowing of Rich's opinion, that the diagram is a non-European five-element system whose imagery is formed in a way suggesting a direct link to the earlier Greek terms, esp. that for unformed matter.
Links to Rich's site were included in my revised post, which explains why I read the image as I do, gives the documentary sources I had used, and explains certain problems about supposing ether included. For people who like to get this sort of thing right.
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My post about Dioskurias and Mingrellian is scheduled to be published next week, but I'll follow this thread and if it turns up anything relevant I'd add he info and credits as appropriate.
I first read about the five elements in You are not allowed to view links.
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I think these labels are a great opportunity to identify some words. Of course, there are many difficulties, one being that the number of the labels does not match that of the “output” tubes. With the exception of fire (
otol or
dchdy) the elements are not easy to identify.
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I believe escape chose the right labels for the right elements. With the exception of ether, which seems to be a very complicated case depending on which system is followed.
About your transcription system: one problem, which it shares with many other proposed solutions, is that gallows represent certain important sounds that are not represented in another way. This seems logical, but given the fact that gallows (and indeed many other glyphs) only occur in certain positions, it complicates things. Are there really languages where "t" and "k" only occur at the beginning of words, like gallows do?
(22-09-2016, 07:54 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I first read about the five elements in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in a comment by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
I think these labels are a great opportunity to identify some words. Of course, there are many difficulties, one being that the number of the labels does not match that of the “output” tubes. With the exception of fire (otol or dchdy) the elements are not easy to identify.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. commented about the Turkic “atesh” for “fire”, noting that it is a loan word from Persian.
I too argued with Sergei about these 6 words. In my opinion, these words refer to parts of between the branch pipes. (
otol) is used as a label near leaf You are not allowed to view links.
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Although I can match up with him in the version of the Vainakh language.
Marco,
That post by Ellie is about a different folio.
As it happens, I'd already described that folio which Ellie is talking about as depicting the world, but the spiral arms are the critical detail, and those I identify as rhumb-lines: that is the winds and/or stars used for the directions. Since none of them is emerging from the cardinal points, I take them as wind-rhumbs. First wrote about this on the old research blog, but it might be matter I've repeated on voynich.imagery.
(22-09-2016, 08:57 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.About your transcription system: one problem, which it shares with many other proposed solutions, is that gallows represent certain important sounds that are not represented in another way. This seems logical, but given the fact that gallows (and indeed many other glyphs) only occur in certain positions, it complicates things. Are there really languages where "t" and "k" only occur at the beginning of words, like gallows do?
Gallows don't only occur at the beginning of words, but in the middle too. The simply don't occur (often) at the end of words. It's pretty common for languages to restrict certain (or even all) consonants from the end of syllables.
Indeed, the fact that [r, l, d, s,] often occur in these positions but [k, t, ch, sh] don't is probably linguistically relevant. As languages have a tendency to restrict sounds in this position based on a hierarchy, we can guess what some of these sounds are and are not.
Emma - perhaps I should phrase it differently: it happens very rarely that more than two glyphs precede a gallow. I just can't imagine that voiceless plosives take such a distribution in any language. Do you know of an example?
(By the way, is there a way to query this on Job's site? The wildcard will only search for "any number of characters").
Ok, let's get a little technical.
You can think of a syllable as having three parts:
1) onset: this is everything which comes before a vowel;
2) nucleus: this is the vowel or any sound which acts as a vowel;
3) coda: this is everything which comes after a vowel.
Now, in terms of consonants, these will typically appear in the onset or coda (though they can form the nucleus). Most languages have both a) restrictions on how many consonants can be in an onset or coda, and b) the order in which they appear. Some languages completely forbid clusters—that is, more than one consonant in either onset or coda position—but if they allow more than one they have a tendency to order them in the same way. Basically, certain sounds must be nearer the vowel than others. It's based on a quality known as sonority, but we shan't bother with explaining that except to acknowledge it exists.
There is a tendency to allow onsets to be more complex than codas. Typically all or most consonants can appear there and some clusters are allowed. Codas are more often either empty or have one of a restricted set of consonants, with clusters forbidden. Of course, many languages which flout these rules do exist, for example English, which allows clusters of three consonants in the onset and four in the coda, but it is not typical. (Indeed, Indo-European languages as a whole are typically more complex in their syllable structure than the average language.)
So, when we look at the structure of Voynich words and see that [r, l] are very commonly found at the end but [k, t] are not, what we are observing (ASSUMING the surface patterns are linguistic) is a fact about what the underlying language permits in syllable codas. We can explain this by saying that [r, l] must have some phonological difference to [k, t]. Were you to suggest that [r, l] were nasals and [k, t] plosives, then you would have a similar situation to a number of languages which forbid obstruents but permit sonorants in codas.
Likewise, the observation that [k, t] often appear at or near the beginning of words can be explained in a similar way. If you believe that [k, t] are plosives, then they have low sonority and typically always appear at the beginning of an onset before sounds with a higher sonority (sibilants are sometimes exceptional, so /s/ can appear in places like in English 'skip' and 'stone'). Those strings which appear before [k, t] in Voynich words: [o, qo, cho, che, cheo, etc] can be explained as separate syllables. The task of researchers is then not one of explaining how [k, t] work, but why the syllables within a word are structured as they are.
Sorry if this answer is a bit long-winded, but hopefully it is helpful to thinking about the possible linguistic features of Voynich words. It is my belief that a linguistic analysis, ignoring the origins of the script, the illustrations, and even the potential meaning of the text, could well solve the Voynich manuscript. At the very least it provides us with a framework for assessing both the text and potential solutions.
Thank you, Emma. I knew this, but it didn't hurt to have it refreshed
Let me use the proper terminology then, and redirect it back to the solution proposed in this thread:
Is it likely that the proposed language(s) does not allow k or t in the coda?
This is very interesting, but I think it is going more and more off-topic with respect to escape's original post.