Right, if you want to test an Indo-European language it basically comes down to this: your first question shouldn't be which language it is. First you must figure out how something with the statistical characteristics of Voynichese can possibly encode an Indo-European language.
...or any language for that matter?
Indeed. Unless you have overwhelming proof that the text must be written in a given language, it is best to approach without a specific language in mind. Otherwise you risk fitting the text to the language, rather than the language to the text.
As you say, you need to figure out something from the known statistics of the text first. I'm constantly amazed how many attempted solutions there are compared with actual discussions on textual characteristics. Discussions of very specific aspects of the text should be wildly more common than attempted solutions.
I've just seen this thread again, having quite forgotten it.
First, thanks to Emma for saying - a most vital point -
Discussions of very specific aspects of the text should be wildly more common than attempted solutions.
Secondly, if I need to give credit for another person's earlier exploration of a theme I'm working on just now, I certainly won't forget this thread again.
About another post in this same thread - if Marco happens to see my comment here:
Marco it doesn't matter where you happened to first notice an item or observation, but rather which person first made that observation or brought the detail to notice of Voynich research. Were it otherwise, half the world would be crediting wiki authors with having discovered an explanation for gravity.
The first observation that the diagram represented the Elements was by Rich Santacoloma; the second and quite co-incidental recognition that such reference was the diagram's intention was my own. The reason you were unaware of this is that in each case, later writers made use of our observations (Rich's and mine) without troubling to credit the contributions as one should. This is not because such credits are greedily sought; it is so that later-come readers (such as yourself) can go back and evaluate the original writers' thoughts, explanations and sources.
Substituting 'alternative' names and references distorts and degrades the standard of scholarly discourse, as I'm sure you realise, and serves none but those who are afraid that if the truth is spoken, their own sense of importance may be reduced. That last is a very general commment on what we see happen in academe when people lie about sources. It is surely not meant as a personal barb. I have great respect for the attention to detail which all your work displays.
Diane, please try to stay on topic.
You can't barge in almost two years after an original post simply to recriminate a poster upon an obscure and irrelevant point of crediting an idea. Also, if you look at the post I You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.you're talking about (you fail yet again to be specific), Marco did not arbitrarily credit the idea to someone; he clearly said "I first read about this idea here", providing a link. Which to me seems to be more than clear and professional. As opposed to your barbs about "
distorts and degrades the standard of scholarly discourse".
This obsession with clear references must stop. You tend to take it to extremes, demanding peer-reviewed levels of footnotes which simply aren't necessary in general conversation. Thank you.
I haven't posted in a while, but I still do take the time to think about the problem and I do have Voynich manuscript as something I get alerts about. I also read the thread and was interested by how it parallels some thoughts I've been having.
My approach to VMS assumes it's a real natural language, but not any specific language. So I'll agree it's a language, reserve judgement on whether it's forgotten or just not yet identified, and offer no comment on it's"true origins". I'm sure all of us know at least a few words that have different meanings in different languages as well as multiple meanings in out own. I don't mind people offering identifications for certain words, but until someone offers a framework all the words fit into, the words are a starting point for discussion, not the beginnings of a solution.
Finding lots of words one believes to be Turkish or derived from Turkish is helpful in that it allows one to generalize about what the other written words might sound like in speech. But allowing what those words sound like to drive a search for similar Turkish words is likely the wrong approach. Albanian has a high percentage of loan words from Turkish. Over 20%, maybe as high as 30. I'm not suggesting the text is Albanian, just pointing out that finding Turkish words wouldn't conclusively prove the script encoded only Turkish. It wouldn't even prove VMS was authored by someone who knew Turkish grammar or syntax.
While labeled images seem to provide a good starting point they require you to properly interpret both the text and the image. if you make assumptions about the image that are wrong and arrive at an interpretation of the text you find acceptable, it's likely to also be wrong. Even worse, since you're happy with it you're unlikely to consider other options. I'd suggest an approach that relies less on the images and more on only what the text might sound like.
Begin by selecting 200 common words that are likely to appear in the text. Nouns like fire, water, earth, stone, gold, silver, star, leaf, stem, root, etc. Adjectives like wet, dry, black, hot, old, small, etc. I put a list like that together and decided against adding verbs because conjugation changes them enough they aren't always easy to spot. Pronouns, conjunctions, articles, and prepositions tend to be very language specific. No one borrows pronouns, and what we're looking for here, at least in part, is loan words. If we can find enough loan words we may be able to limit the geography of the language and definitively eliminate all the Nuatal, Ancient Babylonian, and "written by aliens" discussions.
The next step is to get phonetic spellings and alphabetic spellings of all these words in as many target languages as possible (focusing on Indo-European languages in use between 1200 and 1600 AD). Since there seems to be agreement that the approach has some success with Turkish, the abbreviated dictionaries you had could then be used to sweep VMS page by page. The phonetic encoding derived from the Turkish analysis or others identified through a NN analysis could then be used to build Voynichese specific dictionaries for various phonetic encodings. Best dictionary is the winner.
The phonology would be confirmed by finding a high percentage of the target words in the text using as few of the target dictionaries as possible. You'd probably have to read the patchwork text yourself to see if it made sense since (I hope) people still have more relevant experience with language than machines. The NN could be trained with existing historical texts that are written in one or more known languages. Once the phonology was established with a reasonable degree of certainty you still wouldn't (and might never) have a full solution. But it seems like a reasonable approach to at least creating some gaps to fill in where now there aren't even gaps..
(17-12-2018, 06:34 PM)crezac Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Hello! I'd restored the general phonology for words a long time ago; they are almost all read and translated from the Old Chechen language, Old Ingush and Old Dagestan dialects. With Turkic (Uzbek mostly, Chagatay, Eastern Turkistan) borrowing, not Turkish.
The text says something about spagyric, how to distill medicative from the plants by fire, water and elements, and how to use it for those and another purposes.
A medical handbook of the somewhom from the Caucasus.
If you can read Cyrillic, then You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. is my partial transliteration of this language, 60+ pages, but probably not quite correct.
Hello Escape!
Why not create a (free) blog on which we could read your translation? It's always better than downloading unknown files. And it's easier for the reader to translate your text, using the automatic translator.
(19-12-2018, 03:26 PM)escape Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (17-12-2018, 06:34 PM)crezac Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Hello! I'd restored the general phonology for words a long time ago; they are almost all read and translated from the Old Chechen language, Old Ingush and Old Dagestan dialects. With Turkic (Uzbek mostly, Chagatay, Eastern Turkistan) borrowing, not Turkish.
The text says something about spagyric, how to distill medicative from the plants by fire, water and elements, and how to use it for those and another purposes.
A medical handbook of the somewhom from the Caucasus.
If you can read Cyrillic, then You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is my partial transliteration of this language, 60+ pages, but probably not quite correct.
Hi escape,
There is a You are not allowed to view links.
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Another thing I worried is that, while decoding
ch as Х, you decode
Sh as Й. This looks not that persuasive, unless we consider a two-step progress where Cyrillic И
comes from Greek Η, and Latin H
sounds like Cyrillic Х.
It would be great if you could decode labels of stars, using your own system, and explain from there as others have done.
Quote:Another thing I worried is that, while decoding ch as Х, you decode Sh as Й. This looks not that persuasive, unless we consider a two-step progress where Cyrillic И comes from Greek Η, and Latin H sounds like Cyrillic Х.
It would be great if you could decode labels of stars, using your own system, and explain from there as others have done.
There is a letter J, that sounds like X in Spanish, but like Й in most others. I wrote that it could be a mistake here with this letter.