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+--- Thread: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic (/thread-4543.html)
RE: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic - nablator - 22-03-2025
(21-03-2025, 08:57 PM)newamauta Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd say she's using the term to describe medieval Irish from the Alpine region.
There is no such thing, the Celtic language disappeared after the Roman conquest. Mapping Voynichese to an imaginary language allows a lot of freedom of interpretation.
(22-03-2025, 11:32 AM)VoyBear Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.yeah, she translated one of the most frequent word beginings, the 4o as "qo" which does not exist in medieval irish if you check some of the dictionaries, and she thinks that the most frequent word, the "8am", means "adhoil", which also isnt in any irish dictionary.
I bet many of the translated words (at least those with a question mark) are not found in any Gaelic dictionary either.
RE: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic - Koen G - 22-03-2025
I hadn't noticed before that the author has an Irish first name. Of course, a solution aligning with one's background doesn't necessarily make it wrong. But it does add to the previously mentioned elements of fan fiction.
I can confirm that grouping common glyph clusters as one new character does not help to reach normal h2 levels. At least not without seriously unhinging other statistics like h0, h1 and word length.
RE: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic - dashstofsk - 22-03-2025
From my reading and understanding of the history of the Celtic languages, the continental Celtic languages lie on a different linguistic branch to either Gaelic or to Brittonic ( Welsh, Breton ). Gaelic split away some distant time in the past and formed its own language group. A Welsh speaker and a Gaelic speaker today would have difficulty understanding each other. If the Manuscript ( which we know was written on the continent ) was indeed in any of these languages it would probably be closer to Brittonic, this language group being the nearer.
Have you considered Welsh or Breton as a closer match?
RE: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic - VoyBear - 23-03-2025
(22-03-2025, 08:41 PM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.From my reading and understanding of the history of the Celtic languages, the continental Celtic languages lie on a different linguistic branch to either Gaelic or to Brittonic ( Welsh, Breton ). Gaelic split away some distant time in the past and formed its own language group. A Welsh speaker and a Gaelic speaker today would have difficulty understanding each other. If the Manuscript ( which we know was written on the continent ) was indeed in any of these languages it would probably be closer to Brittonic, this language group being the nearer.
Have you considered Welsh or Breton as a closer match?
How do we know that the VM was written on the continent ? What if it was written in middle-east ?
RE: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic - Koen G - 23-03-2025
Looking at iconography, paleography, marginalia, provenance... a continental origin seems more likely. Other areas of production are not excluded, but would require strong evidence.
RE: Doireann Herold's theory of Lepontic/Cisapline Celtic - newamauta - 25-03-2025
(22-03-2025, 04:02 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(22-03-2025, 12:19 AM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(21-03-2025, 10:00 PM)newamauta Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm curious, what do you think of her explanation for low entropy and the decoding framework she came up with (from the 39-50 min mark in the video)? Correct me if I'm wrong, would that still be considered a substitution cipher? If she's saying the symbols represent phonetic sounds and "fadas"/accent marks, and the grouping of the symbols changes their meaning?
I'd just note that she says "a, o" are vowels and "l" accents vowels by preceding them, and "l" isn't really a letter which caused all this entropy confusion.
l - 9957
la - 429
lo - 577
Thing is, even if the idea was right and we ended up with less letters, the entropy would be worse right?. 1000 letter alphabet, lots of possibilities. 2 letter alphabet, not so much.
Or is it adding accentuated characters?
I disagree that l alone, as she claims, explains the low (conditional?) entropy h2, it is a much broader phenomenon. The effect of what she proposes should be trivial to test if we knew the exact rules. Is her mapping of Voynichese glyphs to Irish letters visible somewhere?
Grouping frequent glyph patterns including l into a single (accentuated) character may bring a modest increase of h2, probably on the 3rd digit IIRC: this type of modification of the transliteration has been studied by René Z. and Koen G. among others.
Maybe there is a confusion with Shannon's entropy h1, that only takes into account character frequencies, as the formula shows.
Here are the glyph substitutions I grabbed from the podcast video