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+--- Thread: Phonology of Voynichese (/thread-2727.html)
RE: Phonology of Voynichese - Monica Yokubinas - 18-09-2019
(18-09-2019, 09:16 AM)-JKP- wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(06-04-2019, 08:26 PM)Common_Man wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Maybe this isn't going to be very useful, but just consider this possibility..
What if the author consistently left out the first letter (or consonant) while writing to make it difficult to read for the people who didn't know the system? The idea obviously comes from Derek Vogt's findings (which I still cant get enough of, even though I believe he lost his way somewhere in the middle and ended up in no man's land), and maybe keeping this in mind might help those trying to assign sound values, and such a thing might give rise to a lot of single glyph words, which the VMS has in plenty.
I myself have tried it while trying to transcribe the MS in my own way, but it never really helped.. Maybe others trying to do the same can benefit by keeping this in mind..
Leaving out the first letter was actually a characteristic of numerous dialects and one sees it when reading labels in herbal manuscripts. Very frequently the first letter just isn't there (not just the "h", which is often dropped, but sometimes hard consonants as well).
Some of the Provençal dialects dropped many letters throughout the words. This happens in some of the small towns in Scandinavia, as well (still to this day), so it was not just true of the mid-southern areas.
So, leaving out the first letter might be a deliberate choice (and might affect every token), but it might also be a property of how a particular person learned to speak.
When translating the Bible, I'll use Psalms 17:13 for an You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. The upper Aramaic is the actual text and the bottom is the interpretation. You can click on the definition of the word, and notice at the top, there are many letters not "interpreted". Like the glottal stop "h" at the end, equivalant to "g" in the Voynich.
Remember, the Voynich was created BEFORE the King James version of the bible, and there has been a lot of speculation on who "interpreted" it, so for fun, if you have a King James Bible, look up Psalms 46 and count 46 words down (note the word) and count 46 words up and be surprised.
RE: Phonology of Voynichese - RenegadeHealer - 18-09-2019
I seem to recall one blogger (maybe it was Emma May Smith?) talking about EVA-ai(ii)n, and reckoning that this represents some type of common vocal phenomenon for the person writing and reading the VMS, with an, ain, aiin, and aiiin perhaps being minor but meaningful variations on a similar kind of vocalization. At the time I was reading that, I was very into Stephen Bax and Derek Vogt's idea that EVA-a derived from the Semitic letter waw, and accordingly, represents either the approximant [w] or as a back vowel. Since then, I've had an easy time imagining that a(ii)in represents a series of heavily nasalized back vowels, perhaps of varying phonemic length. I imagine it sounding a bit like the drone of a didgeridoo or a Tuvan throat singer, but briefer. Or, for a less exotic example, the way Portuguese speakers pronounce "-ão" at the end of a word.
I'm going really out on a limb here, but am I the only one who imagines this Voynichese letter combination sounding this way, and thinks this idea might be plausible?
RE: Phonology of Voynichese - Monica Yokubinas - 18-09-2019
I believe the elongated letters/glyphs are representative of sounds as well, this was before Hebrew (for an example) was organized and vowell points were added. Every different sound, created a different word and definition.
Sukhoting algorithm results - Jorge_Stolfi - 15-09-2026
Quote:You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.:Quote:You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: I don’t think that Guy found that vowel-consonant separation did not work. This is what he wrote in “Statistical properties of two folios of the Voynich manuscript” (1991). Of course, one can disagree with his conclusions.Marco, you are right that my characterization of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was too strong. Guy did find a separation using the Sukhotin algorithm and interpreted it positively.
Sukhotin's algorithm simply tries to divide the set of symbols into two subsets A and B so that the frequency of AB and BA digraphs is maximized.
Intuitively we expect that, when applied to polysyllabic languages in a reasonably phonetic script the smaller set will often be the vowels V and the larger one the consonants C.
The justification is that, in those texts, the two sets tend to alternate:, a C is much more likely to be followed by a V than by another C, and likewise a V is much more likely to be followed by C. And experiments generally confirm that intuition.
However, Sukhotin's algorithm it will always produce some partition A:B of the alphabet. If the conditions above are not satisfied, the result can be meaningless.
Jacques Guy ran the algorithm on Voynichese text, and he did report the the results in that paper assuming that they were meaningful. But the conditions do not seem to be satisfied: either the text is encrypted in a complex way (that is not a simple phoneme-to-glyph mapping) or the language is monosyllabic, with a partition of the alphabet into several different classes (not just two), that do not alternate but rather occur in a "multiple-slot" fashion.
I wrote that "Guy unsuccessfully tried Sukhotin's algorithm", in spite of his positive report, because those results led nowhere. AFAIK, not even he got anything significant out of them. And, if I understood You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. correctly, he later came to accept the "Chinese" hypothesis as a valid possibility.
All the best, -- stolfi
RE: Phonology of Voynichese - JoJo_Jost - 16-09-2026
Well, the likelihood that the VMS is heavily encrypted is extremely high. The highly organized and interdependent structure of the text is unlikely to represent a normal language (though I can't really judge that when it comes to exotic languages like Chinese).
And Sukhotin just isn't helpful here...