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+--- Thread: Syllabification (/thread-201.html)
RE: Syllabification - Diane - 13-02-2016
Sam,
May I say how glad I am to see you here.
RE: Syllabification - Torsten - 14-02-2016
It is not possible that words in the VMS represent a word in a natural language. (Or if we assume some kind of cipher a plain text word.)
(See Currier: "That’s just the point — they’re not words!" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
First, the weak word order can only mean that the words are not ordered by a grammar as we know for natural languages.
I didn't think that it is plausible to assume a language without grammar.
Second, the entropy is too low. Although the entropy is already low we have the line structure.
The line structure is accountable at least for a part of the entropy.
RE: Syllabification - -JKP- - 14-02-2016
(09-02-2016, 07:21 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm currently looking at working to break up the Voynich words into syllables (yes, I believe in a linguistic solution) and I wonder what methods have been tried previously, and by whom, to achieve this.
I only know of Stolfi's work, where he considers each word a syllables in itself, but what others are out there?
If it's an abjad (as with several ancient Mediterranean languages) or a partial abjad (as with some Slavic words), then every two or three glyphs might be one or sometimes even two syllables.
RE: Syllabification - Emma May Smith - 14-02-2016
(14-02-2016, 09:55 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(09-02-2016, 07:21 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm currently looking at working to break up the Voynich words into syllables (yes, I believe in a linguistic solution) and I wonder what methods have been tried previously, and by whom, to achieve this.
I only know of Stolfi's work, where he considers each word a syllables in itself, but what others are out there?
If it's an abjad (as with several ancient Mediterranean languages) or a partial abjad (as with some Slavic words), then every two or three glyphs might be one or sometimes even two syllables.
In such languages, do the characters show a significant ordering? I'm curious how we could make an abjad work without the text becoming repetitive. Maybe this is the word order which is missing?
RE: Syllabification - ReneZ - 14-02-2016
The term adjad is a property of the written language, of course. If the Voynich MS is a rendition of a spoken text, then it plays no role whether that language was written as an adjad or not.
But to answer the question, in the one case I know, those vowels that are written are not always written after the consonant that they follow, but also above, below or in front of them.
And in the case of the many diphthongs, basically all around the consonant. This is not arbitrary, of course. 'e' is always written before, so my name is actually spelled e-r-e-n
Thus, some symbols are always at the start of syllables, and since the language is mostly monosyllabic, at the start of words. There is also a symbol that can only appear at the end. (However, since this langauge - Thai - is written with all words strung together, this feature doesn't appear at all).
But yes, in principle this can happen.
RE: Syllabification - Sam G - 14-02-2016
(14-02-2016, 08:16 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is not possible that words in the VMS represent a word in a natural language. (Or if we assume some kind of cipher a plain text word.)
(See Currier: "That’s just the point — they’re not words!" in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
First, the weak word order can only mean that the words are not ordered by a grammar as we know for natural languages.
I didn't think that it is plausible to to assume a language without grammar.
Second, the entropy is too low. Although the entropy is already low we have the line structure.
The line structure is accountable at least for a part of the entropy.
1) There's at least some word order in the VMS. Also, some languages use inflection more than word ordering to express syntactic relationships, though perhaps there is not enough evidence of inflection in the VMS to rely on this explanation (or perhaps there is - there is certainly some evidence for word inflection).
I suspect that there are rules we are not aware of governing word order in the VMS, so that (for example) in some cases we might see a pair of words A B, but in a different context we will see same the pair B A. German, for instance, has some rules like this that we don't have in English, but it would be incorrect to say that German has "weak word order". So the "weak word order" in the VMS might also be only apparent. The problem is that we don't know what the rules are.
I think the "writing style" of the VMS also probably plays a role here. Many people tacitly assume that a prose style similar to that which we use to write English must be employed in the VMS, but this isn't the only possibility. The writing style is probably "weird", too. This affects a number of considerations about word order, repetitiveness, lack of repeated long phrases, etc.
2) From what I've read, there are natural languages with a lower entropy than the VMS, so there is not a big problem here, though I'm not sure exactly which entropy measure you are talking about, or how many languages and types of texts it has been tried on. What I said about writing style applies here, too.
As far as line structure, it seems that we have:
- Lots of <p> and <f> gallows in initial lines of paragraphs
- Addition of extra letters to the beginnings of lines
- Something weird going on at the ends of lines, notably a high frequency of words ending in <m> or <g>
These are often cited as examples of properties that "no natural language text has", and given all kinds of strange cryptological explanations, but actually these kinds of oddities seem to be fairly common properties of old (unencrypted) Latin manuscripts. Galllows-like embellishments in initial lines of paragraphs in particular are very common, especially in legal manuscripts. (Why the VMS should have a characteristic primarily found in legal manuscripts is another interesting question.) Probably we should be "removing" these features to get "ordinary" text, as we would do with a Latin manuscript, but it's obviously harder to do when we don't understand the language or the details of how these modifications work. In any case, their presence does not demonstrate that the VMS is not a meaningful natural language text any more than they show that old Latin manuscripts are not meaningful natural language texts.
RE: Syllabification - Torsten - 14-02-2016
@Sam
> 1) There's at least some word order in the VMS.
I disagree.
"There are only 35 word sequences which use at least three words and appear at least three times. Only for five of these sequences is the word order unchanged for the whole manuscript, whereas for 30 out of 35 phrases the word order does change." (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. as Timm 2014: p. 3)
Moreover "An additional observation is that in 24 out of 35 cases these repeated sequences use at least two words which are either spelled the same or very similarly." (see Timm 2014: p. 3)
Sometimes similar words are used together. But even for them the order of words doesn't matter.
> there is certainly some evidence for word inflection
Did you mean with inflection the use of similar words like in 'daiiin' - 'daiin' - 'dain'?
It is also possible to connect totally different words like 'daiiin' and 'chedy' this way:
'daiiin' - 'daiin' - 'dain' - 'chdain' - 'chedain' - 'chedan' - 'cheda' - 'chedy'!
> 2) From what I've read, there are natural languages with a lower entropy than the VMS ...
This languages are Japanese and Hawaiian (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). But there is no doubt that the VMS belongs to Europe.
Moreover the line structure also holds some information. Therefore you have to subtract the entropy for the line structure.
RE: Syllabification - lelle - 03-03-2016
(12-02-2016, 10:01 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I share some of these considerations, especially that strings of i's are to be grouped with the preceding character (almost always a). Currier's alphabet has grouped them with the following character, which probably affected many people's way of mentally parsing them.
Looking at the middle column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "der mus del", there are only, what looks like, single glyphs with the exception of "air" on line 11. This might point to aiX-groups being no different from the glyphs we see in the same column.
In my, amateurish, calculations I consider this group atomic. It has not, however, helped me make any sense of the text.
RE: Syllabification - ReneZ - 04-03-2016
(03-03-2016, 08:33 PM)lelle Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(12-02-2016, 10:01 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I share some of these considerations, especially that strings of i's are to be grouped with the preceding character (almost always a). Currier's alphabet has grouped them with the following character, which probably affected many people's way of mentally parsing them.
Looking at the middle column of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "der mus del", there are only, what looks like, single glyphs with the exception of "air" on line 11. This might point to aiX-groups being no different from the glyphs we see in the same column.
In my, amateurish, calculations I consider this group atomic. It has not, however, helped me make any sense of the text.
That is a good point.
RE: Syllabification - Anton - 07-03-2016
Even if one puts apart the cipher theory, I am afraid that no syllabification is possible without our understanding of the alphabet. There is no confirmation that any of the transcription alphabets, EVA included, accurately represent the real alphabet adopted by the author.
I would also like to make some comments on the considerations expressed above in the thread,.
Quote:So when we see that the VMS letters <a>, <e>, and <o> are nearly identical to the "a", "e", and "o" of the Roman alphabet respectively, then I think this fact alone already suggests that these letters are intended to correspond to vowels, and probably even to similar vowels as these letters represent in European languages.
This fact suggests nothing. A person wishing to conceal his message could well use these letters to represent consonants, for an additional layer of obscurity. Besides, EVA e is not like Roman "e". It is like Roman "c".
If the text is abbreviated, then single characters would represent character blocks, like 9 (EVA y) represented "us" in the end of the word and "con" in the beginning of the word in medieval Latin documents.
Quote:Really, the fact that EVA transliteration makes the text basically "pronouncible", as would likely any other transliteration scheme that mapped <a>, <e>, <o>, and <y> to vowels and the other letters to consonants (and considered <i> as a modifier), is by itself strong evidence that its implicit assignment of consonant and vowel status is basically correct.
The "pronouncibility" of the EVA transliteration is mere phantom, partly because the transcription is not fully matched to the Latin alphabet (e.g. substitute "c" for EVA e, as indicated above, and you will lose this pronouncibility at once), and partly because EVA is Latin-alphabet centric - while there is no confirmation that the Latin alphabet was the basis for the Voynichese script. For example, characters like a, c, i, o are found in the Cyrillic alphabet, characters l, d , r, y, q are like Arabic digits, and the rest of the characters are not found in the Latin alphabet at all.
I'd say that being Latin-centric and excess focus on EVA is the worst approach for those who wish to explore the plain text language path. EVA has quite little to do with the real Voynichese alphabet, and absolutely nothing with the Voynichese language (if any).
Quote:Second, the entropy is too low.
As I noted in another thread, it is technically not reliable to speak of (character) entropy in respect to a written language when we don't know what is that language's alphabet.