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RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 26-02-2019
(26-02-2019, 10:16 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
Here's the problem though. If we assume that recurring parts of Voynichese words are grammatical bits, then what's left for the semantic bits? In other words, if we omit the parts of Voynichese that may be grammatical, then is there enough body and variety left to express actual vocabulary?
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Exactly! Where is it? There's something missing. Seen this way, the tokens are unusually short. There are a strangely high number of similar endings and beginnings. Take them out and there's not much left. But they are there—the text is full of them. No serious researcher can afford to ignore them.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 05-03-2019
I forgot to mention, when I posted the Scandinavian example (where articles are indicated by endings rather than separate words), that in the Italian merchant script (and other scripts), even though articles were considered separate words, they were frequently appended to the word they preceded so that it looks like one word.
However, this makes the "words" longer than average, which would not fit the statistics of the VMS as well.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - Koen G - 05-03-2019
Clision is extremely common in Germanic medieval spelling. But it is as you say, this brings us back to the problem we discussed above: there would be insufficient body and variation left to form roots.
Although I'm speaking without having investigated the matter. Has it been tested whay Voynichese would look like if common affixes are omitted?
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 05-03-2019
Considering how many VMS tokens end in ain, aiin, y or dy, if you took away the very frequent ch, t, ot, 4ot or k, ok, 4ok at the beginnings, there's very little left in between, and what's left in between is often equally common patterns like dal and dar.
In fact, sometimes there is no in between... Look at line 3 middle and you'll see common beginning, common ending, no middle in tokens like chy and ydy.
Just glance at a big-plants folio like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and you'll see what I mean.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - geoffreycaveney - 05-03-2019
JKP, thank you for this thread and for all of your additional comments and clarifications in your replies. I find all of it very helpful and useful.
I am glad to know that another researcher has independently arrived at the idea of Hebrew as a vowelless abjad as a logical candidate to be the underlying language of the text. I think it makes sense for many of the same reasons that you state that it made sense to you.
I know I just "introduced" myself on this forum with a prolix magnum or not so magnum opus stating the case for the ms text as glossolalia. And I'm afraid that this issue with the text consisting almost entirely of the same few repeated common beginning glyph sequences, common ending glyph sequences, and very little in between, with what's in between also consisting of the same few repeated common sequences -- I'm afraid that does sound more like a written form of glossolalia rather than meaningful text in any language. Of course, as I said in my own post, I do very much hope that I'm wrong, and indeed I'm still trying to prove myself wrong.
I do have one idea that may perhaps shed light on the rigidity and lack of flexibility of glyph positioning, which is a huge problem as you absolutely correctly point out: Not in the Hebrew script, but in the Arabic and Syriac scripts, certain letters are always *unconnected* with the following letter. Perhaps some of the glyphs in the ms that we see as ending words, are simply unconnected to the following glyph but still part of the same word. Now this does not solve all of the problems with this issue, not at all, not by a long shot. But it does offer one possible explanation for why *some* glyphs *always* appear to be word-final, whether they actually always are or not.
About the reminder comment on the difference between the language and the script, yes of course we all must be clear on this distinction. But in fact, we have the script in front of us, for better or worse, so all we are trying to determine is the language. And yes, we know there are many cases of the same script being used to write very different languages. But when I say I have a Hebrew hypothesis, I mean the Hebrew language, not just the Hebrew script used to write other languages. For example, the Hebrew script is used to write Yiddish, but it adapts several Hebrew consonant letters for use as Yiddish (Middle High German) vowel letters, so Yiddish would have letter patterns much closer to German than to Hebrew. I also consider grammatical structure such as the common Hebrew article prefix ha-, which only applies to the language itself, not to the script when used to write other languages.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 05-03-2019
(05-03-2019, 09:31 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view....
I do have one idea that may perhaps shed light on the rigidity and lack of flexibility of glyph positioning, which is a huge problem as you absolutely correctly point out: Not in the Hebrew script, but in the Arabic and Syriac scripts, certain letters are always *unconnected* with the following letter. Perhaps some of the glyphs in the ms that we see as ending words, are simply unconnected to the following glyph but still part of the same word. Now this does not solve all of the problems with this issue, not at all, not by a long shot. But it does offer one possible explanation for why *some* glyphs *always* appear to be word-final, whether they actually always are or not.
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I have suggested quite a few times (for quite a long time) that the tokens (or some of them), might be "syllables" (in the Voynichese sense) rather than full words, but I have met with some resistance to this idea.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - Mark Knowles - 19-04-2019
I think, if this hasn't been mentioned before, that with a sophicated cipher it is harder to spot mistakes once they have been made and the case for using a scratch pad is greatly increased, both of which make corrections much less likely. Also if using multiglyphs the amount of correction needed is that much greater, so I speculate that the errors just remain in the text.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 19-04-2019
I actually consider scribal mistakes to be a non-issue with the VMS.
When you have more than 200 pages with text in what appears to be essentially the same system, then a mistake here or there isn't going to matter.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - Torsten - 17-09-2019
The hypothesis that the text contains numerous scribal errors assumes that the text in the VMS follows the same rules as a text using natural language. For a text using natural language a rarely used word close to a more commonly used word can indicate a mistake. Therefore such words look like errors to us. Based on this hypotheses it is sometimes even argued that we have to correct such errors before we can start to analyze the text.
This argumentation is problematic for several reasons. First, it is circular reasoning to assume that we can detect exceptions for rules we still want to discover. Secondly, by using this hypothesis we would start the analysis with the presumption that we can't trust our observations.
Last but not least the hypothesis don't fit with well known facts:
1) The VMS don't contain any corrections in form of deleted glyphs. If there are misspelled glyphs the scribe didn't care to scrape them out. This clearly contradicts the idea that rarely used words can be interpreted as errors. However one explanation for this observation is the idea that the text was copied from a draft and that the scribe didn't understand what he was writing. Such reasoning illustrates, how a problematic starting hypothesis leads to even more problematic conclusions.
2) Words with high mutual similarity are typical for the VMS. For each common word there is at least another one differing from it by only a single quill stroke. For example, in addition to the word <daiin> also the words <dain> and <daiiin> are present in the text. The existence of words with high mutual similarity to other words is quite normal for the VMS. Even if rarely used words look like exceptions to us they are in fact typical for the VMS.
3) The text perfectly fits into the available space. This is even the case for holes within the parchment or if a drawing of a plant separates a line into multiple parts. This indicates that the text layout responds to the layout of the page. Either, the text layout was made during writing or beside the holes also the text layout was copied. Therefore, this observation indicates that the text was adopted during writing and also that the scribe was the author.
An alternative idea would be that at the VMS is a facsimile of the original manuscript. But this would mean that beside the text layout also the "errors" were copied. This way the "numerous scribal errors"-hypothesis is unable to explain rare words and must therefore be dismissed.
RE: [split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections - -JKP- - 18-09-2019
Torsten, there are corrections. I haven't seen any major ones, but there are small ones throughout.
When I talk about errors, I am only talking about ones we can readily see and recognize, like a letter that started out curved and was over-written to be straighter, or a letter than was very obviously changed to another one. There are also places where text has been added in, but there's no way to know if someone else did it as a correction or for other reasons (like making the margins more even).
I've created four transcripts. I've looked at every glyph in the VMS at least 10 times. There are penning errors. Whether there are wording or spelling errors is a different issue, there is no way to know, but minor corrections to the glyph shapes do occur. I started documenting them at one point and there were so many (in addition to anomalies), I realized it would take too long and I have other things I needed to research first.