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[Article] Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - Printable Version

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RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - MarcoP - 24-06-2019

(24-06-2019, 01:43 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You argue that the results in your paper are not final and everything is open to further discussion. You even say "We are not in a position to refute the idea that the manuscript is non-linguistic and we don't claim to be." So what do you want to say you’ve done?

I believe the last sentence of the pre-print is a good summary: 
Quote:We would like to suggest that the existence of word break combinations provides some support for the possibility that the Voynich text is written phonetically in a language. We also believe that information gleaned from further study of word break combinations could help to identify the sound values of the glyphs in which the text is written.

In other words, a few aspects of the word-break combinations phenomenon find parallel in written languages, suggesting that Voynichese is phonetic. While "phonetic" is strongly correlated with "linguistic", it needn't necessarily be.
I am not aware of other explanations for word-break combinations, but of course I am open to discussing them. Shouldn't I be?

We have shown the relation between word-break combinations and the results of Guy's and Rene's research about possible vowels / consonants: the roles played by different glyphs "inside" words and at word boundaries are similar. This links Currier's initial observation about the phaenomenon with the work of other researchers. I see this both as a step forward in Voynich research and a tribute to what others have done.

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - Torsten - 24-06-2019

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(24-06-2019, 02:10 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[/font][/font]
I believe the last sentence of the pre-print is a good summary: 
Quote:We would like to suggest that the existence of word break combinations provides some support for the possibility that the Voynich text is written phonetically in a language. We also believe that information gleaned from further study of word break combinations could help to identify the sound values of the glyphs in which the text is written.


In other words, a few aspects of the word-break combinations phenomenon find parallel in written languages, suggesting that Voynichese is phonetic. While "phonetic" is strongly correlated with "linguistic", it needn't necessarily be.
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[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Do you realy want to argue "that the Voynich text is written a phonetically written language" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 19), but that you don't "refute the idea that the manuscript is non-linguistic" and that "Voynichese is phonetic" but not necessarily linguistic? Does that mean that the VMS-text is using a [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]phonetically written [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]non-linguistic language?[/font][/font][/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Anyway, it is well known that some properties behave like natural language. See[/font] Reddy & Knight: "Some features – the lack of repeated bigrams and the distributions of letters at line-edges – are linguistically aberrant, which others – the word length and frequency distributions, the apparent presence of morphology, and most notably, the presence of page-level topics – conform to natural language-like text" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).

So you can search for aspects parallel to natural language or you can try to understand why some properties behave differently. The choice is yours.

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - MarcoP - 24-06-2019

(24-06-2019, 05:06 PM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you realy want to argue "that the Voynich text is written a phonetically written language" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., p. 19), but that you don't "refute the idea that the manuscript is non-linguistic" and that "Voynichese is phonetic" but not necessarily linguistic?

...and three. You do love your little misquoting game  Big Grin

A suggestion (i.e. a tentative statement) cannot be a refutation (proof of falsehood).

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - nickpelling - 25-06-2019

(21-06-2019, 11:54 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Nick, Prescott Currier's qualifications and background are not the issue in contention, his statements are. I stand by what I said, "I don't consider his conclusions to be useful: he gives no solid reasons for his conclusions against linguistic arguments and doesn't expand on his suggestions enough to let others explore them." Currier's total statement on possible causes of this phenomenon is no more that 58 words long.


Any response to Currier's conclusions would either be:

  1. The reasons why Currier came to his conclusions are not stated, and therefore it is not possible to evaluate them.
  2. We assume the reasons he came to his conclusions and argue against our assumptions, even though the assumptions could be wrong.
Neither of these would have been useful.



I would be happy, were you to expand on Currier's conclusions, to respond specifically to your interpretations. I have no fear of discussing any valid point, but it is impossible to discuss something which simply isn't there. I assume, by you dismissal of point 4 as an explanation, you have a clear idea of what Currier was thinking.

You've misunderstood my point (and, I believe, Currier's original analysis and argument) completely, and I think this emerges as a significant weakness in the way you did your statistics and then presented your paper.

Currier started by saying (1) that Bio B showed very strong final-initial patterning, (2) that other B pages showed some (but significantly less) final-initial patterning, while (3) A showed very little patterning at all ("Language A texts are fairly close to expected in this respect"). That is, Currier explicitly starts with a statistical argument for inhomogeneity - that Voynichese is not the same in all sections. A is not the same as non-Bio-B is not the same as Bio-B.

This inhomogeneity is a basic statistical fact that your paper discusses briefly on page 5, BUT THEN IMMEDIATELY IGNORES FOR THE REST OF THE PAPER. That is, despite this issue, you seem to want to paint a picture (presumably based on your presuppositions and biases) where Voynichese is inherently homogenous, even though Currier's foundational work on the specific phenomenon discussed in your paper argues directly against it. I can only conclude that this is both poor statistics and poor research on your part.

Currier, having built up his specific argument for inhomogeneity, then continues: "I can think of no interpretation of this phenomenon, linguistic or otherwise. Inflexional endings would certainly not have this effect nor would any other grammatical feature that I know of if we assume that we are dealing with words." That is, Currier - who as you now know was trained in both linguistics and philology - specifically rejected exactly the kind of conclusion you come to at the end of your paper, where you say "We would like to suggest that the existence of word break combinations provides some support for the possibility that the Voynich text is written phonetically in a language." I don't believe you propose any idea or mechanism Currier would not have trivially considered back in the 1970s: and so I believe that by writing what he did, he specifically rejected what you propose.

Currier's concluding sentence is: "If, however, these word-appearing elements are something else, syllables, letters, even digits, restrictions of this sort might well occur." As a codebreaker (as well as a linguist), Currier without any doubt knew full well that the absence of any kind of numbering system within the text was a major cause for cryptological concern. My interpretation is simply that these three entirely non-linguistic explanations made more sense to him in the 1970s than any of your proposed explanations: and as such their absence from your paper (not only as a missing literature review, but also as a strongly-informed dissenting voice) makes your paper look both superficial and predecided. They do not fall under your category 4, sorry, because you are trying by that description to engineer an homogenous underlying mechanism which Currier already argued against 40+ years ago.

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you just aren't giving Prescott Currier any respect whatsoever (not academic, not linguistic, nothing), and he basically invented the whole field you've picked up on to write your paper. The big difference is that Currier had the good sense to realise that there was a basic underlying problem with the kind of Baxian simple-minded linguistic turn so often applied to Voynichese, and that this wasn't something that could be hand-waved away.

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - ReneZ - 26-06-2019

Currier was one of the pioneers, but his work is 40 years old now. We have much more complete data, much better data and infinitely better tools than he did.
Even if he was the first to publicly show some effects in the MS to the world, some of his conclusions are very questionable.

For me it is therefore completely valid to start from a clean, unbiased state and not take is (partial) conclusions for granted. There is much to be learned still about the MS text, and the paper delves more deeply into one particular topic than Currier ever did.

Also:

Quote:I don't believe you propose any idea or mechanism Currier would not have trivially considered back in the 1970s: and so I believe that by writing what he did, he specifically rejected what you propose.

You clearly write that you are guessing what Currier was thinking.

So, while constructive criticism of any work can be valuable, for me the latest comment is really going overboard on it.

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - Emma May Smith - 26-06-2019

Quote:Sorry if this sounds harsh, but you just aren't giving Prescott Currier any respect whatsoever (not academic, not linguistic, nothing), and he basically invented the whole field you've picked up on to write your paper. The big difference is that Currier had the good sense to realise that there was a basic underlying problem with the kind of Baxian simple-minded linguistic turn so often applied to Voynichese, and that this wasn't something that could be hand-waved away.

Nick, it's not harsh, it's rude and unfair.
  • We took inspiration from Currier's work and acknowledge his priority in the (published) paper.
  • We started from scratch with the statistics as so much more is available to us now in terms of transcriptions and computing.
  • We didn't discuss his rejections because there is no way to use them as an argument due to vagueness:
    • We found a linguistic explanation and do not know if it is one he rejected as he didn't specify what they were. What is the alternative, to say: "Currier rejected all linguistic explanations so we didn't bother looking at linguistic explanations"? Would that have satisfied anybody? Would it have respected Currier to treat everything he said as the final word?
    • We created several other possible causes of word break combinations and explained our reasons for rejecting them. Thus allowing others to understand why we settled on the conclusion we did, and giving them the ability to refute it.
    • Yet we couldn't specifically argue against Currier's suggestions as he didn't specify what they were. What is the alternative, to say: "We guessed what Currier was thinking and concluded he was dead wrong"? Would that have satisfied anybody? How would it respect Currier to put arguments into his mouth?
  • Our approach is nothing like that of Stephen Bax. You know this. Please do not present it as such just because you happen to disagree with us. Indeed, only our conclusions are specifically linguistic, the results and analysis are not.
The only reasonable criticism that you raise is about the text being non-homogenous. We should have made it clear that our conclusion applies to where word-break combinations are present, and that there would need to be an explanation why they are not the same strength throughout the whole text. But, given that the differences between Currier A and B are well-acknowledged, any explanation of word break combinations would have to do likewise. Even were it due to "syllables, letters, even digits" the same problem would require explanation.

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - davidjackson - 26-06-2019

I would suggest that we have discussed ad naseum the reasons for not including more of Currier's results in this paper, and it would be good to return to the discussion of the actual paper itself, and its conclusions. Unless Currier has a publication that directly impacts upon the paper in question, I think we should drop this angle as having run its course.

There is much more of interest to discuss in this paper.

I would also suggest in passing Nick's description of an entire field of linguistic methodology as Baxian is entirely unjust upon Profs Bax and Currier. Prof Bax did not claim to invent the methodology; and certainly he had no impact whatsoever upon Prof Currier, who was studying the book a good 40 years before Prof Bax ever picked it up!

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - davidjackson - 26-06-2019

Emma, a couple of quick and probably unimportant questions upon the transcription preparations:
  • I am assuming that labels were stripped out of the transcriptions?
  • What about the "paragraph initials" standalone glyphs, such as appear on ie, f66r?


RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - Emma May Smith - 26-06-2019

(26-06-2019, 07:10 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Emma, a couple of quick and probably unimportant questions upon the transcription preparations:
  • I am assuming that labels were stripped out of the transcriptions?
  • What about the "paragraph initials" standalone glyphs, such as appear on ie, f66r?

Hi David, I understand that both were stripped out. I'll let Marco confirm this as he performed this part of the research, including preparing the transcription file.

RE: Glyph combinations across word breaks in the Voynich Manuscript - davidjackson - 26-06-2019

I was wondering what results you would get if you repeated the experiment against the labels, putting them into their natural order and assuming the "space" exists between them.
One possible angle to check: Assuming the labels were written down in sequence, one would assume that under the auto-copying hypothesis, you would see similar stats to the main text, as the scribe would use the same procedure to generate them.

Alternatively, if the labels have different stats than the main text, then it suggests that there are two separate text generation methods at work.