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+--- Thread: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? (/thread-2968.html)
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - Gavin Güldenpfennig - 12-10-2019
(12-10-2019, 05:27 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The problem with Voynichese is that it isn't really working either way.
Even if Eva is largely pronounceable, there are many words that aren't, at least comfortably. While the opening lines of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (in Cuva, as shown by Marco) seem to be OK, there is already a word ending in -NR that is uncomfortable.
There are also such words as chcthy / chcThy and oeeos / oeeos
The characters / sequences ee and ch seem to be able to replace each other, but the first is usually classified as a vowel (pair) and the second as a consonant.
Even word endings like -NR are not impossible if you throw languages like Elamite in the whirlpool of possibilities.
Meanwhile, I´m quite sure, that the Voynichese is pronouncable. I will post a possible substitution chart later this evening and you can try to work it, if you want. But at the moment I still can´t say for sure, which language Voynichese could be.
May you have an idea, if you see my transcription examples.
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - Common_Man - 12-10-2019
Just logically speaking, I don't expect someone from 1400s to sit and write a 200 page manuscript and make it non pronounceable, or a full on obscure text (unless it's of utmost importance, as in a military/spy/religious document?). Come on.. What are the odds that one encrypts something into a non pronounceable form and when needed someone has to sit and rewrite the whole thing (at once/page by page for reading) which will roughly take another 200 pages or so of vellum, ink, effort,etc?
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - ReneZ - 13-10-2019
This depends on what the original poster really meant with his question.
If the Voynich author 'encrypted' a meaningful text with a Bonifatius cipher, the result would not be pronounceable, but it would be reasonably straightforward to recover the meaningful plain text.
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - MarcoP - 13-10-2019
(12-10-2019, 06:36 PM)Common_Man Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Just logically speaking, I don't expect someone from 1400s to sit and write a 200 page manuscript and make it non pronounceable, or a full on obscure text (unless it's of utmost importance, as in a military/spy/religious document?). Come on.. What are the odds that one encrypts something into a non pronounceable form and...
I read someone (Rene?) observe that the "odds" argument rises this question: how do we estimate odds?
The VMS is unique in so many ways that one could say it should not exist, but it does. What are the odds of a ms showing a naked woman standing on a fish-tailed cone with a "dead pangolin" pouring rain above her head? What are the odds of a zodiac with 2 Arietes and 2 Tauri and a single occurrence of the other signs? What are the odds of a highly complex diagram with 6 jars at its center, where one expects a symbol of the earth, god, Jerusalem or Mecca? What are the odds of the common word-final symbol 9 being systematically followed by words beginning with the Arabic numeral 4?
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - -JKP- - 13-10-2019
I try not to spend too much time trying to out-guess human motives. People do strange things all the time.
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - RenegadeHealer - 13-10-2019
I've done some reading recently about Scholasticism, and also about the manuscript industry in medieval Europe, which was a market cornered by monastic orders and their scriptoria. Most of you here know much more about this than I do, and I thought it would be helpful background information for thinking about the cultural milieu from whence the VMS came, and maybe now and again having something intelligent to contribute to the discussion of medieval manuscripts. (Plus having seen a lot of the pictures posted in these forums, I definitely get their appeal!)
One thing that stuck out to me in my reading is that in a typical monastic scriptorium, for maximum efficiency, there would be someone standing at a raised lectern reading the original text slowly and loudly, while multiple scribes would copy down what they heard at the same time. I was struck that if the VMS is a copy of an earlier work — which it might very well be — it was very likely read aloud by one person and copied down by another. And/or, the scribe might be called upon to read back a section that he had written, periodically, to check for accuracy.
This is making a lot of baseless assumptions, though. For all we know the VMS was a one-off project by a single person, who never had any need to consult with anyone else in making it, and never intended to share it with anyone, and thus never needed it to be readily convertible to human speech.
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - bi3mw - 13-10-2019
(13-10-2019, 06:17 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view...... For all we know the VMS was a one-off project by a single person, who never had any need to consult with anyone else in making it, and never intended to share it with anyone, and thus never needed it to be readily convertible to human speech.....Whether it was a single author or several authors remains open. If it had actually been several authors, then it had to be a traceable system. For example, this would not fit "asemic writing - theory".
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - davidjackson - 13-10-2019
(13-10-2019, 06:17 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One thing that stuck out to me in my reading is that in a typical monastic scriptorium, for maximum efficiency, there would be someone standing at a raised lectern reading the original text slowly and loudly, while multiple scribes would copy down what they heard at the same time.This was for gospel texts, ones that were expected to be sold "for the mass market", mainly students and the like.
By the 14th century, mass productions of manuscripts had mainly moved away from monastical scriptoriums and into secular copy houses, that hired people to produce texts to be sold at a profit.
Illustrated texts, such as the VM, not so much. I don't think anyone really contends that the VM isn't a personal copy, even if more than one person was involved in writing it. There is no sign that any professional copy scribe was involved - no lines, no copy checking, no scriptorium notation, nothing that a professional scribe would be expected to include in his work.
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - -JKP- - 14-10-2019
I've been collecting drawings of scribes, and many of them show a single scribe copying a manuscript on a double-lectern, with the examplar on the top or side section and the in-progress copy on the bottom one.
But... I can see that it would be much more efficient, if you needed numerous copies at the same time, for someone to read out the manuscript and several scribes to be copying it down in parallel and I have seen images of a lecturer and students in which the students are holding copies of books (which, from my research, it appears that they often copied out themselves).
Most of these images are crowded into historiated initials, with limited space, so we can't expect them to show the full extent of ways that manuscripts were copied, but it seems that at least one segment probably copied books one-for-one.
Note, that I have NOT done much reading on how books were copied, so these comments ONLY apply to the bits-and-pieces of imagery that I've collected.
RE: Was Voynichese meant to be pronounced? - Stephen Carlson - 28-12-2019
On tools that distinguish between consonants and vowels, here is a recently published algorithm: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.