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+--- Thread: [Article] "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code" (/thread-3098.html)
RE: "The Strange Quest to Crack the Voynich Code" - -JKP- - 20-02-2020
(20-02-2020, 06:57 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(20-02-2020, 12:40 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Especially since we don't know if height or tail-length changes the interpretation of a glyph. There are Asian languages where a tiny little serif changes the meaning of a syllable. Even in Hebrew, the distinction between Hey and Chet is difficult for some people to see and much more subtle than the variations among VMS glyphs.
There is a way to tell when small variations are significant in a long text written in a (real) language: compare a large amount of text and see if these variations appear globally or if they are more likely to be a local quirk or mistake by a tired or clumsy scribe. The length of tails is probably not meaningful because different scribes had different habits as the study (to be published) by Lisa Fagin Davis will show. Another example, V101 transliterates some loosely written a as ei in Q20, which may be wrong. Also, choosing distinct symbols/letters in the transliteration alphabet for some variants of glyphs when the actual writing in the VMS shows a continuum is probably a wrong choice.
I am aware of this (and how to look at it globally). I have spent a great deal of time looking at the text. But people keep doing the same statistical studies over and over, when what we really need is some statistics for the very things you mention in your post. These should be documented mathematically. Right now we have only subjective impressions. Impressions like "tail length doesn't matter because glyph EVA-y always appears next to glyphs A, B, and C and scribe C doesn't vary the tail length" so how could the tail length be meaningful? Well, it might be like the difference between a medieval scribe who used no capitals and no punctuation, and another who did. In other words, the difference in scribal habits doesn't definitively answer the question (or put the numbers on the table for further study).
And we can't do this. Why? Because it hasn't been documented yet. I've created four transcripts and I haven't even done this yet (not enough hours in the day). There is no transcript that can be used to test these variations. We shouldn't assume because they vary by scribe that they don't carry meaning.
There appears to be evidence that different scribes used different "dialects" of Voynichese. That means other aspects of the script might differ from scribe to scribe, as well. It would be helpful to have some empirical study of the variations. Especially considering that there are alphabets in which tiny details change the meaning of the letter or syllable. There were ciphers in which small details changed the meaning of glyphs. Most of these ciphers were not invented untili the 16th and 17th centuries, but someone had to be first.