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previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - geoffreycaveney - 18-09-2020
The following is very speculative so I'm moving it out of the "Verbose cipher" thread before I even put it in there.
This also has nothing to do with any of what might be considered my own "pet" theories about the Voynich ms, currently or previously.
But my You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of the Voynich ms text, and the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on folio page f67v1, unexpectedly drew my attention to Arabic for a couple reasons. I wish to emphasize, Arabic would not by any means be my first candidate to be the language of the Voynich ms. Of course it is possible, like many languages are. My first inclination, like Ventris with Linear B and Greek, would be to first try to find evidence to rule out Arabic as a candidate language if possible, and see if such efforts succeed or fail. Ventris was led to the Mycenaean Greek hypothesis as a result of a line of investigation to try to prove that Linear B wasn't Greek, which to his own surprise failed and led to the opposite conclusion.
One of the VCI "Zodiac" labels reads <d'hrá>. I happened to discover that al-eadhra' is the Arabic name for Virgo (for Arabic-speaking Christians, Maryam al-eadhra' means "the Virgin Mary"). Now before anyone gets too excited, I have not been able to find many other such matches among Arabic Zodiac sign names, although the issue is apparently complicated by the fact that several different sets of Arabic Zodiac signs and names appear to exist, and who knows what the situation was like in the late medieval period. An investigation into Arabic in medieval Europe would also have to include the Maltese language, for example. But I digress. Another VCI "Zodiac" label reads <káás>, and the Arabic name for Sagittarius is al-qaws. Alas, this label is four "houses" away from <d'hrá>, while Sagittarius should only be three houses away from Virgo. More vaguely, the VCI Zodiac label <da aly> loosely resembles al-dulu, the Arabic name for Aquarius. At least <da aly> is two houses away from <káás>, the right distance from Sagittarius to Aquarius.
This is a curiosity, but hardly convincing. The best of the name matches, <d'hrá>, is the one in the "wrong" place in relation to the other two roughly similar names. And a quick check has not found any explanation for what the other nine label names might be related to. Of course at this provisional stage many of the phonetic values of the VCI transcription system could be completely wrong, but changes that improve other label names might also disturb the neat match of <d'hrá>. For now it is only a few curious names, which may or may not mean anything.
I must also mention that naturally I had to check the VCI transcription of the two label words near the group of seven stars that appear to represent the Pleiades. In fact I did this before I did the 12 "Zodiac" labels. The VCI readings of the two vords are <khaly> and <hajez>. Hejaz is the historically significant Arabian coastal region along the Red Sea, in which Mecca and Medina are located. Khali is the Arabic name of the large desert bordering Hejaz to the east. How this would be related to the Pleiades, I don't know. One wall of the Kaaba in Mecca is aligned with the rising point of Canopus, the second-brightest star in the night sky after Sirius.
I never delved much into Arabic in relation to the Voynich ms. I always figured that hundreds of millions of people around the world know the language so well already, that I never thought I could contribute much to such an investigation without a great knowledge of the language myself. I also figured if the ms was written in Arabic, surely someone would have figured that out and deciphered it already. But maybe everyone else has always figured the same thing too, so that the hypothesis has perhaps actually not been as deeply investigated as other well-known languages have.
The one tell-tale giveaway sign of the Arabic language should be the ubiquitous article "al-" occurring before a very large number of nouns in any text. It should be everywhere, unmistakable and impossible to miss. However, in the Voynich ms text, the VCI representation of <al>/<l>, which is the equivalent of EVA [ar]/[or], occurs predominantly at the ends of vords, not at the beginnings of them. A hypothesis of a "right-to-left" reading of the Voynich ms text is implausible, and in particular all the Arabic words cited above are the result of left-to-right reading of the VCI transcription. The only explanation I can think of to justify the Arabic hypothesis with the VCI character readings is that the author enciphered the text by writing the article "al-" at the ends of words rather than at the beginnings of words as in standard Arabic. This sounds bizarre, but after all we are dealing with a bizarre manuscript and text. One might perhaps compare it to the French argot "Verlan", in which the syllables of words are transposed. (Such an idea can also be considered for the many Romance languages with articles with "l", of which the word "Verlan" itself is one example.)
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - -JKP- - 18-09-2020
Even if the VMS language were not Arabic, IF there are star-related words in the VMS, there is a high likelihood of them being loan-words from Arabic.
I have collected many star names from early- to late-medieval western manuscripts, in several languages, and they are full of Arabic star names. Sometimes oddly spelled, but pretty much always recognizable.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - Anton - 19-09-2020
(18-09-2020, 11:37 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A hypothesis of a "right-to-left" reading of the Voynich ms text is implausible,
why?
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - geoffreycaveney - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 12:03 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(18-09-2020, 11:37 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A hypothesis of a "right-to-left" reading of the Voynich ms text is implausible,
why?
Perhaps my recollection is mistaken, but I had recalled reading years ago that handwriting experts had studied the manuscript text and concluded that it had been written from left to right. Now I suppose the cipher could have been simply to write every word backward, so that when written left to right by hand, it spelled out the actual words of the underlying language right to left. Yes, that is possible. But the particular label vords that attracted my attention for their resemblance to Arabic words would have been both written and spelled left to right.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - aStobbart - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 12:03 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(18-09-2020, 11:37 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A hypothesis of a "right-to-left" reading of the Voynich ms text is implausible,
why?
Geoffrey will have to answer himself but my guess is because of the caligraphy of voynichese, the strokes suggest left to right handwritting. If we can assume it is written left to right, then it is safe to assume we have to read it in the same direction.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - MichelleL11 - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 12:17 AM)aStobbart Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If we can assume it is written left to right, then it is safe to assume we have to read it in the same direction.
Although l completely understand this argument and would’ve agreed with it without other statistics, l think it is plausible that some sort of rearrangement of the glyphs within words may be necessary to get the rigid structure exhibited. With those kinds of steps being seriously considered, putting an “al” at the end of a word rather than the beginning seems to be a pretty mild step.
Of course this messes with the VCI approach - but independently, Arabic words with “al”s placed at the end of the word doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility and certainly can be accommodated.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - -JKP- - 19-09-2020
The handwriting is left to right. That doesn't mean the text is to be read in the same direction.
If there was a draft copy made before the current copy, then it's not that hard to copy right-to-left words in the right-to-left direction.
ecnef eht no tas tac eht
Pretend that is Hebrew rather than English. If a scribe were asked to copy that in the reverse direction, I think most of them could do it.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - geoffreycaveney - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 01:37 AM)MichelleL11 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(19-09-2020, 12:17 AM)aStobbart Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If we can assume it is written left to right, then it is safe to assume we have to read it in the same direction.
Although l completely understand this argument and would’ve agreed with it without other statistics, l think it is plausible that some sort of rearrangement of the glyphs within words may be necessary to get the rigid structure exhibited. With those kinds of steps being seriously considered, putting an “al” at the end of a word rather than the beginning seems to be a pretty mild step.
Of course this messes with the VCI approach - but independently, Arabic words with “al”s placed at the end of the word doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility and certainly can be accommodated.
I absolutely agree that we should be open to considering all possibilities. With that said, we have to be careful about what type of limitations we may place on the concept of the rearrangement of the glyphs within words. Completely random rearrangement of glyphs within words is the same as the concept of an anagram. But anagrams are notorious for their ability to rearrange almost anything into almost anything else. There would have to be some strict and logical rules about such rearrangement of glyphs.
I wouldn't say that the consideration of any of these possibilities messes with the VCI approach. Strictly speaking, VCI is a transcription system, nothing less, nothing more. Yes, it was based on some hypotheses I had about logically plausible letter values for particular glyphs and multi-glyph sequences. But no such hypothesis at this stage is likely to be correct about all such details or even most such details. Its main value is to present a visual representation of the ms text that is more in line with the intuition behind Koen's verbose cipher analysis. It can serve that purpose regardless of how accurate or inaccurate its guesses about actual letter values prove to be. The same would apply to the rearrangement of glyphs within words, however arranged and organized.
I should take this opportunity to note that it may seem strange that a transcription system based on a hypothesis of a substantial series of palatalized consonants could possibly have a connection with Arabic, which has no such series and only a couple palatal consonants. One possible explanation is that the distinction that had been tentatively identified as plain vs. palatalized may possibly rather instead represent a distinction of plain vs. "emphatic", which is indeed persistent throughout the Arabic consonant phoneme system, in particular in alveolars, sibilants, liquids, and gutturals. (For the latter phonemes, the famous Arabic uvular "q" can be considered the emphatic counterpart of velar "k".) Naturally this will require some adjustments where the VCI values will not correspond precisely with the Arabic values, if that is indeed what they represent. But again, the VCI transcription system can continue to be used as such, regardless of the actual phonemic values that the VCI values may or may not represent.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - -JKP- - 19-09-2020
Random anagramming is a one-way cipher, in most cases. It's not practical.
However, there are numerous rule-based ways to anagram, so anagramming cannot be dismissed out of hand.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - geoffreycaveney - 19-09-2020
For the convenience of anyone else who may be interested in following this line of investigation, I have worked through an Arabic letter frequency histogram chart (attached first in frequency order, right to left of course, and second grouped by letter shape) and made an effort to transcribe the Arabic letters into their Latin letter phonemic equivalents, which I present below in their frequency order along with their approximate percentage frequencies in a corpus of Arabic texts. It is notable how the letters for "l, n, m" are by far the most frequent consonants, which is a strikingly different frequency pattern from that which is typical of most European languages. It is also striking how low the frequencies of the letters for "t" and "s" are! Again very different from typical European frequency patterns. "b" is the most frequent obstruent, probably mainly due to the very common preposition "bi-" meaning 'with, in, at'.
a/' 12.5%
l 12%
n 6.4%
m 6.3%
i/j 6.2%
u/w 5.8%
h 5%
b 4.5%
r 4.1%
` 3.9% (voiced pharyngeal "emphatic")
' 3% (glottal stop, first of several letters for it)
f 2.7%
q 2.6% (uvular "emphatic")
d 2.5%
t 2.5%
s 2.3%
k 1.9%
h. 1.8% (voiceless pharyngeal "emphatic")
-t 1%
-a 1%
dž/g 0.9%
s. 0.9% ("emphatic")
' 0.9% (another glottal stop)
dh 0.8% (like "th" in English 'the')
th 0.8%
x 0.8%
š 0.7%
z 0.5%
t. 0.5% ("emphatic")
d. 0.4% ("emphatic")
gh 0.3%
' 0.2% (glottal stop)
' 0.2% (glottal stop)
dh./z. 0.1% ("emphatic")
' 0.1% (glottal stop)
' 0.1% (glottal stop)
Geoffrey