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RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - Emma May Smith - 19-09-2020
The phonotactics of Arabic allow any consonant to appear in the syllable coda. This is not how the Voynich text appears to work. None of the plosives or nasals you've identified can appear (regularly) in the coda of a Voynich word.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - -JKP- - 19-09-2020
We don't know which letters are vowels or consonants in the VMS (if any).
We only know that round shapes and less-round shapes more or less alternate in small groups.
We also know that groups like this: iii iiii eee and eeee are not uncommon (there are almost 300 of them and they do not look like mistakes):
We further know that languages that use abbreviations and ligatures were common in the middle ages, not just in western languages, but also in Indic languages. Abbreviations frequently represent a full syllable and are frequently represented by disconnected and connected macrons (similar to apostrophes). If there are ligatures and abbreviations in the VMS, they may be obscuring a large number of grammatical dynamics.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - Emma May Smith - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 10:19 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We don't know which letters are vowels or consonants in the VMS (if any).
Geoffrey has proposed a new Arabic theory based on his new transliteration. That transliteration definitely proposes the existence of consonants. Yet not in the position which Arabic has them. I am simply speaking to his claims.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - -JKP- - 19-09-2020
My post was not aimed at any specific person. I just want to get information out there that is relevant to linguistic interpretations of the text.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - Emma May Smith - 19-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 10:33 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.My post was not aimed at any specific person. I just want to get information out there that is relevant to linguistic interpretations of the text.
Well, sure. You are right. But really that speaks to a more fundamental problem with Geoffrey's new transliteration...
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - nablator - 20-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 10:19 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We also know that groups like this: iii iiii eee and eeee are not uncommon (there are almost 300 of them and they do not look like mistakes)
More than 600, unless you're not counting those that are more or less connected?
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - -JKP- - 20-09-2020
Yes, Nablator, you are right... it depends how strictly they are interpreted. Most of the time I prefer to err on the side of being strict and conservative.
RE: previous research on Arabic and the Voynich ms? - geoffreycaveney - 20-09-2020
(19-09-2020, 10:30 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(19-09-2020, 10:19 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.We don't know which letters are vowels or consonants in the VMS (if any).
Geoffrey has proposed a new Arabic theory based on his new transliteration. That transliteration definitely proposes the existence of consonants. Yet not in the position which Arabic has them. I am simply speaking to his claims.
I appreciate all of the feedback and discussion. I am glad that Emma has pointed out the issue of all Arabic consonants appearing in syllable codas. This is exactly the type of issue that needs to be investigated, in order to rule out or refine hypotheses.
I wouldn't say that I have "proposed a new Arabic theory". I have called attention to a handful of curiosities, and suggested that perhaps further investigation may be in order. I see this forum as one big ongoing collective brainstorming session, and I offer ideas as I come across them if they seem significant enough to me. I tend to periodically generate a bunch of ideas in a burst in a short period of time, and then I tend to go quiet for a little while. I just happened to generate these various ideas about Basque, Czech, the VCI transcription, and now Arabic within a short timespan. I see them as ideas that are part of one big brainstorming session.
Yes, the issue of consonants in syllable codas is a difficult one if we are to read the VCI transcription as Arabic text. But since I already proposed the necessity of writing the article "al-" after rather than before the noun, this and additional related ideas could possibly explain the apparent lack of plosives and nasals in the apparent coda positions in words/vords in the ms text. For example, instead of writing "al-salam" (pronounced "as-salam"), the ms author could have written "salam-al", and voilà, the nasal phoneme no longer appears in the syllable coda position. The newly created syllable "mal" would appear as EVA [qotar] in the ms text, which it so happens is actually a rather frequent vord.
Naturally this is only one example with one proposed rule, but other similar rules could possibly explain other potentially problematic examples. Perhaps all Arabic prepositions are written as postpositions after their nouns; given the ubiquity of a small number of extremely frequent prepositions in Arabic, such a rule could create a small number of extremely frequent word/vord endings in the ms text. For example, as I understand it, "alaykum" is an inflected preposition: here "al-" means 'to, for' and "-aykum" is the 2nd person plural masculine inflectional suffix. Again shifting the prepositional part of the word to a postpositional position after the inflectional part that represents the noun would create the form "aykum-al", and again we see the newly created syllable "mal" = EVA [qotar]. Of course this process will also work with other final consonants in syllable coda position, not just "-m".
[Note: This is where Emma could say, "Hmm Geoffrey, that's a really interesting idea. I'm not convinced that it will work, but it's really interesting." Or not.
] I realize that such a rule only for the article and for prepositions will not resolve all possible cases of plosives and nasals in Arabic syllable codas, but it will resolve an awful lot of them. Additional rules will be needed, for example, to resolve certain Arabic conjugational verb endings with final -m, -b, and -n.
I would like to point out here a certain distinction between two possible approaches to the question, "How was the Voynich ms text created?" It seems that many researchers take the approach of trying to figure out how some natural language plain text could have been transformed by certain regular mathematical or programmatic rules into the ms text. I am rather suggesting here that perhaps a natural language was first transformed by certain grammatically based rules, and then the resulting text was written in the Voynich ms script without necessarily transforming it any further with purely programmatic rules. Now I do not rule out certain phonologically based rules, such as those of "Verlan" French or of "Pig Latin" English. It seems to me that the linguistically-minded types of researchers such as myself may prefer to research the possibilities of the grammatically based transformation rules, while the computer programming-minded types of researchers may prefer to research the possibilities of the regular mathematical or programmatic transformation rules.
I actually do see certain problematic issues with the representation of Arabic text by my VCI transcription system, in particular with regard to the relative frequency of certain consonants and types of consonants: Perhaps the nasal phonemes will need to appear more frequently than the EVA [qo-] glyph sequences do, for example, and perhaps the sibilant phonemes will need to appear less frequently than the EVA [l] glyph sequences do. The choice of glyphs to represent the labial, dental-alveolar, and velar-uvular plosive series may need to be rearranged. I have mentioned that Arabic requires a series of emphatic (pharyngealized) consonants rather than a series of palatalized consonants. I am not going to change the VCI transcription system itself for this purpose, but I will consider altering the actual phonemic values of the glyphs and glyph sequences in my investigation of the Arabic hypothesis.
Geoffrey