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+--- Thread: Patterns (/thread-3363.html)
Patterns - crwiin - 22-09-2020
I'm just opening a thread for discussion, but I believe people should stop trying to think of translating the manuscript using known languages and instead look for patterns in the text and try to relate what may be said in it to the pictures. Then maybe we could understand this unique language. For example if a certain word structure comes up often they may be connectives etc.
Just an idea, I'm not sure if people have already tried this I just registered to the website.
RE: Patterns - crwiin - 22-09-2020
Essentially create a new language by reverse engineering the Voynich text.
RE: Patterns - Anton - 22-09-2020
Hi crwiin, and welcome to the forum!
Quote:I believe people should stop trying to think of translating the manuscript using known languages and instead look for patterns in the text and try to relate what may be said in it to the pictures.
Yes, I call that "contextual analysis", something has been done in that respect, and much more remains to be done. There are quite a number of discussions in the forum in that direction.
You also may be interested in this thread: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: Patterns - Emma May Smith - 22-09-2020
(22-09-2020, 06:10 PM)crwiin Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm just opening a thread for discussion, but I believe people should stop trying to think of translating the manuscript using known languages and instead look for patterns in the text and try to relate what may be said in it to the pictures. Then maybe we could understand this unique language. For example if a certain word structure comes up often they may be connectives etc.
Just an idea, I'm not sure if people have already tried this I just registered to the website.
I think your approach is essentially correct, though we don't even need to relate patterns to pictures. Relating patterns to other patterns allows us to build up an understanding of the underlying text/language and how the script might work. Basically using the patterns to reveal the structure of the text. Although first guesses will be very tentative, over time they will cross-link and reinforce one another.
RE: Patterns - -JKP- - 22-09-2020
(22-09-2020, 06:10 PM)crwiin Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
...I believe people should stop trying to think of translating the manuscript using known languages and instead look for patterns in the text and try to relate what may be said in it to the pictures. Then maybe we could understand this unique language. For example if a certain word structure comes up often they may be connectives etc.
...
This is what I have been trying to do from the beginning (understand the patterns and then see where it leads). I've never assumed it was natural language. I HOPE it is natural language or some kind of meaningful symbology, but I've never assumed it.
You should read Torsten Timm's papers if you want to see commentary on some of the patterns within the text. Also Stolfi (which I didn't see until recently, but it is level-headed and there are some good observations).
I haven't posted my information on the patterns yet. It's a bit different from Timm or Stolfi. It's a long paper (over 50 pages without all the diagrams) and I still need to screensnap and insert more examples before I can upload it.
Also, the process of posting it was slowed down because I needed to design and develop a font that would facilitate using both regular text and VMS text in the same line without switching fonts or keyboards. I finished the font a few years ago, but I still need to tweak a couple of key-mappings, and convert the paper to the new font. It uses a different keyboard layout from the EVA font. So... I'm working on it... so many hurdles to overcome before doing something seemingly simple but not-so-simple if you want to do it right.
RE: Patterns - davidjackson - 22-09-2020
Pulling had a similar idea with his paradigm matching theory - find blocks of ancient text that could be size mapped to voynich pages and which were visually linked to the voynich, then try to decipher.
RE: Patterns - MarcoP - 23-09-2020
Hi Crwiin,
this idea is extensively discussed in the recent paper by Bowern and Lindemann "The Linguistics of the Voynich Manuscript" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). If you are seriously interested in understanding more of Voynich research, I strongly suggest you read that paper. The drawback for a newcomer may be that it is long and literally packed with information.
Here is my personal point of view about what the paper says. If you take the time to read it with care and form your own opinion, you will be much better off.
Bowern and Lindemann conclude that "the character level metrics show Voynich to be unusual, while the word and line level metrics show it to be regular natural language and within the range of a number of plausible languages."
As JKP wrote, the unusual, very rigid, structure of Voynichese words has been You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Jorge Stolfi; You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. has proposed an alternative model that, in my opinion, is more compact and easier to understand. Until now, nobody has been able to find a natural language with a similar structure. Bowern and Lindemann suggest that character patterns are not language-like.
According to these conclusions, one could focus on higher level patterns that include more than a single word (e.g. repeating couples of words like the English "in the"). Here we face the problem that the lexicon in the manuscript is not uniform. This is sometimes described as two different languages (known as Currier A and B) but actually it appears to be even worse: a continuous drift where words change from section to section. This drift makes it impossible to find candidate function words for the whole manuscript: very few words are reasonably frequent everywhere (see for instance the table at the end of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). As if in English you had "in the" in one section and "on they" in the next section; no section contains both "in" and "on", no section contains both "the" and "they". This example is somehow exaggerated, but it should give you an idea of the problem. Working with word patterns is only possible with long texts, but if one has to work with a single section at a time it might be that there is not enough consistent text to find anything.
The most prominent word patterns that we do find in the manuscript are just as puzzling: they are "reduplication", i.e. the exact repetition of the same word (e.g. "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.") or consecutive words that are almost identical (something I call "quasi-reduplication"). The two forms of reduplication often appear together:
E.g.: <f75r.38,+P0> You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: Patterns - crwiin - 24-09-2020
I would imagine it is very difficult to do. If no one on earth spoke Chinese, and then a Chinese text was found I imagine it would be extremely hard to understand as for one, the language is completely new to people, additionally the grammar and words use often have no direct translations to English. It is good to see that people are trying to understand the Voynich this way though as I think it is really interesting.