[split] EVA-y as Latin "-us" etc.

[davidjackson]

I think thee 'gallows' are sigla.

I understand a siglum to denote a specific name or text. Surely the six (?) gallows are too repetitive to refer to the same texts? Are there similar examples from the era?

[Aga Tentakulus]

I agree with Helmut. I also agree with Rene. But it is also a question of perspective.
If I were to see the ending (um/us) only as singular, it would be far too much.
If I take "so nimm" as an example in a statement, it is a direct form. But if I were to write a statement where I say "wir nehmen" and address a group, it would look different. The ending based on the conjugation increases several times. See the table.

The same applies to (daiin) = tatis = all
If I now take the dialect form datis, now it is only "with".
If I now conjugate ( dare ) with 2nd pers. plural, I also get "datis".
This would explain why the ending "iin / tis" occurs frequently, but also why 4x datis can stand in a row.
This would then be "ihr nehmt" and not "so nimm".

[-JKP-]

The y symbol in Latin represents con/com at the beginnings of words and us/um at the ends of words. It's a flexible abbreviation. On rare occasions, it occurs within words, but this is not common and it's usually a compound word.

Most scribes used it at the end. Some scribes used it both beginning and end (in about the same proportions as we see in the VMS).


Some scribes superscripted it, others did not. There are a couple of places in the VMS where it occurs superscripted (at the ends of words). Regardless of what it represents in the VMS, clearly the scribes were familiar with how it was used in languages that use Latin scribal abbreviations.

[-JKP-]

I am bringing Helmut's phrase from f9r here so it is easier to see.

   

...cum [EVA t] cca2 o2 aui[cenna]  cc[EVA k]cum(?)2...

... cum/with M[esue] contra/against this a[lbertus] Auicenna contra [N......]cum(?)2

My interpretation of the shapes is not quite the same as his. I see this as

     ytchar oraiin chkor
or   ytchas oraiin chkor

[ReneZ]

Every statistical computation is based on a number of assumptions. These assumptions are not always (or even rarely) spelled out. The result of the computation, and the conclusion, usually say much about the correctness of the assumptions.

When doing entropy calculations, there is a complicated set of assumptions about what constitutes the Voynich alphabet and which are the distinguishing character shapes. There is also an assumption that spaces are word separators.
The result is then compared with known plain texts, but:
- these plain texts are usually fully edited
- with any abbreviations expanded
- the Voynich MS is handwritten and may have any number of undetected errors
A final assumption is therefore that these points do not greatly affect the outcome

The error from the main assumption (of the alphabet) can be mitigated by redoing the analysis with different alphabets. Given that the resulting differences are very significant, one may have faith in the validity of the anomalously low conditional character pair entropy.

With the question whether word-final y represents word-final -us the situation is far simpler and there are basically only two assumptions:
- the apparent spaces in the MS text are word separators
- there is one symbol that looks like y that can be distinguished from all other symbols
Notably, the rest of the Voynich alphabet does not matter.

Both assumptions are actually part of the proposed equivalence of y with -us. If either assumption were invalid, the thesis disappears. Therefore, there is no issue, and the enormous difference between appearance of y in the Voynich MS and in known Latin texts is clear.

Again, this is true because of the length of the text. Another extreme is the Dorabella cipher, which is so short that statistics cannot be relied upon in any useful manner.

[Antonio García Jiménez]

A preliminary question: if we believe that the VM is genuine and we believe in the history of its transmission, why do we believe the facts resulting from those assumptions.

The court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague was surely full of highly educated people, Kepler among them. Dozens of people well acquainted with Latin and other languages must have seen the VM. They were closer historically to understanding it, but they found nothing that resembled Latin or any other language.

Now, 400 years later it seems that we want to see what they did not see. Doesn't this sound a bit arrogant?

[Helmut Winkler]

I think thee 'gallows' are sigla.

I understand a siglum to denote a specific name or text. Surely the six (?) gallows are too repetitive to refer to the same texts? Are there similar examples from the era?

You understand right.

There are about a dozen 'gallows' in the ms. or even more, which would cover the commonly used texts

The common Herbal texts use and quote about half a dozen texts

[Helmut Winkler]

A preliminary question: if we believe that the VM is genuine and we believe in the history of its transmission, why do we believe the facts resulting from those assumptions.

The court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague was surely full of highly educated people, Kepler among them. Dozens of people well acquainted with Latin and other languages must have seen the VM. They were closer historically to understanding it, but they found nothing that resembled Latin or any other language.

Now, 400 years later it seems that we want to see what they did not see. Doesn't this sound a bit arrogant?

That is an unproven assumption. Let's take someone like Kircher, we have no evidene if he was able to read the ms. or not, it could be he could read it and found it so uninteresting that he threw it  into a corner

[Antonio García Jiménez]

It is not Kircher, it is the dozens of wise men before him.

Did Emperor Rudolph II not have money to pay for the translation of a book he was interested in?

[Helmut Winkler]

It is not Kircher, it is the dozens of wise men before him.

Did Emperor Rudolph II not have money to pay for the translation of a book he was interested in?

The use of medieval abbr. and the ability to read them ended soon after 1500, the printers changed their habits and did not use them anymore. That meant that contemporary scholars started to publish heavy volumes explaining them, they are no use in solving the VMs., I have tried.

We don't know if Rudolf owned the ms., I distrust the story because it  is exactly the story someone in the 17th  c. would invent if he was  trying to make a profit. It is like today when you try to sell a piss pot and tell people it was owned by siome rock star