[split] Does Voynichese evolve from A to B?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So why is x in Herbal B and not Herbal A?

Herbal-A and Herbal-B probably had some difference histories, like being copied from two independent herbals or in two in separate sessions.  So maybe the Author wrote "toxic" in one and used '☠" in the other.   

Or maybe he sorted all plants into harmless ones that can be consumed regularly (Herbal-A) and plants that should be consumed only when needed (Herbal-B), some of them being particularly ☠.

All the best, --stolfi

[npcompl33t]

Herbal-A and Herbal-B probably had some difference histories, like being copied from two independent herbals or in two in separate sessions.  So maybe the Author wrote "toxic" in one and used '☠" in the other.   

Or maybe he sorted all plants into harmless ones that can be consumed regularly (Herbal-A) and plants that should be consumed only when needed (Herbal-B), some of them being particularly ☠.

So they wrote about toxic and non-toxic plants in a completely different language? And i take it then that the rosettes is mostly about poisonous things? Come on you are smarter than that.

---

So yes, I would agree there is progression in the negations as the Rohonc Codex was written.

I realize your answer may be quite speculative, but I am curious what you think. Do you think this is script evolution, i.e. it represents a stable (probably natural) language that was being represented differently, or language evolution, i.e. a conlang that was changing

I would also be interested in your opinion on this Rafal!

[npcompl33t]

My lalamo says that the German spoken in the Frankfurt area differs from standard German in ways that resemble the A/B differences: "swallows word endings (e.g., haben becomes hawn), and changes the "ch" sound to a soft "sch" sound (making ich sound like isch)".  It also tells me that Norwegian and Danish are almost the same language, but Norwegian pronunciation is "clear, uses distinct pitch accents (tones), and consonants are pronounced crisply" whereas in Danish "soft consonants like d, g, and b often turn into semi-vowels or disappear entirely", and there is a phonemic glottal catch that is absent in Norwegian.

I checked you on this theory already in another thread, and the changes do not even come remotely close! I will reshare the chart so you stop using this as an explanation.

The differences are far greater than the German differences you are mentioning. They are an entire order of magnitude off from the observed differences.

   

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I checked you on this theory already in another thread, and the changes do not even come remotely close! I will reshare the chart so you stop using this as an explanation.

C'm'on!  The German spelling changes that I proposed in that post were tiny. Yet apparently they were already sufficient to make the divergence between the same text with the original and modified spelling (0.077) as large as the difference between different texts from two of your "Golf" sub-sections (the left end of the second blue bar).

And that was just a change of spelling.  A change of dialect can be arbitrarily large, because there is no clear distinction between dialects and languages.  Thus it can be as small as UK vs. US English (colour/color etc.) all the way to Hungarian vs.  Cantonese. 

All the best, --stolfi

[npcompl33t]

You see the right side correct? And you were asking about the differences between A and B, which are essentially dipoles consisting of the largest differences?

So you agree that these spelling changes, which are the specific ones you yourself called out in your immediately preceding post, do constitute tiny changes that could not be the source of the difference?

To be clear my official assertion was the differences between golf sections do not constitute an entirely different dialect, I say that on the golf thread. 

Is your position now A and B must represent fully different dialects? Or between other sections within A? Be specific and I can test it. I have lots of German in different dialects.

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So you agree that these spelling changes, which are the specific ones you yourself called out in your immediately preceding post, do constitute tiny changes that could not be the source of the difference?

Those spelling changes I proposed (as an example) are tiny.  

Is your position now A and B must represent different dialects?

My best guess now is that they are either two different dialects or the result of a one-time "spelling reform" of the script.

I can't say which one I think is more likely.  I do not know how this question could be definitively resolved, except by deciphering the text.  

Finding a simple set of systematic re-spelling rules that explains the differences could make "spelling reform" more likely.  But since there are probably also differences of vocabulary due to different topic, style, etc., it will probably be impossible to find a one-to-one mapping of words that preserves word frequencies exactly.  

If the cause is indeed a spelling reform, hopefully we can recover some of the rules, that can account for, say, 80% of the change.  But a dialect change could also manifest itself as a "quasi-systematic spelling change"...

However, while less likely, I cannot exclude the possibility that the cause of the A-B difference is something else, like a change of style or topic.  An English text on chemistry could have significant excess of several otherwise rare digraphs, like "-um", "-ol", and "-ide" endings, "-hl-" and "di-" and "-zo-" etc.  If the text style is telegraphic, these changes could well dominate the digraph frequencies of non-technical language. 

What I don't think possible is that the A-B differences are the result of random drift of the Author's word preferences due to passage of time, or of a series of small spelling adjustments made in reaction to experience in the use of the script.   That is, I don't think that there is a detectable "gradient" in statistics space that is correlated with chronological order.

Even because (as I said before) I don't that "chronological order" is a meaningful concept.  Time of what?

fully different

What does this mean?  Dialect difference is a continuous variable.  One could say that Spanish is a rather extreme dialect of Russian, that diverged from it only recently, less than 7000 years ago...

Be specific and I can test it. I have lots of German in different dialects.

I don't think this exercise would be very informative (your German dialect samples are still spelled with the official German spelling rules, right?)

But, if you insist, here is an example of what could be a modest spelling reform for German:

• split all compound nouns.
  
• split verb prefixes "ge", "be" and spell them as "g@", "b@" (the "@" being a schwa).
  
• replace "v" and "ph" by "f".
  
• then replace "w" by "v".
  
• double a vowel followed an "h" and delete the "h".
  
• double every long vowel ([aeiouäöü]) that is not already doubled.
  
• replace "ie" by "ii".
  
• replace "üü" by "uue", "ää" by "aae", "öö" by "ooe".
  
• replace remaining "ü" by "ue", "ä" by "ae", "ö" by "oe".
  
• replace doubled consonants by single ones.
  
• replace "ß" by "s".
  
• replace all "j" by "i".
  
• replace "tsch" by "tx", "dsch" by "dj", other "sch" by "x".
  
• replace "ch" by "k" if it sounds like "k" (sechs").
  
• replace remaining "ch" by "q" if hard ("nacht") or by "ç" if soft ("ich").
  
• replace "s" by "z" if it sounds like "z" ("sie").
  
• finally replace "b", "d", "z", "v", "g", "j" by "hp", "ht", "hs", "hf", "hk", and "hx", respectively.
  

Or, if you too think that it would be too much work for no gain,

• translate the text into Dutch.
  

(Dutch is just misspelled German, right?    Seen from here, it does look like so...)

All the best, --stolfi