23-02-2017, 02:26 AM
(This post was last modified: 23-02-2017, 02:34 AM by Diane.
Edit Reason: clarity
)
Sam and all,
There's enough in the imagery to support the possibility of a south-east Asian language, though some readers may be unaware of the extent to which southeast Asian centres of manufacture and trade (and thus religious and diplomatic travellers) had regular commerce with more westerly regions, or how early those connections had developed before c.12thC AD. I've written a bit about it, because the Voynich botanical images begin in my opinion with the Moluccas' cloves+Ravensara, and then the next few appear to me to be ordered from east to west in terms of natural occurrence - along a trade route is the most likely explanation.
One matter that troubles me in reading analytical discussions of the written text that there seems to be so little allowance made for the disparity that exists between modern, standardised orthography and grammar and what we'd expect given conditions 'on the ground'. If a non-native tried to copy a text in a foreign script, t or to record the sounds of another language, even if they developed a regular system and had a perfect ear, the stats would surely not be exactly parallel to what we get using modern transcriptions, orthography and grammars. As proof, one only need consider the way that Chinese or Indian or Islamic sources record names of western people and places - and the way Latins tried to do the same in the east.
Interpreting those efforts sometimes needs near-intuition - so what troubles me is the apparent expectation of perfect consistency and regularity in this 15thC text. I wonder whether the expectation owes its foundation to the idea that the text must be encrypted, and thus that it must use consistent and standardised spelling and grammar.
So - is there a 'flexibility'/'subjective impressions' factor in entropy calculations?
There's enough in the imagery to support the possibility of a south-east Asian language, though some readers may be unaware of the extent to which southeast Asian centres of manufacture and trade (and thus religious and diplomatic travellers) had regular commerce with more westerly regions, or how early those connections had developed before c.12thC AD. I've written a bit about it, because the Voynich botanical images begin in my opinion with the Moluccas' cloves+Ravensara, and then the next few appear to me to be ordered from east to west in terms of natural occurrence - along a trade route is the most likely explanation.
One matter that troubles me in reading analytical discussions of the written text that there seems to be so little allowance made for the disparity that exists between modern, standardised orthography and grammar and what we'd expect given conditions 'on the ground'. If a non-native tried to copy a text in a foreign script, t or to record the sounds of another language, even if they developed a regular system and had a perfect ear, the stats would surely not be exactly parallel to what we get using modern transcriptions, orthography and grammars. As proof, one only need consider the way that Chinese or Indian or Islamic sources record names of western people and places - and the way Latins tried to do the same in the east.
Interpreting those efforts sometimes needs near-intuition - so what troubles me is the apparent expectation of perfect consistency and regularity in this 15thC text. I wonder whether the expectation owes its foundation to the idea that the text must be encrypted, and thus that it must use consistent and standardised spelling and grammar.
So - is there a 'flexibility'/'subjective impressions' factor in entropy calculations?