05-03-2019, 09:31 PM
JKP, thank you for this thread and for all of your additional comments and clarifications in your replies. I find all of it very helpful and useful.
I am glad to know that another researcher has independently arrived at the idea of Hebrew as a vowelless abjad as a logical candidate to be the underlying language of the text. I think it makes sense for many of the same reasons that you state that it made sense to you.
I know I just "introduced" myself on this forum with a prolix magnum or not so magnum opus stating the case for the ms text as glossolalia. And I'm afraid that this issue with the text consisting almost entirely of the same few repeated common beginning glyph sequences, common ending glyph sequences, and very little in between, with what's in between also consisting of the same few repeated common sequences -- I'm afraid that does sound more like a written form of glossolalia rather than meaningful text in any language. Of course, as I said in my own post, I do very much hope that I'm wrong, and indeed I'm still trying to prove myself wrong.
I do have one idea that may perhaps shed light on the rigidity and lack of flexibility of glyph positioning, which is a huge problem as you absolutely correctly point out: Not in the Hebrew script, but in the Arabic and Syriac scripts, certain letters are always *unconnected* with the following letter. Perhaps some of the glyphs in the ms that we see as ending words, are simply unconnected to the following glyph but still part of the same word. Now this does not solve all of the problems with this issue, not at all, not by a long shot. But it does offer one possible explanation for why *some* glyphs *always* appear to be word-final, whether they actually always are or not.
About the reminder comment on the difference between the language and the script, yes of course we all must be clear on this distinction. But in fact, we have the script in front of us, for better or worse, so all we are trying to determine is the language. And yes, we know there are many cases of the same script being used to write very different languages. But when I say I have a Hebrew hypothesis, I mean the Hebrew language, not just the Hebrew script used to write other languages. For example, the Hebrew script is used to write Yiddish, but it adapts several Hebrew consonant letters for use as Yiddish (Middle High German) vowel letters, so Yiddish would have letter patterns much closer to German than to Hebrew. I also consider grammatical structure such as the common Hebrew article prefix ha-, which only applies to the language itself, not to the script when used to write other languages.
I am glad to know that another researcher has independently arrived at the idea of Hebrew as a vowelless abjad as a logical candidate to be the underlying language of the text. I think it makes sense for many of the same reasons that you state that it made sense to you.
I know I just "introduced" myself on this forum with a prolix magnum or not so magnum opus stating the case for the ms text as glossolalia. And I'm afraid that this issue with the text consisting almost entirely of the same few repeated common beginning glyph sequences, common ending glyph sequences, and very little in between, with what's in between also consisting of the same few repeated common sequences -- I'm afraid that does sound more like a written form of glossolalia rather than meaningful text in any language. Of course, as I said in my own post, I do very much hope that I'm wrong, and indeed I'm still trying to prove myself wrong.
I do have one idea that may perhaps shed light on the rigidity and lack of flexibility of glyph positioning, which is a huge problem as you absolutely correctly point out: Not in the Hebrew script, but in the Arabic and Syriac scripts, certain letters are always *unconnected* with the following letter. Perhaps some of the glyphs in the ms that we see as ending words, are simply unconnected to the following glyph but still part of the same word. Now this does not solve all of the problems with this issue, not at all, not by a long shot. But it does offer one possible explanation for why *some* glyphs *always* appear to be word-final, whether they actually always are or not.
About the reminder comment on the difference between the language and the script, yes of course we all must be clear on this distinction. But in fact, we have the script in front of us, for better or worse, so all we are trying to determine is the language. And yes, we know there are many cases of the same script being used to write very different languages. But when I say I have a Hebrew hypothesis, I mean the Hebrew language, not just the Hebrew script used to write other languages. For example, the Hebrew script is used to write Yiddish, but it adapts several Hebrew consonant letters for use as Yiddish (Middle High German) vowel letters, so Yiddish would have letter patterns much closer to German than to Hebrew. I also consider grammatical structure such as the common Hebrew article prefix ha-, which only applies to the language itself, not to the script when used to write other languages.