27-04-2020, 04:50 PM
Hi Koen and Rene,
I am sure that there is much more than can be done. I have been very much focussed on reduplication, but that is just a tiny subset of what can be done. A further step in this same area could be comparing reduplicating words in the VMS and in reduplicating linguistics texts. For instance, among the reduplicating words in the Kalevala, the most common one in the whole text is 'poika' (boy) ranking 21st. In the VMS, the most frequent word 'daiin' appears several times as 'daiin daiin': what to make of this?
The more one compares with other languages, the more differences are found, which is both interesting and frustrating.
On a side possibly more related with parsing, I think experiments with actual transcriptions of handwritten text can be useful. Spelling variations, abbreviations and maybe scribal errors can contribute to generate a number of similar words that actually stand for a single "ideal" word-type. Finding a well-grounded way to "normalize" the VMS by aggregating words on the basis of both their spelling and their behaviour might allow us to find patterns that are obscured by accidental shifts in words. But I don't know if this has any chance of being possible. The task is also related with trying to map (or normalize) the systematic differences between Voynich "dialects".
What kind of approach are you thinking of when you speak of parsing Voynichese in the context of comparison with plain written text?
I am sure that there is much more than can be done. I have been very much focussed on reduplication, but that is just a tiny subset of what can be done. A further step in this same area could be comparing reduplicating words in the VMS and in reduplicating linguistics texts. For instance, among the reduplicating words in the Kalevala, the most common one in the whole text is 'poika' (boy) ranking 21st. In the VMS, the most frequent word 'daiin' appears several times as 'daiin daiin': what to make of this?
The more one compares with other languages, the more differences are found, which is both interesting and frustrating.
On a side possibly more related with parsing, I think experiments with actual transcriptions of handwritten text can be useful. Spelling variations, abbreviations and maybe scribal errors can contribute to generate a number of similar words that actually stand for a single "ideal" word-type. Finding a well-grounded way to "normalize" the VMS by aggregating words on the basis of both their spelling and their behaviour might allow us to find patterns that are obscured by accidental shifts in words. But I don't know if this has any chance of being possible. The task is also related with trying to map (or normalize) the systematic differences between Voynich "dialects".
What kind of approach are you thinking of when you speak of parsing Voynichese in the context of comparison with plain written text?