Cvetka's Slovenian Theory Thread

[tavie]

On point #3, it may help if I work through the beginning of your introductory/grammar article.  The beginning of the article sets out how you developed the theory.  Near the start, after spotting the words "dal" (give) and "daly", you say:



"This was more than a coincidence."  I'm afraid it wasn't demonstrably more than a coincidence. Let me explain why, and how this kind of thinking at the early stage undermines your methodology.

1. Firstly, you've started off with only 8 isolated words, some with a possible space.  8 isolated identifications is not enough to discount coincidence.
   
2. Secondly, 5 out of the 8 you propose to be inflections or variations around the concept of giving:  "you give!"; "down I gave", "a gift", "gift I gave", "a giver".  The remaining 3 are around the concept of "down":  "down"; "Down you put!"; "down I gave".  So, really, there are only two broad identifications here.  That makes coincidence more likely.
   
3. Thirdly, two of those 3 are the same word "dol,dy" and indeed judging by the image you've added the same instance of the word, but you have translated them in two entirely different ways.  One way is as "dol dj", which you reshape into "dol d(a)j" and identify with "Down you put!" or "put down!".  The second is as "do ldi", which you say is a dialect for "do ljudi" and identify with "to people."  This means this identification is not at all robust and cannot be used to argue against coincidence.
   
4. Fourthly, for half of those identifications, you have added or removed characters.  You have changed "dej" to "daj", "ldi" to "ljudi", "dj" to "d(a)j", and "daror" to "darovalec".  Only for two of those do you ascribe the change to "dialect".  For at least two of these (further down in the article you say ldi is a declination in the Dolenjska dialect) it's not completely clear if this is because this is a known pattern in the medieval Dolenjska dialect...or if you are assuming there must be, in order to make the theory right.  The biggest change is from "daror" to "darovalec", and I cannot find any explanation given for this.  There's also no mention of whether the unamended words are also consistent with the medieval Dolenjska dialect, rather than medieval/modern Slovenian.
   
5. Fifthly, for three of the eight, you have had to reorganize and in some cases reinterpret the words in order to provide an English translation.  You have changed the literal "Down (you) put!" into "put down!"; "gift (I) gave" into "I gave a gift", and lastly "down (I) gave" is transformed into "I put down."  Perhaps this reordering, and indeed the meaning change for the latter, is regularly required in order to translate from medieval Slovenian to English.  But without providing this evidence, it could appear that you've been forced to rework these in order to claw sense out of your system. 
   
6. Sixth, two of the eight identifications are imperatives.  You translate dey as "(You) give!" and dol dy as "Down (you) put!" or "put down!".  These are rather odd translations!  It's possible to have such imperatives in a text...but it seems unlikely.  Since you have not provided their context (i.e. their home sentence, if not paragraph), this increases the probability that the identifications are mere coincidence.
    

So to recap:  you have presented this as one of the very first breakthroughs of your journey, and yet it consists of only eight identifications, seven if we remove the one with different meanings, with 5/8 all variants around the root "give" and the other 3 around the root "down".  And you conclude by saying "this was more than a coincidence" and describe it as a confirmation of the Voynich characters you'd focused on. 

I haven't had time (nor do I have the knowledge of Slovenian) to properly assess the changes you've made to the words and their order, and also the strangeness of the two imperatives.  But even if we discard the uncertainty over those points, the above shows the problem I was trying to convey in #3. 

From some extremely weak identifications at the very start of your journey, your article implies you have become convinced about the theory's foundations.  After that, it's too late to escape confirmation bias infecting all the work you've done subsequently, no matter how interesting it is.  There is a methodological problem in your work from the very outset, and from that point, your brain is primed to ignore and discard evidence that doesn't fit in with the theory and over-emphasize the significance of evidence consistent with it.  Of course you will then find more isolated occurrences that have a resemblance to Slovenian!  Which you do.  But at no point is there any examination of whether the resemblances are coincidental or weak.  

It could have been very different if you'd summarised your initial findings along the lines of "Hmmm...I've found seven/eight possible correspondences, but they could very easily be a coincidence due to their limited range of meaning and how much I've had to alter them.  However, it's still worth testing to see if my proposed identifications make sense in context, and if I can establish a clear pattern for the changes I'm making."