To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?

[cvetkakocj@rogers.com]

I am not a palaeographer, but I like Latin and I sometimes enjoy working my way through medieval manuscripts written in Latin or Italian. In my experience, grammar is vital to understanding any written text, even more so when punctuation is absent or very limited. I find it difficult to imagine any simple measure that could tell us "to what extent" a text respects a grammar. The closest I can think of would be some kind of comparison of the frequencies of the most frequent words. As discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., languages have a closed set of function words typically including at least half of the 10 most frequent words in any reasonably long text. A few years ago, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that checking how the most frequent Voynichese words are interpreted by a proposed solution is an effective way to evaluate a theory: in my opinion, this test is the simplest possible way to see if a solution has any hope of making sense grammatically.

A more sophisticated approach could include looking for specific patterns: e.g. since in English plurals typically end with -s, one can expect "-s are" ("when the thousand years are expired", "the seven heads are seven mountains", "the former things are passed away") to be more frequent than "-s is" (even if 'is' is normally more frequent than 'are'). But of course defining such patterns is much more difficult than counting word frequencies. Anyway, all languages have patterns and Voynichese also shows patterns in how words are arranged: if Voynichese represents linguistic content, at least some of its patterns are probably related to the grammar of the underlying language.

Hi, Marko,

Thank you for pointing out that the grammar will eventually lead to the solution of VM language. Because of the unique subject matter in the VM, it would be impossible to match the text word for word with any other text, such as with the prayer Our Father, which was often used for comparison. However, the grammatical pattern generally stay, even if the words change. This is the reason why I am concentrating on VM grammar. 

The idea is to find word families, to see how various roots were used in different derivates, what prefixes and suffixes are use, as well as how the words are used in phrases.
In Slovenian, DAM was not used just for many words related to DATI (to give), but also in a peculiar way with the adjectives, such as SE DOLŽAN DAM - I obliged give - I feel obligated. It was also used as the verbal suffix, like REČI DAM - I give words, I preach; or REČEM - I say. This is similar to English TAKE A LOOK  or LOOK. 
In the VM, the words DAM and DAR (in different grammatical forms) are among the most frequently used, which could be understandable.
Here are some examples how the grammar could be explained for Slovenian language:
Slovenian verbs are conjugated for number, gender, time    

The grammar can be recognized from the surrounding words       
And here are some examples of the prefixes

There is a Slovenian grammar book from the 16th century, if you are interested. 

There are also two Italian Slovenian dictionaries, however, because Slovenian is highly flexible, not all the words can be found in the dictionary.

Sincerely,

Cvetka