Ruby's Greek Thread

[pfeaster]

What differences do you see between my strategy for matching Slovenian to Turkish and your strategy for matching Voynichese to Greek?

The number of words

Fair enough.  But there's a list You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of what are supposedly the 2000 most common Slovenian words.  I just chose the top ten for my earlier example, but I suspect it wouldn't be difficult to find hundreds more "matches" with Turkish words, especially if I allowed more flexibility in what counts as a "match": for instance, if I speculated that Slovenian [b] could represent not just [b] in Turkish, but also [p] or [m].  The eleventh Slovenian word in the list would have been [njegovo]; that's a tricky one, but perhaps I'd try matching [nj] to Turkish [ş], and [g] to Turkish [h], and then start examining Turkish words that begin with [şeh-], such as [şehiri], "his city," and see where that took me.
 
As you've probably guessed, I didn't choose Slovenian and Turkish arbitrarily: those are two other languages in which people have identified hundreds (I believe) of individual "matches" with Voynichese words.  So:

Q. What are examples of languages for which hundreds of individual word matches with Voynichese can be identified, given a transliteration scheme that's flexible (i.e., you couldn't just substitute characters using a strict one-to-one mapping and reliably get a valid word) but is still consistent enough to satisfy whoever's doing the research?

A. Greek, Turkish, and Slovenian.

Q. Given that information, if all we know is that someone using a flexible transliteration scheme has identified hundreds of individual word matches between some language and Voynichese, what's the maximum probability of this discovery corresponding to a correct language identification? 

A. ~33%, if one of the three language identifications cited above is correct.

To be clear, this doesn't disprove your Greek hypothesis (or the Slovenian or Turkish ones).  But it suggests that finding even hundreds of word "matches" has a high likelihood of being a false positive.

This is relevant to your question, I think, because if there are some "clues" in favor of Greek and other "clues" against Greek, I assume we'd want to weigh the reliability of the different kinds of clue involved.

wouldn't the list of most common Currier B words ([chedy], [Shedy], [daiin], etc.) still provide an enormously important clue?  Maybe even more of a clue than it otherwise would?

It is the words chedy and shedy that prove that it is not Greek?

"Prove" is a strong word -- you only asked about "clues."

If you were tentatively to identify the most common Voynichese words with Greek words for "the," "and," and "but," that could be somewhat persuasive.

If you were tentatively to identify them with Greek words for, say, "stir" and "mix" and "boil," that could still be thought-provoking.

If they don't seem to match any Greek words at all, or if you tentatively identify them with words for, say, "gimlet," "bog," and "dolphin," then perhaps there's a problem.