Lingua Volgare Shorthand

[ginocaspari]

Two Italian solutions added to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.in 24 hours!  But very different from each other, so thank you for that. 

Your two main docs are much better papers than what we are usually presented with.  

But weirdly, that makes me feel I expect more from your solution.  There seems to be a disconnect between the level of confidence ("the key we provide here finally allows for an identification of the language of MS 408") with the amount actually translated, which seems to be only three sentences if I've read correctly.  This is by no means unusual for a Voynich solution but you do seem aware of things like confirmation bias and insufficient evidence, so it feels jarring. 

Three areas that came to my mind as potential issues:

Lack of translated material
You say the main problem is that none of your predecessors have gone behind individual words/lines and deciphered longer passages of text.  It is certainly a key problem, if not the main problem.  But I've not been able to tell why your work is different.  Three sentences isn't enough to distinguish a solution from all the others.

You say it hasn't been shown before that a language proposition is effectively transferable to all parts of the manuscript.  Am I misunderstanding this?  It seems impossible to tell this from only three sentences.  Or perhaps you have more than three since you mention others are in the Supplementary Info, but the excel seems to be only isolated words?

More sentences are also needed to grapple with one of the other key problem seen in all solutions:  having too many degrees of freedom, which Marco mentioned.  If you base the solution on abbreviation, isn't this problem exacerbated?  If the text is meaningful, I'm personally very partial to abbreviation being involved (bearing in mind its other problems), but it does give your system a lot of flexibility.  Identifying both context and more consistent trends of abbreviation would assist with this problem, but you can't do that with only 3 translated sentences. 

I think this may also be a problem for your explanation on Claire's Criterion 3 (grammatical material).  Three sentences, especially ones unrelated to each other since they are drawn from separate quires, doesn't seem enough to establish proof of grammar.  You seem to rely a lot on isolated words, but I don't think they can demonstrate grammar without being read in a sentence.  This is an issue we've seen in at least one other solution.  For example, I could say that the qokaiin, qokain, qokedy, qokeey, qokeedy etc cluster represent different inflections of the Latin word puella.  Even if I show a rough correspondence between the glyphs and the puella inflections, it's not proof of syntax until I can show that the plural genitive appears in a sentence where the plural genitive makes sense, and repeat for the other inflections.

Claire Bowern's views (separate paper on her criteria)
I appreciate that there is effort to prove the solution via what I think would be objectively recognized valid criteria developed by Claire Bowern. 

But I'm concerned that - with this as the basis - for Claire's Criteria 1, 2, and 5, you write "Passed. Confirmed by C. Bowern in February 2025"

...and yet for Claire's Criteria 3, 4, 6, and 7 there is nothing of Claire's thoughts.  Maybe she didn't have time to evaluate these, since they are the hardest to meet?  But if she expressed any degree of doubt, given how this paper is set up, you ought to highlight that. 

And I would expect at least some initial doubt from Claire Bowern on Criterion 6 (explain why Voynichese performs so differently from other writing systems on text metrics like entropy) in regard to the idea that the abbreviation/shorthand involved is a key factor behind the entropy values.  Some of her comparison work of various texts indicated that abbreviations raised conditional entropy rather than lowering it.  

She did caveat that this was based on the common known abbreviations, so is it your case that the ones employed here are substantially different from contemporary ones?  Again, I'm not at all anti-abbreviation but quite a few people better informed than me have expressed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that it is even largely present, let alone the main explanation for failure of decipherment so far. 

Line Patterns and other Voynichese behaviour
Lastly, my guess is that Claire was also thinking of line patterns when she set out Criterion 6.  Entropy was just an example.  I may have missed it somewhere but I've not seen explanations for any of the below:

• paragraph/top line behaviour:  why EVA p and f are almost exclusively on top lines of paragraph.  That seems to be "s" under your system.
  
• line-start behaviour:  why some glyphs are disproportionately more common or rare at line start.  Some like EVA ch show consistency in their aversion to line start across the top three scribes; some like EVA q show aversion in Scribe 3's Stars and attraction in Scribe 1's Herbal A.  There are also the vertical impact patterns I've been working on that require explanations
  
• line end behaviour:  why some glyphs are disproportionately more common/rare at line end, especially the final glyph of a word but also the initial and middle glyphs.  And Patrick Feaster's work indicates it might only peak at line end - there are trends appearing across the line.
  
• first-last combinations:  the existence of glyphs appearing disproportionately across a word break, e.g. words ending with y tend to be disproportionately and spectacularly so - followed by words starting with q, at least in the Balneological and Stars section.   Emma and Marco have done You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. on these kind of combinations.
  
• the excessive alliteration in Voynichese.  You seem to be saying that "qo" means that/which.  I did a visual (so very rough) count years ago of alliterative words.  In the Balneological section alone, there were over 175 consecutive q-word pairs; 44 consecutive q-word triplets; 11 consecutive q-word quadruplets; and 3 instances of five consecutive q words. This is by no means the only glyph that likes to alliterate:  initial o is just as bad if not worse, as is initial ch, and initial sh is no slouch either.  It's definitely not a matter of a few isolated lists. 
  

That's just some off the top of my head.  Maybe your answer for some/all of these is abbreviation, but there are real challenges to grapple with if that's the case, and these should be set out and refuted.

tl;dr:  please could we have more sentences, and an explanation for line patterns?

Dear Tavie,
thank you for this - we came here exactly for this type of well-founded scepticism. We do not claim to have an answer for every single point (especially not instantaneously and without further diving into the manuscript itself). We also do not think that our solution is perfect as is - in our opinion it is a start to work from which needs revisions and improvements. An expectation to be able to just read the cipher once the encoding is reversed is also not necessarily realistic as very few people fluently read medieval shorthand manuscripts in the first place. It will take time to substantiate or refute this properly. We generally prefer to express our uncertainty clearly where it is due, but we have also have been criticized for that. It seems tricky to strike a good balance here with different preferences of different scholars. That being said, let me briefly address the points raised:

1. Lack of translated material
We are working on a longer stretch of text. Given how much work there is involved in substantiating individual shorthand abbreviations, finding comparison in other manuscripts etc. it will take time to provide this. It is a reason we already provided our basis to a larger community because we also have to address the reproducibility aspect and - for obvious reasons - we cannot do this ourselves. We believe, however, that consistency is a very important aspect of any solution. The vocabulary list features words from nearly every page (without repetition), so what we have is a relatively large consistent vocabulary that finds a reflection in authors roughly contemporary with the Voynich. This is an argument in itself.

Flexibility: Yes, shorthands increase flexibility. This makes them harder to read correctly, not easier. While this ambiguity is a hindrance for a straight forward reading of the manuscript, it is not necessarily an argument against a solution. It's not like anything can be read into a shorthand. Shorthands are designed to highlight the recognizable parts of words as briefly explained in the Seven Criteria doc.

2. Criteria by C. Bowern
We learned about her preference for these criteria after finishing the work on the main paper. That's why we addressed the additional criteria in the separate document. The ones marked as "passed" have been assessed by her and considered sufficient. The others need further elaboration. Our solution at least partially addresses the low entropy as a function of oversplitting glyphs. We believe that this in itself is an important finding that should be taken into consideration and factor into future statistical studies. We find this to be a major issue for general assumptions derived from statistical analyses which is why we have addressed the oversplitting problem in much detail. We also need to be clear that there is a difference between common abbreviations and a shorthand.

3. Line patterns and other Voynich behaviour
We believe these patterns can be addressed as we read more of the manuscript but this does require extensive work. The patterns are duly noted though they also need to be adjusted in some cases based on oversplit glyphs. Our working hypothesis is that at least the herbal section provides horticultural instructions in a broad sense based on the verbs (e.g. piotare, potare, terrare, etc.) that we read. Some of the line patterns are likely due to these step by step instructions where a line can but not necessarily has to be a unit.