Classical astrology in the text of the Voynich zodiac?

[GregS]

Apologies for going back so far, but I'm still catching up ...

In natural language we make up names for things like Sagittarius.

If, however, you are describing Sagittarius in a conceptual way, you might name it Voynich-style with something like ani (for animal) + sht (for shoot, as in shooting an arrow).

In English we say dog for a grown dog and puppy for a young one. In some languages they say dog for the grown dog and young-dog for the young one rather than making up a new word for the young one (they don't have words like kitten, puppy, cub, foal, etc.). This means a large number of concepts are expressed with a smaller number of syllables or words and it seems to work perfectly well.

I get what you're saying about the Voynich, but as Koen pointed out natural laanguages do indeed do this, even English, if you look past the borrowings. 'Sagittarius' (like many constellation names) is conceptual - rendered literally into English it would be 'arrower', i.e someone who uses (or makes, the Latin sagittarius could mean either depending on context) arrows. An arrow-man. Yes, 'man', because we have the male -us ending. So rather than being originally a name it was a conceptual description, 'male arrow user', it became just a name in English with the loss of Latin as an everyday language in modern times (a couple of hundred years).

'Kitten' is literally a diminutive of 'cat', 'iittle cat', which is the way many languages describe young animals; 'foal' is a a very old world for a young animal of many species. 'cub' and 'puppy' are relatively late (16th C or so) imports into English which originally meant something other than what they mean today. 'Book' and the German 'Buch' both derive from an ancient word for the beech tree, which was used for writing, just as the French and Latin livre and liber derive from a word for tree bark.

In other words, many if not most words in natural languages were originally 'conceptual' as you describe. In English particularly the conceptual nature of lot of words has been obscured by usage and changes in spelling and imports from other languages over the centuries, and the root of some words (like 'arrow') are so ancient that their descriptive nature, if there was one, has been long forgotten.

That said, as you say a lot of people have forgotten this way of thinking.