Emma May Smith > 07-03-2016, 01:57 AM
(07-03-2016, 12:04 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The "pronouncibility" of the EVA transliteration is mere phantom,...
ReneZ > 07-03-2016, 02:00 AM
Sam G > 08-03-2016, 02:39 PM
(07-03-2016, 12:04 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Even if one puts apart the cipher theory, I am afraid that no syllabification is possible without our understanding of the alphabet. There is no confirmation that any of the transcription alphabets, EVA included, accurately represent the real alphabet adopted by the author.
Quote:This fact suggests nothing. A person wishing to conceal his message could well use these letters to represent consonants, for an additional layer of obscurity.
Quote:Besides, EVA e is not like Roman "e". It is like Roman "c".
Quote:If the text is abbreviated, then single characters would represent character blocks, like 9 (EVA y) represented "us" in the end of the word and "con" in the beginning of the word in medieval Latin documents.
Quote:Quote:Really, the fact that EVA transliteration makes the text basically "pronouncible", as would likely any other transliteration scheme that mapped <a>, <e>, <o>, and <y> to vowels and the other letters to consonants (and considered <i> as a modifier), is by itself strong evidence that its implicit assignment of consonant and vowel status is basically correct.
The "pronouncibility" of the EVA transliteration is mere phantom, partly because the transcription is not fully matched to the Latin alphabet (e.g. substitute "c" for EVA e, as indicated above, and you will lose this pronouncibility at once),
Quote:and partly because EVA is Latin-alphabet centric - while there is no confirmation that the Latin alphabet was the basis for the Voynichese script. For example, characters like a, c, i, o are found in the Cyrillic alphabet, characters l, d , r, y, q are like Arabic digits, and the rest of the characters are not found in the Latin alphabet at all.
I'd say that being Latin-centric and excess focus on EVA is the worst approach for those who wish to explore the plain text language path. EVA has quite little to do with the real Voynichese alphabet, and absolutely nothing with the Voynichese language (if any).
Quote:Quote:Second, the entropy is too low.
As I noted in another thread, it is technically not reliable to speak of (character) entropy in respect to a written language when we don't know what is that language's alphabet.
Anton > 08-03-2016, 07:32 PM
Quote:We can't know it perfectly of course, but the distinction between consonant and vowel does seem quite clear.
Quote:Everything about the script suggests that it was intended to emphasize the structure of the text, not obscure it.
Quote:You are now contradicting what you wrote above, about EVA <y> deriving from Latin abbreviations. I think it's been well-established for a long time, and is obvious to begin with, that the VMS script derives from medieval Latin abbreviations and from the Roman alphabet, and that there is really no need to look further afield for the origins of the shapes of the letters. The tables in D'Imperio show this well enough
Quote:We know the alphabet well enough to show that the entropy is going to be low no matter how you combine or split the glyphs. The low entropy is really just telling you how rigid the phonotactic structure (i.e. rules governing how the glyphs may be combined to form words) is, and this can be understood without using math at all.
Sam G > 08-03-2016, 09:26 PM
(08-03-2016, 07:32 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:We can't know it perfectly of course, but the distinction between consonant and vowel does seem quite clear.
Could you please explain how this can be clear if we don't understand a single word in Voynichese?
Quote:Quote:Everything about the script suggests that it was intended to emphasize the structure of the text, not obscure it.
The structure (morphology, regularity and patterns) is not the meaning (the message). While the structure may be more or less evident (and my opinion rather shifts for "less" here), the message still stands obscured.
Quote:As for the derivation of some of the VMS symbols from Latin abbreviations - this is likely, but it is by no means "established". There is a good deal of researchers who would prefer to refrain from this derivation. Actually, if we consider EVA y, this is a shape of the Arabic digit "nine". I don't know if the Latin abbreviation symbol was derived from the digit or it is a standalone invention, but it is certainly not "established" whether the VMS script inherits the abbreviation or the digit. In my opinion, this is the former case, where the y shape is actually comprised of the c with the tail modifier (as suggested by Currier and recently revived by Cham), so as to mask the real glyph composition behind the "well-known" abbreviation symbol. But this is nothing more than a working hypothesis and it is simply not scientifically correct to dub it "established". In science, "established" means proven, consistently reproducible and independently verifiable. In fact, there are too few really established things about the Voynich Manuscript.
Anton > 08-03-2016, 10:59 PM
Quote:Okay... let's start with this: do you honestly believe that every ciphertext in existence has a glyph-for-glyph mapping onto the Roman alphabet that makes it pronounceable? Because this is what you and others seem to be arguing here, and if you seriously believe this to be true then I don't really know what I'm supposed to say.
Quote:That you don't understand it doesn't mean it was the author's intention to make it obscure. All texts in languages that you can't read are obscure to you - that says nothing about the intentions of the people who wrote them.
Quote:The point is that the script was clearly devised by someone who knew how to write Latin, a point which I'm not sure if you're actually disputing, or if you're just trying to nitpick.
-JKP- > 09-03-2016, 02:26 AM
(08-03-2016, 09:26 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... The point is that the script was clearly devised by someone who knew how to write Latin, a point which I'm not sure if you're actually disputing, or if you're just trying to nitpick.
Sam G > 09-03-2016, 11:05 AM
(08-03-2016, 10:59 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:Okay... let's start with this: do you honestly believe that every ciphertext in existence has a glyph-for-glyph mapping onto the Roman alphabet that makes it pronounceable? Because this is what you and others seem to be arguing here, and if you seriously believe this to be true then I don't really know what I'm supposed to say.
Actually I did not thought about it, but this is an interesting question. To answer it, we in the first place need to introduce some language-independent measure of pronounceability. Don't know if it exists (as I said, I'm zero in linguistics), but offhand it seems to me that pronounceability depends largely on the pronounciation rules of the language of choice (or perhaps it will be more appropriate to speak of language families here?) - what is pronounceable in one language may be not pronounceable in another language using the same alphabet.
As for ciphers, at least all substitution ciphers would have glyph-for-glyph pronounceable mapping onto the Roman alphabet. That's just trivial. Beyond substitution, I would not venture to assert anything, but offhand I don't see any reasons why at least a subset of ciphers may not have at least one "pronounceable" mapping (even however vague be the notion of "pronounceability").
Quote:Quote:That you don't understand it doesn't mean it was the author's intention to make it obscure. All texts in languages that you can't read are obscure to you - that says nothing about the intentions of the people who wrote them.
That's true, but that does not waive the possibility of that intention.
Quote:While I suggest to take the possibility of deliberate obfuscation of the message by means of these "pseudo-vowels" as one of the options for consideration, you prefer to waive it altogether. Actually you take them (the pseudo-vowels) at face value just because of their shape. What's the proof that they are vowels indeed?
Quote:Quote:The point is that the script was clearly devised by someone who knew how to write Latin, a point which I'm not sure if you're actually disputing, or if you're just trying to nitpick.
No I am not disputing this (mailnly because this is supported by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia),
Quote:but there are researchers who are. I won't speak for Bax or O'Donovan or others (let them defend their points of view themselves). What I mean is that scientific discourse should be based on criteria of scientific truth, not on assertions like "this is clear" or "this is evident" or "thus spake D'Imperio". What is "clear" for one researcher may be not "clear" for another - and the lack of consensus upon essential aspects of the VMS amongst different researchers shows that there are too few things that are really clear - that means, commonly acknowledged.
(09-03-2016, 02:26 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(08-03-2016, 09:26 PM)Sam G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... The point is that the script was clearly devised by someone who knew how to write Latin, a point which I'm not sure if you're actually disputing, or if you're just trying to nitpick.
The script was clearly devised by someone who was familiar with Latin scribal conventions.
- As in Latin, the "9" char is usually at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and only occasionally elsewhere.
- As in Latin, the Eva-s are Eva-r are sometimes in a longer word and sometimes alone, between words. Even though single chars are otherwise uncommon in the VMS, these two shapes behave more-or-less as they do in Latin.
- As in Latin, the shape that looks like a bench is sometimes broken into two shapes that stand alone.
- As in Latin, the terminal shape in a word-token sometimes has a tail stretching up and back over the last glyph.
Quote:But, the script does not otherwise behave like Latin. While the variability of the letters may match or be similar to a number of natural languages in a purely numeric sense, the problem is that the VMS imposes strict rules on the position of letters in a word that are different from most natural languages, including Latin and most Germanic languages. Which makes me wonder whether the Latin conventions are used to represent similar conventions in a language of a less variable structure or, if they were added to make it superficially look like Latin (as a ruse or as a comfortable way to write something less familiar in a familiar system).
Anton > 09-03-2016, 12:34 PM
Quote:If you want to dispute this, then please provide examples.
this is a cipher message
01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100011 01101001 01110000 01101000 01100101 01110010
ollloloo ollolooo ollolool olllooll oolooooo ollolool olllooll oolooooo ollooool oolooooo olloooll ollolool ollloooo ollolooo olloolol ollloolo
olllola ollola ollolal olllall oola ollolal olllall oola ollal oola ollall ollolal ollla ollola ollalol olllalo
Quote:Which isn't my argument. I wrote above: Everything about the script suggests that it was intended to emphasize the structure of the text, not obscure it. You responded to that with the non-sequitur about the meaning remaining obscure, and I was just addressing that.
Quote:Maybe you could elaborate on these "criteria for scientific truth". Obviously we can't redo the creation of the VMS in a laboratory experiment. I see no problem using terms like "clear" and "obvious" because in my view that's as good as it can realistically get with historical questions like this. We can amass all the evidence in the world, but at the end of the day everyone is still free to believe whatever he or she wants.
Sam G > 09-03-2016, 02:03 PM