geoffreycaveney > 18-03-2019, 01:11 PM
(18-03-2019, 11:41 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I must say that my knowledge of Greek, let alone the Judaeo-Greek, is far less than even that of English, so can you please clarify if something can be picked out this word list that would suit the different contexts in which otol is mentioned?
Anton > 18-03-2019, 01:25 PM
geoffreycaveney > 18-03-2019, 01:43 PM
(18-03-2019, 01:25 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, even with the many assumptions that you made in terms of spelling, you can see that this fails the test, unless in Greek we have some celestial body or constellation called "birdcage" or plant called "estate", etc. That's the problem for the theory of Voynich labels as plain designators.
This has been attempted by linguists before, most notably by late Prof. Stephen Bax, and they have not been very successful with the labels.
Anton > 18-03-2019, 03:00 PM
DonaldFisk > 18-03-2019, 03:16 PM
(18-03-2019, 12:24 AM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.By the way, about the "verb test". What about beginnings of paragraphs? E.g. in Russian it is not very common to have a verb starting a sentence in a narrative, unless in poetic or colloquial, and also unless the sentence is not interrogative or imperative. Although there are cornercases. In English, same thing, I think - unless to express subjunctive (like "Were I a boy,..."), a verb is not common in the beginning of a sentence, is it? What about other languages?
Anton > 18-03-2019, 03:29 PM
-JKP- > 18-03-2019, 03:49 PM
geoffreycaveney > 18-03-2019, 03:56 PM
(18-03-2019, 03:00 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's what I'm suggesting to circumvent - namely, to jump from the glyph level directly to the vord level. There can be myriads of mappings of natural languages to Voynichese - Latin, Greek, proto-Ukrainian, Nahuatl etc. etc. In contrast to that, the vord is unambigous, with two reservations only - first, transcription reliability, and, second, inflexions.
If we see "otol", then is it "otol" everywhere. We don't care if it is Greek or Nahuatl. We only don't know if, say, "otolchedy" is related to "otol" or unrelated. This presents additional complexity, but, at the same time, "otolchedy" is always "otolchedy" as well.
Anton > 18-03-2019, 05:58 PM
Quote:I am suggesting that "otol" can represent numerous different words, all within the same ms text. It could represent "oikos" on one page, "akase" on another page, "augos" on another page, and so on, and so on.
Quote:Because people who are very familiar with the language and the script, largely know what word to expect to occur in a given place anyway.
Quote:what I expected to see IF it was linguistic, just didn't seem to be there, at least not on the vord level.
geoffreycaveney > 18-03-2019, 06:14 PM
(18-03-2019, 05:58 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:I am suggesting that "otol" can represent numerous different words, all within the same ms text. It could represent "oikos" on one page, "akase" on another page, "augos" on another page, and so on, and so on.
If we add this, i.e. different spelling, to different meanings (i.e. homonyms), then of course it becomes significantly more complicated, and more degrees of freedom for the interpreter do arise. But what it left is to demonstrate that in action, on a more or less extensive fragment of text and respecting grammar. I do not think anyone has yet been successful in that.
Quote:Because people who are very familiar with the language and the script, largely know what word to expect to occur in a given place anyway.
Can we assert that the author was very familiar with the script? I do not see solid grounds for that. On the contrary, the last line of f116v, where only part of it is in Voynichese, suggests that either the author was not very comfortable with the script or that the expressive power of the script was very limited (e.g. not suitable for German language or not suitable to convey meaning of "so", "nim", "gas" and "mich").
Quote:what I expected to see IF it was linguistic, just didn't seem to be there, at least not on the vord level.
If a writing conveys meaningful message, then it simply must be linguistic. Just it can be "oddly linguistic". Consider, for example, a dictionary. Is it linguistic? Yes, it is. Does it resemble something like the Bible or the "Origin of Species"? No, it does not. It is common to approach the VMS as if it were a systematic narrative, and to expect relative things from it, but what grounds are there for such an approach? Actually, not very solid ones.