Koen G > 08-09-2020, 06:35 AM
MarcoP > 08-09-2020, 07:16 AM
(08-09-2020, 06:35 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As far as I recall, when Lisa mentioned Bowern's work to me, this would be about looking for text behaviour that matches different scribal hands. This sounded very interesting, but I don't know if it was abandoned or still in progress.
Quote:Sterneck, Rachel and Claire Bowern. 2020. Topic modeling in the Voynich manuscript. URL
arxiv.org.
-JKP- > 08-09-2020, 08:13 AM
ReneZ > 08-09-2020, 08:24 AM
(08-09-2020, 07:16 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One year ago, I looked into You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.: Liber Loagaeth and the Enochian Calls. One of these two languages is also mentioned by Bowern and Lindeman, I guess they are referring to the Enochian Calls, which are more clearly a pseudo-language, coming with an English translation.
Anton > 08-09-2020, 02:28 PM
Quote:we assume that there are two “languages” in the manuscript, referred to as Voynich A and Voynich B. More precisely, there are two methods of encoding at least one natural language.
cbowern > 08-09-2020, 03:53 PM
(07-09-2020, 07:52 AM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Now that I've a had a chance to read the paper, I'd say that it is clear and generally well-written but it is best viewed as setting forth the status quaestionis of the VM rather than advancing a key new insight.
(07-09-2020, 07:52 AM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The paper does not consider Schinner and Timm's work, which in my view is a major oversight since their auto-citation proposal, if I understand it correctly, can generate some of the supposed linguistic features discussed in the paper (like the Zipfian behaviors).
(07-09-2020, 07:52 AM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.They are also probably too quick to a late medieval/early modern fake here:
(07-09-2020, 07:52 AM)Stephen Carlson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'd like to know more about this undergraduate experiment--as well as others in asemic writing--especially on the nature of local repetitions (how are they comparable to the VM's repetitiousness?). Again, here, some engagement with the Schinner & Timm proposal may be enlightening. Can undergraduates, briefly trained in auto-citation, simulate features of the text?Next time I teach the class (next year most likely) we'll try it out.
cbowern > 08-09-2020, 04:03 PM
(08-09-2020, 07:16 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Thanks to everybody for the interesting comments!
I agree with Emma about the importance of Zipf's law and entropy for Bowern and Lindeman's arguments. The fact that these linguists make extensive reference to quantitative measures is one of the strengths of the paper. As I said, I hope they will share their corpus so that people can replicate their experiments.
(08-09-2020, 07:16 AM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(08-09-2020, 06:35 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As far as I recall, when Lisa mentioned Bowern's work to me, this would be about looking for text behaviour that matches different scribal hands. This sounded very interesting, but I don't know if it was abandoned or still in progress.
Quote:Sterneck, Rachel and Claire Bowern. 2020. Topic modeling in the Voynich manuscript. URL
arxiv.org.
cbowern > 08-09-2020, 04:06 PM
(07-09-2020, 10:19 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So, having read to the end, I should slightly revise my impressions. It's not clear until the summary that they favour a "cipher" solution rather than a simple "language" solution. I think this is fair, though it seems that the conclusion rests mostly on the entropy problem.
cbowern > 08-09-2020, 05:28 PM
(07-09-2020, 08:45 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As I am not a linguist, I did not understand what is the share of the authors' analyzes? Do the graphs reflect their own results? On what documents and from what period do they base their analyzes? Is it marked somewhere?
Emma May Smith > 08-09-2020, 05:50 PM
Quote:The question we should really be asking is, "How likely is it that someone in the early 15th Century would use a method which resulted in text which followed Zipf's Law?" The constraint they would have been working to is that it had to look like a natural language. The bare minimum for that is that the choice of current glyphs depends on the previous one, and I think that would have been obvious even at the time the Voynich Manuscript was written.