pfeaster > 19-10-2021, 10:21 PM
(06-07-2021, 12:04 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I wonder whether, even if we could hypothetically understand the inner logic of Voynichese, it would be that easy to read. Even knowing and understanding the language/cipher of Voynichese one would still be left with the same questions as to whether a character is an "a" or an "o". It is certainly true that if one understood the underlying "language" it should, I would think, make it much easier to work out what the intended characters were in a given instance. Nevertheless it might still be difficult to read even one knew the fundamental system of Voynichese.If we understood the logic of Voynichese, it's also possible that the question of whether a glyph is [a] or [o], or [s] or [r], etc., would turn out not to be meaningful as such. In this snippet from f7r, I sense somehow that asking whether the second glyph in the top and bottom vord is [a] in each case, and whether the last glyph in the bottom word is [s] or [r], might take us in the wrong direction.
Koen G > 19-10-2021, 10:45 PM
pfeaster > 20-10-2021, 03:04 PM
(19-10-2021, 10:45 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I agree this is worth exploring. And Eva-a is to the start of the minim cluster what EVA-n is to the end. Something like "ar" could just mean "two minims". I don't know what to do with this though, apart from trying to read it as a numeric system. (And then?)I don't know that a hatchmark-and-flourish approach to parsing the script would, in itself, need to go hand in hand with any particular interpretation, any more than other approaches to parsing it do. If we read something like [o-(-\\\\-'] instead of [o-a-ii-r], that could still leave open as many interpretations of [(], [\\\\], and ['] as there are of [a], [ii], and [r]. There's nothing about [\\\\] that would inherently keep it from having, say, a phonetic value in Turkish or Slovenian.
Koen G > 20-10-2021, 04:40 PM
pfeaster > 21-10-2021, 12:03 AM
(20-10-2021, 04:40 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That seems to me like a very attractive way of thinking about Voynichese. Would I be right to deduce that for this system, you would go as far as not differentiating at all between EVA [e] and [i]? So the only information conveyed by the glyphs we are talking about is the number of marks and the connection of the flourish?I guess that would take this line of speculation to its logical extreme -- maybe as the "strong" version of a hypothesis that also has a "weak" version. There are certainly contexts in which [e] or [i] is much more probable, but the same could be said of, say, [ſ] versus [s] in early modern print, so perhaps that's not a decisive counterargument. There do seem to be cases in which differently shaped hatchmarks seem to be written so as to contrast purposefully with each other, e.g., any vord containing [eai]. But maybe the salient point is the contrast itself -- much as either \\\\// or ////\\ could indicate "4,2" as opposed to just "6," even if \ and / "mean" the same thing.