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Positional allography?
- Positional allography?
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RE: Positional allography?
oshfdk > 12-03-2025, 09:19 AM
(12-03-2025, 07:44 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What's against reducing the number of letters? Especially if all hopes of simple substitution have been abandoned?
Have you ever seen Roman numerals in a manuscript? Usually, the final "I" gets a swoop added to it. It's effectively a positional allograph. Why would one argue I'm favor of it being a separate numeral, just to increase the size of the set?
Roman numerals are not a natural language. I assume Frigorifico is primarily talking about natural languages in this thread, since the original post starts with:
Quote:It is well known that some symbols only appear at the end of words, the beginning, or followed or preceded by some specific symbols. This is often used to argue that voynichese can't be a real language because no language behaves this way, but what if these aren't different symbols?
If we are talking about ciphers on the other hand, then there is nothing wrong with reducing the character set. When I was computing sequence repetition stats, I tried various alphabets, including the 2-character alphabet, where only the basic minims/curvelets encode information and all flourishes are for obfuscation. -
RE: Positional allography?
oshfdk > 12-03-2025, 09:25 AM
(12-03-2025, 08:48 AM)project963 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In verbs I have found that the glyphs with the opposite "C" and a different number of streaks (1 to 4, can be) use to bend words
What is "to bend words"? I tried Googling it and learned something new about rap music, but I guess this is not what you meant. -
RE: Positional allography?
Koen G > 12-03-2025, 10:02 AM
(12-03-2025, 09:19 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Roman numerals are not a natural language. I assume Frigorifico is primarily talking about natural languages in this thread, since the original post starts with:
Ah, I see. So the question is rather: does it become more, or less language-like if we assume positional allography?
I know that when transcribing a medieval text for literary purposes (so we can read the story), a lot of allographs are either not represented in the transcription, or glossed over by the reader. Elaborate forms (initials, top line ascenders...) are merged with their regular counterparts. The allography of capital letters is maintained, but we know they have the same phonetic value as their counterpart since we understand the writing system.
This is different when doing a paleographic transcription, which does not flatten these details. The EVA transliterations are most definitely of the more detailed kind. But we kind of treat them as if they are literary transcriptions, religiously maintaining distinctions even though LAAFU/PAAFU effects only make sense as allographs.
Unfortunately, it's all very tricky and hard to test, since it isn't very clear which glyphs may be variations of one another, and what we'd do with the system once hypothetical allographs have been flattened out. -
RE: Positional allography?
MarcoP > 12-03-2025, 11:55 AM
(11-03-2025, 07:40 PM)Frigorifico Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This is something that happens in many real scripts, such as Arabic, Mongolian, Syriac and a few others. Letters have often three or four forms: initial, medial, final and sometimes they also have an isolated form. These shapes are often similar, but they can be quite different in a few cases. This is called "positional allography"
However the reason these scripts have this feature is because they are "cursive" in a way, they are designed so that people need to lift their pen as little as possible when writing, which required letters to "flow" into each other and thus change shape
The voynich script is not like this, so it wouldn't need to behave like this... But what if it does anyway?
What if the Author was exposed to Mongolian or Arabic or whatever and that inspired them to make a script in which letters changed shape depending on their position?
Actually, positional allographs also occurred in medieval non-cursive European manuscripts (for purely aesthetic reasons, I guess). The two most obvious examples are short/long ‘s’ and rounded/straight ‘r’. The shape of ‘s’ was selected on the basis of word position (short for word-final), while ‘r’ was selected on the basis of the following character (round ‘r’ before a round character). We can be sure that Voynichese scribes were familiar with this practice.
Example from You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
ordinatis
passibus gradiatur
In addition to proper allographs, there also are abbreviations which add even more ways to write some characters (see how -us is rendered in passibus).