(12-08-2022, 12:35 PM)Juan_Sali Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of these greek minuscule is very similar to one of rare glyhs of the VM. Any idea of what greek minuscule letter can it be?
nablator Wrote:pi !
This symbol is clearly an ancient one, with many different meanings and usages across human history. I think the Greek Minuscule pi is a decently good parallel. Personally though, I've never been able to unsee You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view., which is pronounced as an alveolar affricate in Korean — [t͡ɕ], [tʃ], [dɕ], or [dʒ] in IPA. I'm sure this is a shining example of "correlation does not imply causation", but it has crossed my mind that the Korean Hangul alphabet was a constructed script ("con-script"), invented and published at a date that's within the commonly accepted window of likelihood for the VMs's composition.
King Sejong is usually credited with the invention of Hangul, but he actually assembled a think tank, involving his kingdom's top linguists — most of them scholars, translators, interpreters, and diplomats, and all of them among the most worldly and multilingual Koreans alive at the time. The shapes of the letters were determined by their place of articulation. For example, for
jieut, the bottom two lines that look like an inverted V (or EVA v, while we're at it!) indicates a fricative at the alveolar ridge, right behind the upper teeth, as the placement of the tongue tip. The horizontal bar on top, meanwhile, indicates a stop in addition to this. It's a very logical writing system, designed for ease of learning. Its promulgation greatly increased literacy in medieval Korea.
Historians and archaeologists tend to recognize a maximum of four inventions of written language entirely from scratch, pun intended: Sumerian Cuneiform, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Chinese Characters, and Mayan glyphs. Mayan glyphs almost certainly took no influence from any other writing system. But it's quite possible that the Sumerians actually gave the Egyptians and/or the Chinese the concept of writing, since they definitely traded overland with both peoples extensively in prehistory. This means that written language may have only been invented completely from scratch twice in human history. But barring this controversial and unproven possibility, there are no writing systems in current use that trace an unbroken lineage to either Sumerian or Mayan writing. All naturally evolved writing systems and
a posteriori constructed scripts in use today trace their lineage to the Phoenician abjad, itself a product of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or to Chinese characters. King Sejong's think tank included learnèd men familiar with writing systems from both lineages, and the influence of both can be seen in the design of Hangul.
Again, I don't mean to suggest that anyone involved with the creation of the VMs and its
a posteriori con-script was aware of, let alone involved with, the creation of Hangul. Although of course anything is possible, that seems quite literally far-fetched. What I'm suggesting is that both may have inherited, and relied upon, a common and ancient sensibility for how written marks could potentially correlate to human vocal utterances, and how that correlation might be improved upon or played with, to some desired end.
J.K. Peterson has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that Voynichese glyphs, with the notable exception of EVA t and p, all have a history of use as scribal abbreviations of the Roman alphabet during medieval times. Brian Cham and David Jackson, meanwhile, have shown with their Curve-Line System that, like Hangul letters, Voynichese glyphs seem to have a deceptively simple logic to their design and selection: Start with a right-concave curve, a short back-leaning straight line, or a tall vertical line. Attach a flourish to this basic stroke: an upward curve, a downward curve, a downward curve with a loop, or a horizontal bar attached to the top; or, alternately, an upward curve attached to the bottom.
Unlike with Hangul, it is not at all clear which, if any, spoken human language Voynichese was constructed to represent. So it's not at all clear what the logic of its design means, or what implications its apparent logic has for its intended use. But I come back, time and again, to a basic question: What sort of information would Voynichese, in its apparent
ad hoc design, be particularly well suited to recording? What kind of speech? What kind of content or data? What kind of information that would be readily apparent (i.e. "easily decodable") to the right insiders with the right prerequisite knowledge, but not so much to anyone else?