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Ruby's Greek Thread
- Ruby's Greek Thread
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RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
Ruby Novacna > 26-11-2022, 12:52 PM
(25-11-2022, 06:23 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would suggest that, logically, if you can't prove it is Greek, you can't prove it isn't Greek.
Indeed, it is the first idea that comes to mind.
Certainly, to be able to confirm or invalidate the choice of a language, it would be necessary to have a minimum knowledge of this language.
This is why, while waiting to acquire more skills, I am thinking of the possible existence of useful clues for amateurs. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
Ruby Novacna > 26-11-2022, 04:21 PM
(25-11-2022, 08:41 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I don't think it's possible to rule out Greek or any other language...
For the moment I am more interested in the identification of the language, than in the explanation of the value of entropy.
This is because we know that if it is language (and not meaningless gibberish), multiple things have been done to the text to give it the myriad un-language-like characteristics that it has, such as the entropy issue, the line patterns, etc.
Moreover, if I understood the Wikipedia article correctly, the notion of entropy is quite recent, much later than our manuscript and the large number of coded letters. How did decoders proceed without calculating entropy? -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
tavie > 26-11-2022, 07:06 PM
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying entropy is a symptom, along with line patterns, that tells us that whatever we're dealing with, it is not a simple substitution cypher. And that this has consequences for our ability to exclude candidate languages.
By symptom, I mean that the entropy levels and the Voynichese line patterns are characteristics that we do not see in normal, meaningful text, including one that has been through a simple substitution cypher. These symptoms tell us that if there is meaningful text here, a lot of things have been done to this plaintext to generate these effects.
Individually, these "things" may be simple or complex. Together, they may constitute an extremely complex cypher system that was advanced for the era, as some here have suggested. Or they may constitute a system that has a simple design at its core with added bells and whistles, including some aspects that weren't intended for concealment purposes but which have the effect of it being more complex, e.g. parsing issues. Or whatever. We don't know.
My point is that whatever those things are, their complexity as a whole makes it hard to exclude a specific language. Let's say someone points out that the relative frequencies of Voynichese initial and final characters don't come anywhere close to matching the relative proportions we see in the contemporary Greek. That would exclude Greek if the system were a simple substitution cypher. But since it's not, we can't exclude the possibility that the complexities of the system have altered the plaintext Greek words in a way that generates artificial, unGreeklike letter distributions. Indeed, if we did exclude Greek on that basis, then I think we'd end up excluding all other candidate languages on similar bases.
If it were that easy to exclude a language, we probably would have found the right language by now. So while people could come up with characteristics of Greek that are inconsistent with your theory to give you a better sense of where it might need modification or areas for further investigation...I can't see how we could exclude Greek.
(26-11-2022, 04:21 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Moreover, if I understood the Wikipedia article correctly, the notion of entropy is quite recent, much later than our manuscript and the large number of coded letters. How did decoders proceed without calculating entropy?
I was answering your question about excluding Greek; I didn't say that calculating entropy is necessary for decipherments. It isn't. But as a "symptom", it is useful, along with other Voynichese behaviours, in getting a sense of what could - or could not - have been done to a plaintext to generate these symptoms or effects. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
Anton > 26-11-2022, 07:31 PM
(25-11-2022, 06:23 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would suggest that, logically, if you can't prove it is Greek, you can't prove it isn't Greek.
There's some fallacy here. Suppose you encounter an unknown animal. You are considering the question of whether it is a cat or not. The animal in question has wings while cats are known to be devoid of wings. Hence you can't prove that it's a cat, while, at the same time, you can prove that it is not a cat. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
Koen G > 26-11-2022, 07:55 PM
In a strict categorical (no pun intended) case like this, you can prove a negative. Or basically in any case that involves simple observations. Proving that I am holding a pen in my hand is just as easy as proving that I have no pen in my hand. But in practice, proving a negative is often harder because it involves disproving a whole range of scenarios. And after that, new scenarios can probably still be thought of, keeping the ball rolling. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
davidjackson > 26-11-2022, 09:32 PM
(26-11-2022, 07:31 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(25-11-2022, 06:23 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I would suggest that, logically, if you can't prove it is Greek, you can't prove it isn't Greek.
There's some fallacy here. Suppose you encounter an unknown animal. You are considering the question of whether it is a cat or not. The animal in question has wings while cats are known to be devoid of wings. Hence you can't prove that it's a cat, while, at the same time, you can prove that it is not a cat.
What? If you can prove it's not a cat, case closed, because the two situations are mutually incompatible. I can't prove it's a cat, because it's a bloody bird.
In order to prove it's not Greek, you have to be able to understand it sufficiently to bring together your argument. Therefore, in order to be able to say it's not Greek, you know enough about it to identify it if it were Greek.
Also, Greek doesn't have any living cognate language, so it's unlikely you'd get it confused with a similar one. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
Anton > 26-11-2022, 11:20 PM
(26-11-2022, 09:32 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What? If you can prove it's not a cat, case closed, because the two situations are mutually incompatible.
Something being Greek and it not being Greek are two situations mutually incompatible as well. Just been alarmed by the invocation of logic, you know
There would be markers for something being something, and there would be markers for it being not. I'm nearly zero in Greek, but speaking e.g. of Russian, if you are able to show that a text contains articles then by virtue of that you prove that it's not in Russian, because Russian does not have articles.
Regarding the OP question, this would depend on whether the text is considered to be a rendering of natural language, to begin with. If it is, then let's say frequency tables (those for letters and words) could show that it is not Greek. More generally, statistical characteristics of the text would suggest that the foundational assumption does not hold true, and then it is not Greek just by virtue of it not being a natural language flow.
But if the question is rather to disprove that the language behind the text is Greek, then I'm afraid it's difficult to approach from that direction at least until "real" word tokens are reliably extracted. Because we are not sure in word boundaries or if some kind of character transposition is not in place. Personally I would not approach it from that side. I would rather select a range of "candidate languages" like Latin, Italian, German etc. based on non-text markers (like cultural/provenance context, imagery etc.), and then try to reverse engineer the message based on vocabularies and statistical characteristics of those languages. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
Ruby Novacna > 11-12-2022, 03:53 PM
Although I find many of the words readable in Greek, the combinations of the glyphs pch - ph=f and kch- nk are written in the Latin way. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
nablator > 12-12-2022, 04:10 PM
(26-11-2022, 10:25 AM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
If you had a consistent way of converting Voynichese to Greek it would help a lot in this discussion, even if it is a long list of either do this or that (several possibilities).(25-11-2022, 10:41 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do you have all the possible substitutions written down somewhere?
Writing all the possible substitutions seems difficult, it would be feasible for a computer program. However, the substitutions I currently use are presented on the Word List page of my blog.
I have tried several times to figure out how you do it from the words on your blog and here and failed. -
RE: How to prove that the B-language is not Greek?
pfeaster > 12-12-2022, 05:30 PM
(11-12-2022, 03:53 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Although I find many of the words readable in Greek, the combinations of the glyphs pch - ph=f and kch- nk are written in the Latin way.
You asked whether there are any "clues that could exclude ancient Greek," and I take it you're looking mainly for any evidence against a solution in which Voynichese words are equivalent to Greek words and Voynichese glyphs correspond at least loosely to Greek plaintext characters.
The points others have raised about entropy and so forth are relevant, but let's try a different approach.
According to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., the twelve most common words in a large sample corpus of Greek texts -- together with their token counts in it -- are:
καὶ ["and"] 4129066
δὲ ["but"] 1501550
τὸ ["the"] 1414996
τοῦ ["the"] 1140938
τῶν ["the"] 1051317
τὴν ["the"] 993011
τῆς ["the"] 849596
ὁ ["the"] 831492
ἐν ["in"] 795289
γὰρ ["because"] 687117
τὸν ["the"] 679309
τὰ ["the"] 627063
If we take any text of significant length in grammatically and stylistically "normal" post-Homeric Ancient Greek and work out what its most frequent words are, we should expect the results to resemble these, at least approximately: the single most frequent word should be somewhere around 2.75 times as frequent as the next-most-frequent word, and five of the seven (or so) most frequent words should all begin with the same glyph (τ), which should also be different from the beginning glyph of the most common word of all (κ).
So let's consider the running text in Currier B. The top twelve words are:
chedy 429
Shedy 361
daiin 316
qokeedy 301
ol 289
qokedy 269
qokain 261
qokeey 252
qokaiin 241
aiin 232
chey 208
ar 197
I don't find tentative Greek readings for the most common Currier B words on your blog, but those words sometimes appear as parts of longer words for which you have proposed readings. Thus, if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., then [chedy] should be something like γειται; if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., then [shedy] should be something like σκεθην; and if You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., then [daiin] should be something like των. Of these, των is the only match for a word in the top twelve, but [daiin] is the only top-twelve word that begins with [d], whereas quite a few of the top twelve words in Greek begin with [τ]. It would be a very strange form of Greek indeed where the two most common words begin something like "get-" and "sket-"; this would be a bit like finding a 30,000 word text in English in which the two most frequently occurring words are not "the" and "of," but "blip" and "bloop."
On the other hand, if we wanted to force the Voynichese forms onto Greek forms, we could hypothesize that [chedy] = [Shedy] and that both represent the word καὶ. The token ratio of those two Voynichese words to the next most common word, [daiin], would then be nearly right (2.5 to 1 as compared to 2.75 to 1). Then [daiin] could represent δὲ, and all those common words starting [qok-] ([qokeedy], [qokedy], [qokain], [qokeey], [qokaiin]) could represent similarly common words starting in Greek with [τ] (τὸ, τοῦ, τῶν, τὴν, τῆς). Then perhaps [ol] = ὁ and [aiin] = ἐν.
That's starting to look pretty convincing, eh?
Except that, for consistency, [qokedy] really ought to end the same way as [chedy]/[Shedy] -- hence, ταὶ. And [qokaiin] should end the same way as [daiin] -- hence, τὲ -- while [aiin] should be just ὲ. But for the sake of argument, let's hypothesize that the glyph sequences [edy] and [aiin] can each represent more than one plaintext value, and that the words [qokedy] and [qokaiin] in fact represent τὸ and τοῦ. Alas, then we'd be faced with another problem: passages in which the Voynichese words appear side by side wouldn't seem to make much sense. For example, [qokeedy qokeedy qokedy qokedy qokeedy] would translate to "the the the the the."
Should we place any weight on these "clues"?
Meanwhile, we could also compare the results we get by applying particular forms of analysis to known negative cases -- that is, cases in which we know that a script does not match a given language. So, for instance, we might test the hypothesis that modern Slovenian is a system for writing modern Turkish. What happens if we look at the vocabulary of Slovenian and see if we can find matching Turkish words?
Slovenian [biti] = Turkish [biti], "his louse"
Slovenian [in] = Turkish [in], "den, cave"
Slovenian [do] = Turkish [doğa], "nature"
Slovenian [od] = Turkish [od], "fire, poison"
Slovenian [jaz] = Turkish [yaz], "summer"
Slovenian [v] = Turkish [ve], "and"
Slovenian [imeti] = Turkish [imdi], "now"
Slovenian [to] = Turkish [tuğ], "horse-tail crest"
Slovenian [on] = Turkish [on], "ten"
Slovenian [ne] = Turkish [ne], "what"
... and so forth
This seems to be working pretty well. So should we conclude that we're probably on the right track? If not, why not?