Emma May Smith > 07-10-2016, 08:45 PM
stellar > 07-10-2016, 10:51 PM
(07-10-2016, 08:45 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It is believed by some researchers that the Voynich script, language, or both, were designed by the author of the manuscript. This is used to explain why the manuscript is both unique in its appearance and somewhat divergent in its underlying statistics. Were the script or language to have been designed then we can fairly assumed there must be some understanding of linguistics which informed that design.
So an inlightening question for researchers to answer is what possible knowledge was available to the author. Although we can put an ultimate date and place of creation in 1400s Europe, the sources of knowledge may be much wider spread. Thankfully, we can divide linguistic traditions into five main groups: Medieval European, Greek-Latin, Arabic, Indian, and Chinese. (We could also assume some 'folk' knowledge of linguistics, in that unlearned people had ways of looking at language which could have been an influence, but such things seem to be unrecorded.) Due to the time and place of creation the first two traditions—Medieval European and Greek-Latin—are most immediately interesting.
I've been reading a little about these two traditions, specifically their understanding of phonology and phonetics, in order to learn how they might have understood a language were they seeking to design a script for it.
Medieval European linguistics was based on the knowledge of Latin writers but extended in various directions. Their main interests were logic, rhetoric, and semantics, and do not seem to have been innovative with regard to the study of phonology or phonetics. Whatever they knew about these areas were based on ancient authorities, but I cannot discover exactly the depth of their knowledge except that it was much more on Latin writers than Greek.
The Medieval European tradition was wholly forsaken at the onset of the Renaissance with a switch to the full Latin-Greek tradition which was being revealed through the new learning. However, it is hard to say exactly when the new ancient knowledge became available. Some, certainly Aristotle, would have been available before 1400 for the author of the Voynich manuscript to have studied. Others will not have been available.
Thus we're interested in the Latin-Greek tradition, specifically Greek knowledge of phonology and phonetics, which was relatively advanced. The Greek made a number of interesting discoveries and developed a classification of sounds which is of interest to us. I will enumerate the main points, at least as I see them.
1) A clear distinction between vowels and consonants.
2) A further distinction between 'half sound' and 'soundless' consonants. That is, between sonorants like /l, r, n, m/ and /s/, and plosives /p, t, k, b, d, g, ph, th, kh/ and /h/.
3) They specifically linked aspiration with the sound /h/.
4) They saw voiceless, voiceless aspirated, and voiced plosives as existing on a kind of spectrum. So that if /p/ and /ph/ were voiceless and voiceless aspirated counterparts then /b/, the voiced sound from the same place of articulation, was seen as 'between' the two. This is actually wrong, as voicing and aspiration are not linked in this way, but it was their understanding of it.
I haven't yet read up on Arabic, Chinese, and Indian linguistics, though I guess that Indian linguistics will be the most interesting for our purposes. I hope somebody can add further knowledge or raise important points.
Diane > 08-10-2016, 03:39 AM
Emma May Smith > 08-10-2016, 06:28 PM