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Which plaintext languages to try?
- Which plaintext languages to try?
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RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Stefan Wirtz_2 > Yesterday, 12:19 PM
(21-06-2025, 06:12 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
And indeed Venetian does not have the geminated consonants of Italian, not at all: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Oh come on. For real?
Your own example shows double consonants after a few lines already. (Other example of singing italians: quite worthless here)
Doubled consonants can be be found at any corner of venetian,
so it is just not true to say that there is no „geminizing“ at all in North italian variants.
At least there are much more than Voynichese can deliver, and maybe less than in today‘s italian.
And this is, again, not the status of some kind of written Venetian 600 years ago.
Simple thing at last: if VMS was in any North Italian variant, someone would have found out meanwhile…
But it isn‘t in Latin or any latin-based language. -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Mauro > Yesterday, 01:11 PM
(Yesterday, 12:19 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Your own example shows double consonants after a few lines already. (Other example of singing italians: quite worthless here)
Doubled consonants can be be found at any corner of venetian,
so it is just not true to say that there is no „geminizing“ at all in North italian variants.
At least there are much more than Voynichese can deliver, and maybe less than in today‘s italian.
And this is, again, not the status of some kind of written Venetian 600 years ago.
And yet again, you are wrong. Venetian does not have geminated consonants, at all. When you see the doubled-s in a word such as 'preghesse' they do not represent two geminated [s], indeed... they represent a single [s]: 'preghesse' is pronounced [pre.'ge.se].
*Some* orthographies of Venetian (but not all) use this convention only because an Italian speaker would read 'preghese' as [pre.ge.ze], which would not be understood by a Venetian. With the doubled -s an Italian will read [pre.ge.sse], which is bad Venetian but at least is understandable. A mothertongue Venetian, instead, would wonder why 'preghesse' is written with two -s, when it obviously has only one.
As another example, this is from page 24 of the Eastern Lombard dictionary 'Vocabolario bresciano-italiano di Giovan Battista Melchiori', published in 1817 (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., when Eastern Lombard was yet a living language:
"Non si ammette alcuna doppia consonante, come inutile, tranne in alcune poche parole, nelle quali sembra che la pronuncia necessariamente il rieccheggia, come in emmatìs, emmuzonàs, emmulàs"
"No double consonants are allowed, because they serve no purpose, except in a few words where it seems the pronunciation necessarily echoes them, as in emmatìs, emmuzonàs, emmulàs".
Melchiori got it right, except for the exceptions... (but notice how he was cautious: 'seems to necessarily echo...') which actually are enmatìs (to go mad) enmüzonàs (to sulk) enmülàs (to become stubborn); notice 'en' means 'in' and is a common prefix for verbs. -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 08:49 PM
(Yesterday, 12:19 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(21-06-2025, 06:12 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[..]
Oh come on. For real?
And indeed Venetian does not have the geminated consonants of Italian, not at all: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Your own example shows double consonants after a few lines already. (Other example of singing italians: quite worthless here)
The geminated consonants of Italian are a phonetic feature that is reproduced in writing: "notte" is not just written differently than "note", it sounds different too. Gemination means a very brief stop before some consonants, like "t", "p", "k" (which is spelled "ch", and "cch" when doubled), and a lengthening of other consonants, like "m", "n", "l", "s". Most consonants can have that dual pronunciation. The case of "s" however is more complicated because between vowels, as in "casa" the simple "s" sound is generally replaced by a soft "z" sound. The simple "s" sound exists mostly at the beginning or end of words ("sento", "gas"), or in clusters like "basta".
Therefore, in Italian spelling the "ss" has two functions: (1) when between vowels, it prevents the sound from turning into a "z" sound, and (2) adds the lengthening/stop of geminated consonants ("cassa" v. "casa").
Spoken Venetian does not have geminated consonants, not even for the "s" sound. (The videos I posted were meant to show that.) . That is an unusual feature among Italian "dialects"; in spoken Neapolitan, for instance, geminated consonant sounds are quite noticeable. When speaking Italian, I still must make a conscious effort to pronounce the geminated consonants, and often forget to do so. Sometimes, before I finish the first sentence, other Italians will ask "are you Venetian"?
But the most common spelling system for the Venetian language is basically the standard Italian spelling, with a few changes, and therefore consonants other than "s" are never doubled. But "ss" is still written doubled between vowels, because a single "s" there, which phonetically would make more sense, would be pronounced "z" according to the Italian pronunciation rules. For example, when the Italian word "cassa" ("box", pronounced with doubled "s" sound) is translated into Venetian, it must still be written "cassa" but is be pronounced with a simple s sound. Whereas the Venetian word that is written "casa" is pronounced "caza", as in Italian.
(Among the changes that had to be made is that "ce" and "ci" in written Venetian ("cena", "cinghia") must be pronounced with a simple "s" consonant, whereas in Italian they are pronounced with a "tch" consonant.)
That spelling system is used for the convenience of those Italian speakers who do not speak Venetian and/or cannot be expected to learn a different spelling system just for it. But if one were to design a Venetian spelling system from scratch, the "s" sound would be written with a single letter that would always be pronounced like simple s, even between vowels. (And also "ch", "sc", "gh", "gn", "gl" would be replaced by single letters.)
Quote:it is just not true to say that there is no „geminizing“ at all in North italian variants.
I did not say that! Again, other Italian dialects do have geminated consonants in the spoken language, and therefore their written versions have them too.
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Aga Tentakulus > Today, 06:45 AM
However, since the German text is still there in the VM, and it also fits with the region, it is likely that the double ss will simply be replaced by a z. This can often be found in old books.
At the same time, it also shows that frequent use is not as far-fetched as one might think.
Take, for example, the many o's in words. And when they are still attached to the word, it is almost VM.
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RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Mauro > 10 hours ago
(Yesterday, 08:49 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That spelling system is used for the convenience of those Italian speakers who do not speak Venetian and/or cannot be expected to learn a different spelling system just for it. But if one were to design a Venetian spelling system from scratch, the "s" sound would be written with a single letter that would always be pronounced like simple s, even between vowels.
And, I would add, the [z] sound would just be represented by 'z'.
Quote:it is just not true to say that there is no „geminizing“ at all in North italian variants.
I did not say that! Again, other Italian dialects do have geminated consonants in the spoken language, and therefore their written versions have them too.
All the best, --jorge
[/quote]
Notice he said 'North italian', and it is indeed true all northern Italy languages (northward of the La Spezia - Rimini line) do not have geminated consonants (while all southern languages do). -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
oshfdk > 8 hours ago
Just in case, to the moderator and participants, as far as I'm concerned this discussion is still on topic here. Plaintext character statistics, which characters might be duplicated, which duplicated characters can be replaced by some other character, spelling conventions, etc is exactly the information I'm looking for in this thread. -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
dfs346 > 8 hours ago
Jorge_Stolfi Wrote:My native language is Venetian
Dear Jorge, could you recommend a document in Venetian from the 15th century, for my study of letter and word frequencies? -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Jorge_Stolfi > 6 hours ago
(8 hours ago)dfs346 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Dear Jorge, could you recommend a document in Venetian from the 15th century, for my study of letter and word frequencies?
There are very few written texts in Venetian from before the 1800s, or even the 1900s.
The best ones I know are the plays/monologues by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from ~1500, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. As this example shows, Venetian was used in plays or tales only to mark a character as an ignorant rustic peasant. Even Goldoni, the Venetian playwright who created the Harlequin character, wrote mostly in Tuscan (=Italian) and only used Venetian for that purpose (and it seems that he translated Venetian parts to Tuscan in the printed editions of his plays).
The dialect of Ruzante is from Padua, which is about 5'000'000 cm distant from my parents' home town. I don't know if it is that enormous distance, or 400 years of language evolution, but I can understand only maybe 70% of those texts.
Hope it helps...
All the best, --jorge -
RE: Which plaintext languages to try?
Jorge_Stolfi > 5 hours ago
(6 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The best ones I know are the plays/monologues by You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. from ~1500, like You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
PS. You may want to use the "edizion moderna" which uses a more phonetic spelling. The original spelling seems to use the Italian spelling for many words, with doubled consonants, which which I suppose were not pronounced as such.
Original: ... de arivare a l’herba nuova, cavalla magra, e imbozzia, a me reffare pure ...
Modern: ... d’arivare a l’erba nuova cavala magra e imbolsía. A me refaré pure ...
The latter is much more like what "my" Venetian would sound like.
As for the dialogues collected/created by Francesco Artico, they are in modern Venetian from the Piana, the region just east of Venice. That is only 2'500'000 cm from Treviso, and that dialect sounds very much like "my" Venetian. (One difference I noticed is that he says "pìe"= "feet" with stress on the "i", whereas in "my" dialect it is "piè" with stress on the "e".)
All the best, --jorge