- Options
- Login
- Desktop Style
Options
Lingua Volgare Shorthand
- Lingua Volgare Shorthand
-
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
R. Sale > 03-03-2025, 09:56 PM
Pick a page or segment of text and do something with it. Methodology is fine. Analysis is all well and good. But statistics don't translate the text. There need to be certain pages where specific parts of the text are put up for interpretation, based on a process of selection.
If there is a proposed vocabulary, where do those vords cluster? Ostensibly, those clusters should provide a fair advantage to interpretation, but if no sense can be made of this, what does that really mean? Let's see if it actually works on a few specified segments of text. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
MarcoP > 03-03-2025, 10:19 PM
(02-03-2025, 03:44 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Quote:We are looking for specialists in lingua volgare shorthand to replicate our solution and mitigate our confirmation bias.
I am curious about lingua volgare shorthand. Could you please link a couple of scanned manuscripts, so I can have a look?
(03-03-2025, 09:51 PM)ginocaspari Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Understanding what a shorthand is and how it functions is nonetheless a requirement for even being open to such a solution displaying different statistical properties.
Understanding the miraculous shorthand that results in the observed properties of Voynichese would be much easier if you linked examples of shorthand manuscripts that you consider to be similar. Discussing actual evidence and reading actual manuscripts is much more interesting than speculation. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
pfeaster > 03-03-2025, 11:35 PM
(03-03-2025, 09:51 PM)ginocaspari Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Understanding what a shorthand is and how it functions is nonetheless a requirement for even being open to such a solution displaying different statistical properties.
I've studied a number of older shorthand systems, and one feature they all seem to share in common is that they methodically replace the letters of the alphabet with simpler, easier-to-form characters as a means of saving time. For example, the character for [s], as a letter or a phoneme, should be faster and simpler to write than a conventional [s]. The Voynichese characters in your key don't seem to satisfy that criterion -- your Voynichese [s], for example, would take considerably longer to write than a conventional early fifteenth-century [s].
It seems reasonable enough to suggest that the plaintext behind Voynichese might be a highly abbreviated and contracted written form of a vernacular language. But even if it were, I'd have reservations about calling it "shorthand," except in a casual or colloquial sense -- there's nothing about the design of the characters that points to any interest in attaining higher writing speeds. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
Rafal > 04-03-2025, 02:27 PM
I'll throw some my opinions.
You are right that EVA transcription is not perfect. I don't like it a bit too. It treats things which are most probably single symbols like "benches" as they would be group of letters. And what is even worse it creates a false impression that some letters appear in the vords while they most probably don't appear.
Have a look:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
EVA makes you believe that these two vords share "c" letter and "h" letter. But probably they don't as "ch" is single symbol and "cth" is another single symbol which may be something totally different. So in my personal opinion it would be really better to write it down something like Xor and Yom. Unfortunately 90% of people don't notice it or forget it and they treat "c" and "h" in these two words like they were the same letters when they do their substitutions.
And speaking of substitutions, this is the major challenge of your solution. You seem rational but you are doing the same thing as many people before - a simple substitution, although a bit less simple in your case as you notice the benches and things like "aiin" to be single things. It's not true that other people were unable to get any longer texts with it. Check for example these solutions:
Gerard Chesire You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
John Farmer You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Sugula and Kaluzna You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
They all give you "something" which is a text which is not very grammatical, has words are only similar to real words, symbols are ambiguous and the meaning is quite weird. But they always pull an ace out of their sleeve that it is some rare dialect full of abbreviations and the author uses some "licentia poetica" which allows him to write in strange way.
None of these solutions were accepted. Do you think you can do it better? -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
Ruby Novacna > 04-03-2025, 05:32 PM
(04-03-2025, 02:27 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... But probably they don't as "ch" is single symbol and "cth" is another single symbol which may be something totally different.
This is a good idea, has anyone tried it? It increases the number of letters in the alphabet. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
Rafal > 04-03-2025, 06:41 PM
Quote:This is a good idea, has anyone tried it? It increases the number of letters in the alphabet.
I suppose people try different approaches in their own research but often don't boast about it if they don't bring results. As you can see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. people tried different transliterations. Somehow EVA became the standard yet in the 1990s.
As nobody had any serious breakthrough with the text, it remains so. I guess, you would need to show in some concrete way that something works better and only then we could think of replacing EVA. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
ReneZ > 05-03-2025, 05:30 AM
Everyone is welcome to create his own transliteration, and everyone is welcome to create his own transliteration alphabet.
These are two different things of course.
When it comes to changing or improving the transliteration alphabet, I have created, and made public available, a tool to do that very conveniently. I use it constantly.
The only problem I see in the above reasoning, and which I have been seeing over the last 20+ years, is a misunderstanding what is the purpose of a transliteration alphabet.
It is NOT meant to indicate the meaning of the character. Just to represent the shape.
When shapes appear in different contexts, their meaning can vary depending on the context.
There is no way of knowing (just yet) whether ch is a single character and/or cth is a single character.
These are just text strings that your software can process. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
MarcoP > 05-03-2025, 08:18 AM
I don’t think I am aware of any formal paper in which the authors do not understand that EVA is meant to be easy to pre-process to test different options, forming glyphs made of several strokes. But, understandably, several amateurs are not familiar with the literature and fail to grasp the concept. A clear discussion of the subject, and a good example of what can be done by a simple EVA pre-processing, is Lindemann, L., & Bowern, C. (2020) You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., also referenced by the authors of the theory discussed in this thread. Actually, the theory is based on a system comparable with Lindemann and Bowern’s Minimal Transliteration (where they group 20 EVA sequences, including benches and benched gallows, to form 20 individual characters). Lindemann and Bowern show that such a transliteration does not cause a large increase in entropy and does not go even near to solving the problem. -
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
Ruby Novacna > 05-03-2025, 08:40 AM
-
RE: Lingua Volgare Shorthand
pfeaster > 16-03-2025, 05:32 PM
(03-03-2025, 09:51 PM)ginocaspari Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Understanding what a shorthand is and how it functions is nonetheless a requirement for even being open to such a solution displaying different statistical properties.
I'm still waiting on a concrete specimen of the type of Italian "shorthand" these researchers have in mind. However, the question of the statistical properties of vernacular "shorthand" systems is an interesting one, so I'd like to go ahead and share an example of my own for consideration here that isn't as old as the Voynich manuscript, but that's conveniently written in English, so that most people who read this forum should have the basic linguistic background needed to grasp how it works.
As I mentioned earlier, "shorthand" generally implies that simpler characters have been substituted for the conventional letters of the alphabet. But this wasn't invariably so. Histories of English shorthand -- which include the earliest known vernacular shorthand systems purposefully devised since classical antiquity -- start in the late sixteenth century with Timothe Bright and Peter Bales, with some uncertainty as to which of them came first. Bright used arbitrary marks somewhat similar in character to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. written about by David A. King, while Bales reportedly used conventional letters of the alphabet with dots in various positions around them. Both systems seem to have followed the logic of the codebook. Thus, all words beginning with B would be listed in a loose kind of alphabetical order under "B," and would be written as "B" plus a mark indicating the number of the word. In Bright's system, for example, we have Banish = B1, Bargaine = B2, Beare = B3, Beast = B4, Beate = B5, and so forth. To keep the vocabulary manageable, Bright also provided a list of rough synonyms, so that "Abashe" could be written as Blush = B24, "Abbote" could be written as Bishop = B18, etc. As far as I can tell, the first English shorthand systems that pursued any other approach didn't arise until a couple decades into the seventeenth century.
I've read that, outside of instructional manuals, there's only one known manuscript text in Bright's system, and none at all in Bales's system. I'm not sure whether that's strictly accurate or not, but it seems there's not a vast quantity of true shorthand text from this early period to analyze.
So on to my example. I recently acquired a 738-page manuscript compiled in 1637-38 by William Jewell at the school of Langford -- or so a couple of Latin inscriptions in it state, although I haven't yet been able to identify either the person or the place any further than that. The handwriting is tiny, and except for a few titles, quotations, and notes in Latin and Greek, it takes the form of a very heavily abbreviated form of English. Much of the content follows the texts of two printed books: An Explanation of the Generall Epistle of Saint Iude by Samuel Otes and Christs Victorie over the Dragon by Thomas Taylor, both published in 1633. However, both books were themselves based on earlier public lectures, and Otes's at least must have been taken down in shorthand or something similar (on December 24, 1601, he was in the middle of one lecture when an earthquake struck, and he immediately pivoted to an extemporaneous talk about earthquakes which he can't possibly have prepared in advance). The versions of the texts in my manuscript are worded differently than the published ones, and in ways that suggest they're based either on separate records of the lectures or on different "readings" of shorthand notes (where, for example, one source might have had "Abbote" while the other has "Bishop," since both words would have been taken down identically in Bright's system).
I wouldn't say my manuscript is written in "shorthand," exactly, but it's more heavily abbreviated than any other English writing I've seen from the time. Here's one typical page, numbered 707, corresponding to a passage in Christs Victorie over the Dragon beginning at page 828 (if you want a crib -- through comparison with the printed text, I've been able to decipher all but about half a dozen words). I chose this page only because it was easy for me to scan without risk of damage: it's the first page of the last signature, which is detached from the rest.
The marks for some words seem arbitrary (the = "o.", perhaps reflecting Bright's use of a circle for this word; that = "+"). Others are simply truncated with a period (e.g., "bo." = "body"; "so." = "soul"; "beli. & li." = "believe and live"). An overbar at the end of a word generally indicates an m or n somewhere towards the end (e.g., "dn." with overbar over the period = "dragon"; "destr." with similar overbar = "destruction"; "y" with overbar = "then" or "them" depending on context). A superscript letter placed above the period usually indicates the last letter of a word (e.g., "wr." plus superscript "h" = "wrath") or a letter near the end (e.g., "wh." plus superscript "c" = "which"). As with "then" / "them," there are numerous abbreviations that need to be disambiguated from context or memory; another such example I've noticed is "tho." = "those" / "though." In one other passage, I see that "b." = "bird"; but I doubt the single-letter abbreviation "b." was universally assigned to that reading, since single-letter abbreviations seem mostly to have been limited to words used very frequently (e.g., "G. o. f." = "God the father").
I'm putting this forward as a concrete example of vernacular writing that has been very heavily abbreviated. I'm guessing that this is more or less the kind of model the "lingua volgare" researchers have in mind, except for it being in English rather than Italian.
For what it's worth, I believe words do tend to follow a more rigid structure here than they do in English longhand. But I'm not sure how best to calculate entropy or other useful statistics -- as with Voynichese, there are some features of the writing here that could be transcribed in a variety of ways with different results. For example: how would we encode a superscript character per se? Superscripts are almost always word-final or word-penultimate.