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Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

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• Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

• Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  DorotheeM > Yesterday, 06:30 PM

  Dear all,
  
  let me please present you my current work.
  
  First, my current working hypothesis: The VMS is a compendium of midwifery knowledge compiled during the turmoils within and around the Knights Hospitaller and the rise of the Aragonese, and written in a specifically for this purpose designed and constructed script - on Malta, in the first decades of the 15th. century.  Please note, that I honestly doubt this is the ultimative solution - but I assume it's a good pivot point for further investigations.
  
  
  My main and leading assumptions are as follows:
  
  1. The VMS is (to me at least, obviously) a compendium of midwifery knowledge. No secret society behind it, no cryptography, no deeper metaphorical setup constructing deeper enlighment only to share with the rulers who are worth to know in the sight of God. And not necessarily funded in far-away countries. All just things, your ordinary Jane Doe Midwife should know. This does not automatically rule out metaphorical comparisons or complex systems we nowadays would consider superstition in a given detail, but focussing eg. on the illustrations I would tend to say: if you see a bathing female nude, I assume that Occam's razor surely suggest a bathing nude in first place and not some half-divine figure from forthcoming apocalypses, the power of Qi or similar.  Let's keep it simple.
  
  2. Books about midwifery are rare, though midwifery was daily practice and common to use. This is knowledge that for some very good reasons usually was handed over personally from one generation of commited women to the next, normally "on the job", and for centuries, normally strictly orally. And even this had to be done with a lot of precautionary measures. Seeing it written down is a very rare thing. This may have, BTW, led to some blind spot within the one or the other VMS theory. An usual book is an unlikely book. Around 1400~1430 AD (I take this slot as a given) Malta already had at least one vivid hospital, most likely two, and like in Akkon, Rhodos, Sigena or other places,  Mulieres Sti. Johannis and their staff (mostly local woman)  were active here, too, and as far historians tell us, scientifically leading. But the loss of estates in the Holy Land led to a severe crisis within the Knights Hospitaller and their related enterprises. The Order concentrated their activities to Rhodos. And so (long before the order relocated to Malta), the future of the care work on Malta was unclear.  A relocation for nuns, often originatrd from european countries and sometimes of noble birth, was always possible. One for the local midwifes wasn't, at least not for all of them. So there might have been the decision to keep these treasures alive. Even in case the chain of support would not break on Malta, it would have been handy to have a compendium that might be used for teaching lessons to successors. And yes, Malta, is franky spoken, a vague idea. Several places would work without big differences. But, alas, everyone needs a place to start.
  
  3. But how to maintain this knowledge? By writing it down. I assume that a team of several people helped to write down the oral explanations of the local Maltese midwives. Hence, several scribes. Hence, several ducts. But they had to master further challenges: there was no script for (early) Maltese. And most probably, the team had no shared language with those. Maybe the midwives even had different dialects. So they found an obvious solution by setting up a script. This included a few decisons: the simplified radically what they hear into a small group of consonants. Maybe they did the same with the vowels, maybe they skipped them directly. E.g. 13 different fricatives as modern Arabian has, can easily be stripped together to a few. Same with plosives. Nasals, Liquids - one each is enough.  I already tested it with classical Arabian, and generally it works - I will soon present here my first steps as well in detail.  Of course, with lower Shannon entropy come more homonyms. But the root structure of any semitic language is full of redundance. Nevertheless, some peculiarities of VMS may root in corrective measures to avoid homonyms - e.g.: clear word borders, positional markers, ligatures, and maybe, additionally, vowels or matres. With only a small subset of letters needed they could work on a system for quick writing and, as I assume, integrated this as well. Again, I see no way at the moment, to reduce the possible phonems to graphems in a way that means easy undoing it the other way round. Maybe for ever. But for reading a language one already knows this not necessary. It's just a bummer we don't know and maybe never will.
  
  4. Beside the work on further evidences that this might have been the key to the alphabet and maybe additional estimations there, I'm working on a second corpus lingustic topic, and this is to analyze, whether it is at least not totally unlikely the VMS was written (or better dictated) in a semitic language. I adopted a method here from pattern recognition and I named it "fake lemmata". This includes the setup of word lists (including lists for hapax and dislegomena) and calculate entropy and collocations. Whenever an observed pattern turns out to be significant (fake lemma) it is replaced in a derivated corpus (shadow corpus) as a dedicated token. This is done iteratively. For semitic languages it is expected, that the collocations would rise in distinctiveness and the distribution will be more stable. This comes with several stages of root lexica, word lengthes, TTR, change of Zipf curves, entropy and more Information to analyse. This is, of course, not only done for VMS but also for Maltese, Siculo-arabian, classic Arabian, Hebrew and several addional comparison corpora.  The amount of operations is then the measure to compare, like, but not the same as the Levenshtein distance.
  
  Let me please remind at least myself in addition, that every additional assumption makes the overall approach more unlikely - even if makes the approach at first glance additionally plausible. We all tend to such cognitive bias, as we know from Kahneman and Tversky (and Slovic, if I recall it correctly).
  
  
  So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.
  
  Thank you in advance. 
  
  
  Dorothée

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  oshfdk > Yesterday, 06:51 PM

  (Yesterday, 06:30 PM)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.

  
  Hi!
  
  I'm not sure what to challenge here, is there any specific evidence pointing towards Maltese? I think Maltese has been discussed before, but I can't find it now.
  
  Also, for a midwifery book, I find the total lack of babies in the images a bit unexpected.

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  DG97EEB > Yesterday, 07:08 PM

  (Yesterday, 06:51 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (Yesterday, 06:30 PM)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.

  
  Hi!
  
  I'm not sure what to challenge here, is there any specific evidence pointing towards Maltese? I think Maltese has been discussed before, but I can't find it now.
  
  Also, for a midwifery book, I find the total lack of babies in the images a bit unexpected.

  
  From my search engine:
  
  The possibility of Maltese as the language of the Voynich Manuscript has been discussed by several researchers. Emma May Smith considered Maltese due to its historical context, its status as a Semitic language written in Roman script, and the potential for its unvoweled nature to explain the manuscript's characteristics. [3] Michael Zakaria also raised the possibility of the text being an archaic creole, or a variant of Latinized Siculo-Arabic, similar to modern Maltese. [10] In 1991, Jacques Guy speculated whether one of the two proposed "languages" in the manuscript could be Maltese, suggesting a connection to Sabir dialects spoken by Venetian and Maltese individuals. [1] R.S. Richmond noted in 1997 that while Semitic languages are usually written without all vowels, Maltese is fully vocalized. [5] More recently, in 2022, a peer-reviewed paper by Caruana, Layfield, and Abela, based in Malta, acknowledged the limitations of their language coverage in comparing the Voynich Manuscript to only Old English and Old Italian. [15] They noted that resources for low-resource languages like Maltese are limited, despite their team being well-placed to study it. [15] On the voynich.ninja forum in 2021, VViews expressed a wish for Maltese to have been included in such comparisons, while also noting the scarcity of surviving Maltese texts from before the 1485 Kantilena. [16]
  
  Sources:
  [1] voynich.nu mailing list a1991 — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [3] Summary of my views on the Voynich Manuscript — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [5] voynich.nu mailing list a1997C — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [10] Nick Pelling - a response — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [15] An Analysis of the Relationship between Words within the Voynich Manuscript (Caruana, Layfield & Abela 2022) — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [16] Dr. Colin Layfield and Dr. John Abela are doing research on the VMS — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  Jorge_Stolfi > Yesterday, 11:00 PM

  (Yesterday, 06:30 PM)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.First, my current working hypothesis: The VMS is a compendium of midwifery knowledge compiled during the turmoils within and around the Knights Hospitaller and the rise of the Aragonese, and written in a specifically for this purpose designed and constructed script - on Malta, in the first decades of the 15th. century.  Please note, that I honestly doubt this is the ultimate solution - but I assume it's a good pivot point for further investigations.
  
  So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.

  
  Well, one objection is that the VMS consists of at least five separate sections, with no visible link between them other than the script and language and the style of writing and drawing:

  • Herbal + Pharmaceutical
    
  • Astronomical + Cosmological
    
  • Astrological (the Zodiac)
    
  • Biological (or Anatomical, Balneological, etc.)
    
  • Starred Paragraphs (or Recipes)
    

  Only the Biological section has elements that could be considered related to midwifery.  But even in that case the interpretation seems to be rather stretched.  The top image on f77v has been claimed to represent the uterus with ovaries and Fallopian tubes; but the position of the latter is wrong, and what should we make of the bifurcated tubes at the very top, or of the three pendants at the bottom of the  "uterus"?  Could that illustration instead be a sorry attempt to illustrate the kidneys and bladder?
  
  None of the other images in that section seem to be about pregnancy or delivery.  There is not a single baby in that section. 
  
  The Herbal and Pharmaceutical sections seem to be what they seem to be, lists of plants and their medical properties.  But the sheer number of plants argues against them being related to midwifery.  Those sections look more like other herbals of the time: that is, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for every kind of condition and use (including bleaching hair, making one invisible, hardening iron, ...)
  
  I gather that medical books of the time often connected medicine to astrology, so the Zodiac section could be part of that.  But, again, I don't see anything in that section that suggests a connection to medicine, much less midwifery; and I don't see anything in the other sections (besides Astro+Cosmo) that suggests a connection to astrology. 
  
  Moreover, I imagine that midwives at the time (and for many centuries before and after) were generally practical people with no formal studies and no inclination to them.   "Ordinary Jane Does" as you write.  So I would expect that a manual of midwifery would be down-to-earth, packed with practical advice and scarce on theoretical digressions (like astrological influences).
  
  My own theory is that the VMS is a collection of several independent treatises, written by distinct authors in separate times and places, that were copied/translated/summarized/adapted by the VMS Author, with no attempt to connect or harmonize them.  In that case, your theory at best would apply to the Biological section only.
  
  

  Quote:No secret society behind it, no cryptography, no deeper metaphorical setup constructing deeper enlighment only to share with the rulers who are worth to know in the sight of God.

  
  I happen to agree with this part...
  
  

  Quote:And not necessarily funded in far-away countries.

  
  Well, Malta is not quite Europe's backyard...
  
  

  Quote:if you see a bathing female nude, I assume that Occam's razor surely suggest a bathing nude in first place and not some half-divine figure from forthcoming apocalypses, the power of Qi or similar.  Let's keep it simple.

  
  Makes sense...  but, by the same argument: if gestation, delivery, and babies are not depicted anywhere, we should assume that the book is not about those things...
  
  

  Quote:Mulieres Sti. Johannis and their staff (mostly local woman)  were active [in Malta], too, and as far historians tell us, scientifically leading.

   
  Can you elaborate on that "scientifically leading" aspect? 
  
  

  Quote:4. Beside the work on further evidences that this might have been the key to the alphabet and maybe additional estimations there, I'm working on a second corpus lingustic topic, and this is to analyze, whether it is at least not totally unlikely the VMS was written (or better dictated) in a semitic language. I adopted a method here from pattern recognition and I named it "fake lemmata". This includes the setup of word lists (including lists for hapax and dislegomena) and calculate entropy and collocations. Whenever an observed pattern turns out to be significant (fake lemma) it is replaced in a derivated corpus (shadow corpus) as a dedicated token. This is done iteratively. For semitic languages it is expected, that the collocations would rise in distinctiveness and the distribution will be more stable. This comes with several stages of root lexica, word lengthes, TTR, change of Zipf curves, entropy and more Information to analyse. This is, of course, not only done for VMS but also for Maltese, Siculo-arabian, classic Arabian, Hebrew and several addional comparison corpora.  The amount of operations is then the measure to compare, like, but not the same as the Levenshtein distance.

  
  Oops, this technical word salad sounds suspiciously like output of a lalamo...
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  DorotheeM > 4 hours ago

  (Yesterday, 07:08 PM)DG97EEB Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (Yesterday, 06:51 PM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  (Yesterday, 06:30 PM)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.So now, challenge me, roast me. As sooner I know where my false assumptions are, the sooner I can adopt my approach.

  
  Hi!
  
  I'm not sure what to challenge here, is there any specific evidence pointing towards Maltese? I think Maltese has been discussed before, but I can't find it now.
  
  Also, for a midwifery book, I find the total lack of babies in the images a bit unexpected.

  
  From my search engine:
  
  The possibility of Maltese as the language of the Voynich Manuscript has been discussed by several researchers. Emma May Smith considered Maltese due to its historical context, its status as a Semitic language written in Roman script, and the potential for its unvoweled nature to explain the manuscript's characteristics. [3] Michael Zakaria also raised the possibility of the text being an archaic creole, or a variant of Latinized Siculo-Arabic, similar to modern Maltese. [10] In 1991, Jacques Guy speculated whether one of the two proposed "languages" in the manuscript could be Maltese, suggesting a connection to Sabir dialects spoken by Venetian and Maltese individuals. [1] R.S. Richmond noted in 1997 that while Semitic languages are usually written without all vowels, Maltese is fully vocalized. [5] More recently, in 2022, a peer-reviewed paper by Caruana, Layfield, and Abela, based in Malta, acknowledged the limitations of their language coverage in comparing the Voynich Manuscript to only Old English and Old Italian. [15] They noted that resources for low-resource languages like Maltese are limited, despite their team being well-placed to study it. [15] On the voynich.ninja forum in 2021, VViews expressed a wish for Maltese to have been included in such comparisons, while also noting the scarcity of surviving Maltese texts from before the 1485 Kantilena. [16]
  
  Sources:
  [1] voynich.nu mailing list a1991 — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [3] Summary of my views on the Voynich Manuscript — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [5] voynich.nu mailing list a1997C — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [10] Nick Pelling - a response — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [15] An Analysis of the Relationship between Words within the Voynich Manuscript (Caruana, Layfield & Abela 2022) — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  [16] Dr. Colin Layfield and Dr. John Abela are doing research on the VMS — You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

  
  Thank you for the summary, I just checked all of the sources. There is just a little paralipomenon I'd like to add to [5]: Maltese is nowadays vocalized, true. At the time of the VMS, it hasn't been scripted at all or ar least all attempts from then are lost, in which latter case we won't know how it was set up usually.  From other languages and the given assumptions, my first guess it was written within  MS with 3 vowels covering some range, roughly described as: <a>, <(e)/i> and <(o)/u>, maybe additionally with a ligatur for short or long. This pairing is rooted in the approximity of sounds, that would make it hard to differ for non-native speakers. That would mostly cover the scheme in Arabian, too.

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  DorotheeM > 4 hours ago

  [quote="oshfdk" pid='86651' dateline='1782755515']
  [quote]
  
  Hi!
  
  I'm not sure what to challenge here, is there any specific evidence pointing towards Maltese? I think Maltese has been discussed before, but I can't find it now.
  
  Also, for a midwifery book, I find the total lack of babies in the images a bit unexpected.
  [/quote]
  
  
  I see your point, but there might have been a reason. Once a baby was born and baptized, usually immediately after birth, the job of the local midwife was done. This was different from now and even different from 100 years later. As the babies (directly after birth) were christian babies, the aftercare was done by other, baptized people. You never know, don't you? Your local midwife was your local witch, too.
  
  Well, it's tricky to be precise when exactly that changed, especially on Malta - but it did in the midrun, mostly because the midwives became or already were christian, too.
  
  Doro

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  DorotheeM > 3 hours ago

  [quote="Jorge_Stolfi" pid='86670' dateline='1782770437']
  

  Quote: Can you elaborate on that "scientifically leading" aspect? 

  
  Gladly, but later, I'm still collecting documents.
  
  

  Quote: Oops, this technical word salad sounds suspiciously like output of a lalamo...

  
  I kindly assume this wasn't meant to be insultive or abusive, because, frankly said, it sounded so. There is no AI involved in any way. Wouldn't help a lot, IMHO.
  
  
  Well, I'm going to describe my methodologies later, but it will take some time, and it's the end of the academic turn right now here in Mainz, keepng all of us extra busy. 
  
  
  Cheers,
  
  Doro

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  Jorge_Stolfi > 2 hours ago

  (3 hours ago)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I kindly assume this wasn't meant to be insultive or abusive, because, frankly said, it sounded so. There is no AI involved in any way.

  
  Apologies if I guessed wrong.  But that last paragraph does read like the author did not care whether readers would understand it or not... 
  
  All the best, --stolfi

• RE: Midwifery miscellanea, mayhap Maltese

  oshfdk > 2 hours ago

  (4 hours ago)DorotheeM Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I see your point, but there might have been a reason. Once a baby was born and baptized, usually immediately after birth, the job of the local midwife was done

  
  As far as I understand, midwife was usually the first person to touch the baby and her job was to make sure the birth goes smoothly for both the mom and the baby. Handling babies is an essential part of midwife's profession.
  
  So far I don't think you have presented any direct evidence that the book has something to do with midwifery or that the book has something to do with Maltese. Is this correct?
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