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• Not words but logograms?

• Not words but logograms?

  Dirac > 10-07-2026, 09:41 PM

  Hi,
  
  New user, I'm sure this idea has been debunked already but on the tiny chance that it hasn't been:
  
  What if what we currently consider to be "letters" aren't letters at all but akin to "strokes" in hanzi? So no connection to phonemes, but each word is still a word, or at least a concept akin to a single Chinese character. This could explain why the inventory of characters is so low (and strangely distributed) for a natural language (Hanzi has around 8 or so basic strokes, which combined in 2d space make a character, Voynichese could be similar but in 1d), and no attempt at pulling phonemic values from them has been successful.
  
  Obviously there is absolutely nothing in the historic record akin to this, and I'm not even sure if this has been repeated in the world of conlanging, but it could theoretically work as a system?
  
  
  This would however make it significantly harder to actually solve, as the "words" are then relatively arbitrary when it comes to associated meanings.
  
  Any thoughts or ideas as to how this could be proved/disproved?
  
  
  This is pure and idle speculation, but I'm trying to think of ways that aren't the extremely debunked substitutions, but still would (I believe) conform with the statistical analyses.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  ololololo > 10-07-2026, 11:18 PM

  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and it seems that in this case they tend more towards Asian languages than philosophical ones.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  oshfdk > 11-07-2026, 12:02 AM

  As with most theories that are not immediately and obviously wrong, the only way to prove it (I think) is to provide a reproducible decoding into sensible plaintext for a large enough part of the manuscript. And the only way to disprove it is to provide a similar decoding but using some competing theory.
  
  Generally this system may work and I think it has been discussed in the past. Also, it's reminiscent of Cangjie or Wubi input methods for Chinese characters. For example:
  
  我不會寫，但我還是可以試試看
  HQI MF OMWA JHXF OAM HQI YWMRV AMYO MNR VIO YRMPI YRMPI QBU
  
  I think this may look a bit like Voynichese under some simple substitution.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  ReneZ > 11-07-2026, 12:05 AM

  There was also a 'stroke theory' not involving Asian characters, proposed by Elmar Vogt, at least 20 years ago. This allows for a lot of interesting speculation.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  oshfdk > 11-07-2026, 12:12 AM

  (11-07-2026, 12:05 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There was also a 'stroke theory' not involving Asian characters, proposed by Elmar Vogt, at least 20 years ago. This allows for a lot of interesting speculation.

  .
  
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  It's this one, right?

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  rikforto > 11-07-2026, 12:23 AM

  It would need to be tested to say this for sure, but my sense is that you'll still have to contend with the letter-order problem in Voynichese. Do most words start with a certain stroke and then proceed through others---is there any system like that?
  
  This is especially acute for Chinese characters where stroke order essential to recovering the character, so you can't rearrange them to get the strokes in a partiuclar order
  
  I myself have played with decomposing and re-ordering Latin letter components, but I struggled to come up with a set of rules that didn't sometimes give words like qotaiiiiin, though that's obviously not the last word on the matter

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  ReneZ > 11-07-2026, 12:35 AM

  (11-07-2026, 12:12 AM)oshfdk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It's this one, right?

  
  I can't specifically remember reading that paper, but it is certainly the same theory.
  He had a series of blog posts about it going back a few more years.
  
  With respect to @rikforto's comment: indeed, this has not led to any clear example.
  
  I wouldn't have put chinese characters as the top choice, but at least it is something that is probably testable.
  I do not know, but I can easily imagine that people must have produced lists of strokes in their proper order for the most common Chinese characters.
  
  For gothic or other contemporary handwriting styles, I can just imagine that two sufficiently different hands could lead to the differences between the various Voynich languages and dialects.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  Dirac > 11-07-2026, 01:10 AM

  (10-07-2026, 11:18 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and it seems that in this case they tend more towards Asian languages than philosophical ones.

  
  This is similar, but it's still phonetic (albeit with extra steps), I just wonder whether what we're considering as "words" in Voynichese are actually in fact discrete logograms, and what we're considering as letters are actually just "strokes".
  
  I don't think this necessarily indicates that the source language is asian, although it does apply a similar logic to chinese languages. I know there was limited contact between Ming (and earlier Yuan) China and the West, so it's not beyond the limits of imagination that some slightly kooky academic in the southern HRE heard the idea of logograms and went off on one for his new Alchemical handbook.
  
  As for deciphering, that would make it pretty impossible as far as I can imagine.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  Rafal > 11-07-2026, 12:25 PM

  Dirac, you may like to check my thread about another undeciphered manuscript, Rohonc Codex:
  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
  
  Several people including me believe it was written in logographic script "posing" as phonetic script which fooled many researchers.
  This case isn't definitely solved yet but if it was true then hell yeah, it happened that someone in Europe invented from scratch a logographic script.
  
  "Deciphering" such a script is totally different job than working with "ordinary" ciphers. I am not even sure if "deciphering" is a proper word as you basically have to guess word meanings from the context.
  
  By the way, if Voynichese "vords" are actually words then you apply "guessing by context" approach even if they are phonetic. You may totally "bypass" the encoding process and even language recognizing and just guess that some word means Sun, herb or water.
  
  Unfortunately nobody had any success in it with Voynich Manuscript. The structure of its text is generally weird, not chaotic but not resembling obvious natural languages too. Despite all these illustrations it is really hard to make a guess of any word that would work good in all places.

• RE: Not words but logograms?

  ololololo > 11-07-2026, 12:52 PM

  (11-07-2026, 01:10 AM)Dirac Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I just wonder whether what we're considering as "words" in Voynichese are actually in fact discrete logograms, and what we're considering as letters are actually just "strokes".

  The idea of strokes is somewhat true: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
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