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An experiment with phonetic writing
- An experiment with phonetic writing
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RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
rikforto > 03-09-2026, 04:05 PM
(03-09-2026, 11:11 AM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.According to proponents of the Chinese theory, VMS is problematic due to phonetics. The author clearly perceived Chinese in his own way, with a “European” ear, and we cannot know how accurately he represented what he heard (for example, the speaker might have been reading quickly, and the author might have taken two similar characters for one word).
A point I would make about this, not just for the particular theory there but anyone going down the route Voynichese is "phonetic [insert choice here]", is that to understand the language you must be able to distinguish between phonemes. I'd certainly expect a small rate of errors as well as idiosyncratic choices in theorizing them that might look different from how modern linguists or how the native informants would explain the phonetics, but that is constrained by the fact that taking as much dictation as is assumed all but implies a reasonably good faculty with the language. And for Sinitic languages, this unavoidably means identifying the tonemes in practice with a high degree of accuracy. The alphabet design and the dictation process would both require that the people involved could in fact make these distinctions to claim the result is "in [insert choice language here]". I find the other possibility, that they were just taking down sounds, and badly, hard to credit. -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
nablator > 03-09-2026, 04:25 PM
(03-09-2026, 02:46 PM)ololololo Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But the question isn’t about how easy it is to find something similar in the texts. How easy it is to fully analyze and decipher the writing — that’s what I was thinking about.
I'm not sure how I would do that in general if I had to program it. Global pattern matching is the obvious way to go, but as you showed the correspondence with a phonetic text or any alphabetical representation of the text must not be one-to-one so the algorithm would need to be pretty smart. I would start with exact matches (the one-to-one kind), hoping there are enough of them to break the text down into small segments requiring human review to determine whether more symbols can be matched to letters in a more complicated way (one to many, many to one, many to many), "many" meaning: allowing several alternatives and/or sequences or letters/symbols. -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
ololololo > 03-09-2026, 04:57 PM
(03-09-2026, 03:43 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If I understand correctly, you are compressing the text, and that is likely to increase character entropy. Voynichese appears to go in the opposite direction
It’s not about entropy. I don’t think I could reproduce it. I’ll probably put that off until I have other ideas... -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
ololololo > 03-09-2026, 05:04 PM
(03-09-2026, 04:05 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The alphabet design and the dictation process would both require that the people involved could in fact make these distinctions to claim the result is "in [insert choice language here]". I find the other possibility, that they were just taking down sounds, and badly, hard to credit.
Then it’s unclear what kind of scribe's mistakes we’re talking about… I mentioned this earlier — if the text was poorly written, the author would simply stop and not continue. Otherwise, he wastes his time and, perhaps, even money... -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
Rafal > 03-09-2026, 05:52 PM
You may find interesting and relevant my earlier experiment with "phonetic" writing of English:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I wrote and ciphered an English text with Polish spelling which as I believe brought quite a bit of disruption:
Quote:ertyn plents hef olłejs bin ikstrimly waluajble tu as wi noł łan of wem es jaroł
wis plent bikejm e pałerful aly for as hier on erf e long tajm egoł
es łos klierly riwild baj its prezens in neandertal grejws diskawered in we mediterenijen basin riportedly dejtin bek erałnd siksty tałzend jers
jarł is stiped in myf end ledżend it is e plent wet meni kalczers of we łord hef łajdly juzd end rewired
it is nołn in latin es ahilea milleflorium end łos nejmd in oner of we grik god ahiles hu ekording tu ledżend
hed kors to łajdly imploj wis łond stanczing herb on we batelfild andabtly e sowerejn rimedy ...
It turned out easy to crack for the people, however. -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
ololololo > 03-09-2026, 06:13 PM
(03-09-2026, 05:52 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You may find interesting and relevant my earlier experiment with "phonetic" writing of English:
You forgot to create a new script
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
I wrote and ciphered an English text with Polish spelling which as I believe brought quite a bit of disruption:
Quote:ertyn plents hef olłejs bin ikstrimly waluajble tu as wi noł łan of wem es jaroł
wis plent bikejm e pałerful aly for as hier on erf e long tajm egoł
es łos klierly riwild baj its prezens in neandertal grejws diskawered in we mediterenijen basin riportedly dejtin bek erałnd siksty tałzend jers
jarł is stiped in myf end ledżend it is e plent wet meni kalczers of we łord hef łajdly juzd end rewired
it is nołn in latin es ahilea milleflorium end łos nejmd in oner of we grik god ahiles hu ekording tu ledżend
hed kors to łajdly imploj wis łond stanczing herb on we batelfild andabtly e sowerejn rimedy ...
It turned out easy to crack for the people, however.
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RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
Rafal > 03-09-2026, 06:44 PM
Quote:You forgot to create a new script
It was ciphered with substitution cipher:
Quote:cbwmj@ inb@mc sbt fnob#c zh@ hpcmwhenj l$nr$#znb mr $c lh @fo o$@ ft lbe bc #$wfo lhc inb@m zhpb#e b i$obwtrn $nj tfw $c shbw f@ bwt b nf@y m$#e byfo bc ofc pnhbwnj whlhn% z$# hmc iwb^b@c h@ @b$@%bwm$n ywb#lc %hcp$lbwb% h@ lb eb%hmbwb@h#b@ z$ch@ whifwmb%nj %b#mh@ zbp bw$o@% chpcmj
m$o^b@% #bwc #$wo hc cmhib% h@ ejt b@% nb%gb@% hm hc b inb@m lbm eb@h p$n&^bwc ft lb ofw% sbt o$#%nj #r^% b@% wblhwb% hm hc @fo@ h@ n$mh@ bc $shnb$ ehnnbtnfwhre b@% ofc...
Would it change anything if I wrote it by hand with fantasy letters and ornate caligraphy? People would just hate me for having to transcribe it
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RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
Jorge_Stolfi > 03-09-2026, 06:44 PM
(03-09-2026, 05:52 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You may find interesting and relevant my earlier experiment with "phonetic" writing of English:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
But that exercise went
written English -> spoken English in your head -> phonetic transcription
That should produce a transcription that has largely correct word breaks, no skipped phonemes, and relatively consistent encodings of the sounds.
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
Jorge_Stolfi > 03-09-2026, 07:28 PM
(03-09-2026, 04:05 PM)rikforto Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.to understand the language you must be able to distinguish between phonemes.
I lived 13 years in the US, and by the end my spoken English was good enough for most practical purposes, such as giving lectures. I even could almost get the point of Monty Python's jokes.
But to this day I cannot tell the difference between the vowels of "man" and "men", unless the two words are spoken right next to each other. My brain maps both to the same open-"e" phoneme of Portuguese/French/Italian/etc before they get to the language processor. So that is an error I would probably make -- inconsistently -- if I had to take dictation of unfamiliar words in English.
And I would probably map each schwa to a random vowel, or omit it altogether.
(And of course I would get the spelling of unfamiliar words totally wrong. But that is not relevant here.)
All the best, --stolfi -
RE: An experiment with phonetic writing
ololololo > 03-09-2026, 07:35 PM