Anton > 01-01-2016, 10:22 PM
david > 02-01-2016, 10:24 AM
Anton > 02-01-2016, 02:42 PM
ReneZ > 23-01-2016, 10:47 AM
-Job- > 01-02-2016, 08:28 AM
(02-01-2016, 02:42 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, and certainly the embellishment is (and has been indeed, in the Voynich discussions) the natural assumption in the first place.
For a somewhat more comprehensive check of the "coverage" hypothesis, one may do the following (limiting this to plain p and f, for simplicity):
- Locate all words containing plain p and f
- For each word, write down the order of the coverage (e.g. if the loop is covering one character, the order is 1, if it is covering two characters, the order is 2, and so on; if the gallows does not cover anything, the order is 0)
- Check if the non-zero order of coverage is preserved for occurrences of a given word as identified in point 1 above. If it is, at least in some of the occurrences, then we observe a system. If it is not, then possibly these are flourishes, indeed.
Emma May Smith > 01-02-2016, 08:42 PM
(23-01-2016, 10:47 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the most important aspects (IMHO) of the gallows is so obvious that it is rarely mentioned. This is, that Eva-k and Eva-t, which have a similar shape, can also occur in exactly the same contexts. Take any word with one of them, replace it, and you have another valid word (with a very high probability).
Without going into a list of possibilities how this could happen, I think it is very important.
Note that this also works for ch and sh, and r and l, just to name a few.
It does not work for k and p (or the other three similar options). Currier was adamant that p and f are never ever followed by Eva-e, though in more complete transcriptions one may find a few examples of that. In any case, k and t are of course very often followed by e. p and f might be interchageable, but I am not certain of that.
For me, this confirms the conclusion from entropy analyses and the existence of (not very strict) word patterns, namely that one should not hope to turn the Voynich MS text into a meaningful plain text by simple substitution.
This should be phrased more precisely of course. It means that any such plain text is necessarily in a language that exhibits the same features: special entropy, word patterns, replaceable characters.
crezac > 01-02-2016, 10:49 PM
ReneZ > 03-02-2016, 12:19 PM
(01-02-2016, 08:42 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(23-01-2016, 10:47 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This should be phrased more precisely of course. It means that any such plain text is necessarily in a language that exhibits the same features: special entropy, word patterns, replaceable characters.
While I cannot speak for the first of these characteristics, I would suggest that the other two are pretty normal for natural languages. Although the Voynich language my exhibit them more thoroughly than typical, I don't think they are peculiar.
Emma May Smith > 03-02-2016, 08:18 PM
(03-02-2016, 12:19 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As Jacques Guy used to say in the distant past, it will be hard to find any peculiarity that doesn't exist in some language somewhere.
On these two or three points, it may be a matter of taste whether one calls them peculiar or something more strongly.
If we take Mandarin Chinese for example, its rendition in Pinyin shows a structure that is even more rigid (I would say) than the Voynich MS. There are only some 400 allowed combinations (not counting the tones), and one can almost freely replace consonants by other ones and end up with another valid (pinyin) word.
Other East Asian languages will have various different rules.
For me the equivalent functions of k / t, ch / sh, and l / r remain highly suspicious. The best I can come up with is that someone was trying to render a language with unknown sounds, and had to make choices on the fly....
This doesn't work for everything though. The ending -m can appear where -l or -r can appear, but preferably at line ends. This more suggests an elaborate way of writing (say) -r, but then there are labels that differ only by the ending -r or -m.
So far, I can only think of quite contrived explanations.
-Job- > 04-02-2016, 10:56 AM