Voynich: natural language or not? (1)

Stephen Bax ♦ February 19, 2014 ♦ 26 Comments

I’ve had many encouraging comments about my paper on the Voynich script, but also some puzzling ones gnuxe 다운로드.

Some people insist that the analysis “couldn’t be possible”, so they don’t bother to consider it, because the script “couldn’t represent a 1:1 mapping” onto real words, or the signs “couldn’t represent a 1:1 mapping” onto letters burp suite pro. Therefore they are sure that the script must be some kind of complex code.

As a linguist, I am perplexed by this, so I thought I’d explore it in this posting 아이폰 산돌 고딕 다운로드. To start with, this position hides a lot of assumptions. Firstly, it seems to assume that ‘normal’ scripts do or should have a 1:1 mapping of letters to sounds when you want to go crazy. Well, English doesn’t for a start, as the word “thorough” (‘TH U R A’, roughly) can demonstrate – 4 sounds, 8 letters. The Arabic verb meaning ‘s/he wrote’ is written with three Arabic signs (K T B), though it is read with vowels which the reader must supply from memory (roughly ‘K A T A B A’ ) – i.e 맥 아이콘 다운로드. 6 sounds, 3 letters. No sign of a 1:1 mapping there then.

In terms of words: Arabic ‘ana fi’lbeet’, written as 2 ‘words’ in Arabic script, is semantically 4 words: ana   fi   al   beet’ = “I am in the house” 파자마 프렌즈 다운로드.  So in terms of ‘script words’ to ‘semantic words’,  no 1:1 mapping there.

A thoughtful account of the argument concerning 1:1 mapping and the Voynich manuscript has been offered by Elmar Vogt (http://voynichthoughts.wordpress.com/) as follows:

“Any “brute force” attack [by computer] would presume that the ciphertext words of the VM are mapped 1:1 from the plaintext words 더위쳐3 다운로드. And this is extremely unlikely for a number of reasons:

1. The ciphertext alphabet seems to consist of around 17 frequent letters, plus a large number of rare “wierdos” in these words 다운로드. That maps poorly to a latin alphabet.
2. Some frequent letter groups show up almost exclusively word-initial (“qo”) or word-terminal (“dy”) Monmon. That’s unknown for any Central European language.
3. Word-length distribution is odd: There is a shortage of both very short and very long words; words have a comparatively uniform length — Again, this is unusual for Central European languages Idol Mubi.
4. Overall, the words exhibit a very regular structure — check out Stolfi’s “Core-Mantle-Crust” paradigm. (Yes, it’s a tough read, but worth working it through if you want to understand the VM.) they are composed by a fairly rigid “grammar”, the like of it is unknown for European languages.
5. Nobody has been able to identify particles and articles (“a”, “and”, “with”…) in the VM.

 All of these differences between natural languages and the VM make it highly unlikely that the enciphering mechanism simply always turned plaintext word “A” into ciphertext word “X”, and “B” into “Y”.*) I’m convinced that one VM word is not equivalent to a plaintext word, but rather that it only represents a few letters.”

It is interesting that Elmar mentions European languages four times, then says “All of these differences between natural languages and the VM……..”. I have two issues with this:

a)      There’s a big confusion here between language and script. In theory just about any language could be written in any script – the two terms are not synonymous. So it is wrong to mix them up, making a point about a script and then using it to make a deduction about a language.

b)      We need to consider non-European scripts and languages. It is perfectly possible that the underlying language of the VM script is non-European. And a non-European script – for example an ‘abjad’ like Arabic, or a script which in other ways does not represent all vowel sounds – could well explain most of the points which Elmar mentions.

As for his final  point: “I’m convinced that one VM word is not equivalent to a plaintext word, but rather that it only represents a few letters”, well, in an abjad like Arabic, with vowels omitted, that is exactly what we get – ‘a word represented by only a few letters’ because the reader must fill in the missing vowels herself.

Why do we Voynich people torture ourselves and insist on complicating things, when what we need to do is work out the script step-by-step, NOT closing off options by assuming that it must be European, or that it cannot be a 1:1 matching?

In fact in my paper I conclude that the words I have identified also do not represent a plain 1:1 match. For example the word for the plant (genus) Centaury is identified as KNTAIRN, with no written vowel after the first consonant, nor before the last consonant. No 1:1 match there of sign to sound, but why on earth should there be?

More to follow on this methinks…