(20-08-2015, 08:28 AM)david wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote:Is that too many as compared with natural languages?I have no idea. But those four words you quoted are some of the most famous Voynich words out there.
I also don't know how this compares to other handcopied manuscripts of the era. It could be a way into resolving the "original or a copy?" question.
Quote:Is not the repetition issue too exaggerated?
I think the issue is not direct repetition, but rather many similar words repeated, as in Timms pairs and [ah-hem] Jackson sequences, which are not features of written languages.
When you worry about repetition you assume that the word as written has the same meaning every time. There's really no reason to assume this. Even in English a word like do has at least 8 meanings, more if you consider homophones. Doo doo and other informal usages increase the count. Run has around 18 definitions in most dictionaries; some of them nouns, some of them verbs, but most of them modern usages. This linguistic flexibility could account for repetition in VMS if it were written by someone who enjoyed playing with language.
Side note: it's this flexibility that also makes word frequency analysis of questionable use in comparative language analysis, or even word distribution within a document written in a single language. Knowing how many times run is used in a document is interesting, but it doesn't aid understanding in a big way when you don't know which definitions of run are being used most. You're really doing a character distribution on sets of characters rather than any kind of word analysis. Unless, of course, the word is guaranteed to be unique by some feature of the language.
(08-02-2016, 05:23 PM)Torsten wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@Don
Typical for the VMS are strong rules about character combinations and weak rules for the word order. Both features are the result of the copying process. If the scribe was adding a new element to the text generation process one of two things could happen: A.) He could add the new element into his set of copying rules. In this case it was frequently used and we would see it as a rule. Or B.) he could forget about the new element. In this case the new element is rarely used and it would look like an exception to us.
...
As last glyph 'a' occurs 63 times. Is the existence of 'cheda' therefore an error or is it a valid word?
The bigram 'ya' occurs 22 times. Is the existence of 'dyaiin' therefore an error or is it a valid word?
Whatever the scribe does, for us it always looks like a rule or like an error. But they are the same. There are only too many possibilities for changing a word. It is impossible to use all of them frequently.
@Diane: That something can happen within language doesn't mean that it is typical for language.
I don't think that anyone is suggesting that there are any particular rules Voynichese has to follow based upon the written form (at least not yet). But there are feature sets that are typical for all languages, things like having nouns and using phonemes. There are probably more possibilities of what you can do in a language than there are languages though if anyone cared to make a comprehensive list.
The trick here is to figure out what's going on in VMS. Given how the manuscript was produced I think it's safe to assume some errors crept in. Assuming everything that you don't want to explain is an error though strikes me as lazy. Work from the assumption that there aren't any errors and the errors will be obvious eventually. Throw out anything you don't like and you many never figure out what's happening. I'll grant that's a possibility anyway, but I'm arguing approach not output.
English has "strong rules about character combinations". We call them spelling rules and learn them as a part of learning to write. Generally speaking if you can spell something properly you don't misspell it in written English. Most English spelling errors are the result of trying to figure out which spelling rules are used to generate an unfamiliar work. It's easier to memorize how a word is spelled than it is to regenerate it; this is why when we are learning spelling rules we memorize many of the really common words need to write. Spelling has become more standardized but there are still words that require us to memorize their spellings because the rules don't help. The nice thing though is you can usually tell from context if a word has been spelled or used incorrectly.
I wouldn't say English has "weak rules for the word order" but I might mean the same thing if I say English grammar allows for significant variation in word order which may either modify the semantic content or leave it unchanged depending on both word choice and word order. The reason for these choices is that written English's primary function is to record semantic content. If a word is written down it is more important to know what it means than how to pronounce it. I learned that young, to my chagrin, because I mispronounced chagrin when reading to myself and was embarrassed by how badly I pronounced it when trying to use it in speech. In speech, it matters. Mayan emphasizes phonemes. If you can write Mayan you can write almost anything in it -- even if you don't understand the language you are writing. If you can read Mayan you don't mispronounce Mayan.
But it might be a mistake to think that strong rules about character combinations are always spelling rules. It's certainly a mistake to think that the scribe can write anything he likes and produce a meaningful text. It isn't even clear whether VMS gives priority to semantic contents, pronunciation or something else. Additional information like tonality, vocal emphasis, negation or whatever else the scribe found important might be encoded by something more subtle than word repetition (the words you perceive as errors perhaps).