Sequential word repetitions in the VMS

[Ahmet Ardıç]

Although I do not know both languages in which these articles are written and I see the first letters of the words in the first image as different letters, this point for me will probably be a misreading due to my not knowing these languages.

The way in which [e] was formed in the French handwriting of this period might be confusing because its two parts aren't joined.  Below I've highlighted three tokens of [e] in red to illustrate their structure.



Otherwise, de is a preposition equivalent to English "of" and terres is the plural of terre ("land").  In modern French, these are treated in writing as two separate words.  In Middle French, however, de was sometimes joined to the word that followed it.  This is still done conventionally today when the following word begins with a vowel, e.g., d'eau ("of water").

The first image you choose is most likely just a blank space due to a typo.
<...>
When we enlarge the words a little, we see that during the writing of one of these words written on the same page, the second letter was written by sliding over the first letter (as a handwriting mechanical error). It looks like a gap has formed as a result of this scrolling.

Here are enlarged images of those two sequences, plus three tokens of "de terre" / "deterre" without an [s] from the same document.

 

The last case strikes me as ambiguously spaced -- if it were in the Voynich Manuscript, the ZL transcription might have shown it as a "comma break."  But in the other cases, the spacing (or absence of spacing) appears to be as definite as it is anywhere in the document.

In the second image you were share, I could only read the word "mitnamen" once, but could not see the second one.

You're right that the second image contains only "mitnamen"; as I wrote, I was presenting it only to show that this unspaced form was in use and shouldn't be rejected lightly as a transcription error in the other published source I cited.  It literally means "with names" and was used in conventional legal expressions such as "we the hereinafter-mentioned with names X, Y, and Z."

However, you may think that I consider the examples you gave as successful by approaching from these rare finds. Even so, I think that few exceptions should not be compared with the frequent repetitions seen in many examples and on almost every page throughout the text.

They're not "rare finds" or a "few exceptions" -- to the contrary, they turn up constantly in documents of this kind.  I'm not eager to spend more time simply documenting their existence, so let me instead place the burden of proof on you: can you show that spacing was in fact as consistent in writings of the fifteenth century (in Italy, Germany, France, etc.) as your argument about prefixes requires it to have been?  

For my interpretation of "daiin daiin" and any other word, please pluck a photo of these repetitions from the original pages or a photo of a whole line with the meaning of the searched word. 

[I wasn't looking for an interpretation of any specific case, but was just curious whether you had some alternative hypothesis about the phenomenon of spaced and unspaced pairs in general.  Of course there are tools readily available which you could use yourself to look up where cases of these appear and link them back to facsimiles.  But if you'd need to investigate the individual cases now in order to answer the question, that in itself might already answer the question -- i.e., you believe the pattern is illusory and that every apparent case of it actually has its own entirely separate explanation.  Is that much fair to say?]

Dear Sir,

While I am doing my assessment on the aforementioned details, I am trying to find information that will make it easier for me to compare the details I am looking for among the articles written in English. While making the detail-specific comparison we mentioned, I try to look at and try to understand how the same situation is happening in European languages.

When I carried out such a search, I could not find any academic article about the fact that the same authors could always write the prefixes separately and together, and this is a common situation in European manuscripts. For this reason, I would appreciate if anyone came across a separate academic article on how this detail was handled in the old written texts of European languages, and if they would share this source with me.

Let me talk about what I see in the spelling of the word "de terre" / "deterre", which you have given in 5 different forms so that we can compare. (Probably, your and my perspective and interpretation will be different.) When I look at the spelling of the words "de terre" / "deterre" here, I see that there is a space between the continued part in every spelling where the second letter is shifted over the first letter. I think that the author of this text repeats the same mechanical typo or carelessness from time to time. So, In my opinion these examples are too weak to change my general approach and perspective on this subject.

After we had finished reading the first full sentences and the first full page of the VM texts, we had submitted an article hoping it could be published in a Western journal. But that our article was not published in that journal. As the reason for not being published, the comments written by two reviewers who read and evaluated our article were sent to us.

According to these people, "weak aspects of our article" or details that were deemed inappropriate were conveyed to us by that journal. When we looked at that comments, we saw that all of the criticisms (or all the points that are assumed to be inappropriate in some details in the content of our article) only consisted of the personal views of two people who did not know about Old-Turkish.

One of the details in these people's poor and inconsistent reviews was about these prefixes issue.

Would it be logical to think that the author writes prefixes sometimes adjacent and sometimes separately, or would it be wiser to think that they are not prefixes, but simply written as stand-alone words and word-roots?

Presumably, the journal that received our article selected two reviewers from those who might have voluntarily offered them the job. It didn't really matter whether they volunteered or not, but I'm pretty sure that someone who has studied the VM-texts beforehand and has some prejudices and opinions in certain details has been chosen.

I have no specific arguments for French, Italian or German, and my knowledge of the writing styles of the ancient manuscripts of these languages is very limited. When I want to compare the writing styles of these languages or their ancient texts with Old Turkish or today's Turkish, I scan academic articles.

Why am I writing all this now?

Why are we talking about whether VM texts have prefixes or not?

In addition, the fact that word repetitions are detected in texts up to quintuples and their presence in the texts (frequency of writing the same word repetitions) is considered as an abnormal or unusual situation. But when it comes to Turkish, they show a complete overlap. Likewise, the words provide overlap in many different details in terms of their spelling. For example, some words never start with some letters, and certain letters never appear at the end of words. Moreover, the fact that these letters are the same as those in Turkish. And all these details are of course not a coincidence in terms of mathematical possibilities. Because all these are actually structural evidence.

Those who evaluate the claims in our article make an evaluation based on their own ideas, instead of looking at whether there is a similar structure in Old Turkish.

It is not my aim to examine why the first article we wrote was poorly evaluated and not published. In the end, this is not really important, and it is only the choice of the journal that does not publish an article. The main issue I want to draw attention to here is that some details that are thought to be confirmed about VM are actually not confirmed by scientific evidence.

It's a common belief that when you look at VM-texts (even though you can't read them), you see a lot of prefixes there. In this case, the reason why I examine this issue here is precisely to show that these judgments are inconsistent.

So I'm asking anyone who thinks these structures are prefixes: Why shouldn't they be standalone short words? Why shouldn't these be root words? What are the elements that disprove my claim at this point, but prove that they are prefixes?

Even you, linguists, who can think in an Indo-European language (since you haven't studied the Turkish language), you see many anomalies in these texts.

We say that all the details that you consider as anomalies are normal situations for Turkish and part of the natural structure of the language. Moreover, we do not just say this, we show the overlaps with Turkish by presenting the evidence and logical inferences.

However, you can continue to write that there are prefixes in these texts and look for examples. You will continue to research the subject as if we did not present any other evidence, as if the only overlap we have provided between the VM texts and the Turkish language is in this detail. You all can search VM-text structure on many way, but whatever detail you look at, you will experience an inexplicable confusion because the content is clearly in Turkish and you can search as much as you want and there will be no other results. Actually the VM riddle is solved and you don't realize it yet.

The most rational way to progress in scientific work is to question and evaluate correctly. This can be done correctly when you have the knowledge to evaluate the claim put forward. Here I am giving you accurate information about Turkish so that it will be easier for you to compare. 

All you have to do is carefully read the information and evidence I have presented, and compare it with the data you have. When you do this, you will understand that the texts are in Turkish.

Thanks for your explanation.

Kind regards,

A. Ardıç