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To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
- To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
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To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
Ruby Novacna > 03-05-2022, 01:18 PM
One of the reasons why the various translations of Voynich were not accepted was that they did not respect the grammar of the proposed language.
This morning I am leafing through the manuscript, listening to a song by Vianney, whose refrain is :
If me to love you, me to hurt
if me to love you
when me to love you, me to hurt
when me to love you. (I hope my translation is close to the moose)
If this text is discovered in a few centuries by cryptologists, what will be their reaction, bad translation, coded message, misidentified language?
What might have been the manuscript author's demands on his grammar?
Are there any known manuscripts in which the grammar is not respected at all? -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
Koen G > 03-05-2022, 01:25 PM
Do you know why the Vianney song does this? This may be part of the answer. -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
cvetkakocj@rogers.com > 03-05-2022, 07:05 PM
(03-05-2022, 01:18 PM)Ruby Novacna Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.One of the reasons why the various translations of Voynich were not accepted was that they did not respect the grammar of the proposed language.
This morning I am leafing through the manuscript, listening to a song by Vianney, whose refrain is :
If me to love you, me to hurt
if me to love you
when me to love you, me to hurt
when me to love you. (I hope my translation is close to the moose)
If this text is discovered in a few centuries by cryptologists, what will be their reaction, bad translation, coded message, misidentified language?
What might have been the manuscript author's demands on his grammar?
Are there any known manuscripts in which the grammar is not respected at all?
Hi, Ruby,
You showed an example of a poem with a few verbs in the infinitive form. To you, the grammar does not make sense. I'd like to show you an example of my poem, which I had written long before I ever heard of Voynich. You will note all those 'ti' suffixes, which are Slovenian suffixes for the verbs in the infinitive form. This is comparable to VM 'dy' endings, since T was often spelled as D, and Y was later changed in some words to Y, and some to I.
Slovenian language has a very flexible word order, so with a bit of 'poetic freedom' I composed almost entire poem with just verbs in infinitive form. The poem in Slovenian was published. It is perfectly understandable.
I purposely translated it in English in the same word order as it is in Slovenian, to show you how different and meaningless could sound in a foreign language.
I do not know why the author of the song you mentioned used the infinitive. I didn't even know why I did it, but later on I realized it reflects infinity. -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
Ruby Novacna > 03-05-2022, 07:44 PM
Thank you, Cvetka, for your beautiful poem.
In my example, the author writes a song in French, but its refrain does not have the same syntax.
That's why I ask the question: can we be absolutely sure that our author was concerned about grammar? -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
Koen G > 03-05-2022, 09:04 PM
We can't be absolutely certain. But I guess poetic experiments with grammar are less likely in the 15th century than they are today? Do you know of any medieval examples? -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
Ruby Novacna > 03-05-2022, 09:19 PM
Obviously, if I had medieval examples, I should not have asked my question.
Now I use dictionaries and the internet to learn, in the 15th century were there dictionaries? -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
nablator > 03-05-2022, 09:45 PM
Infinitive forms, eh?
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In printed editions of the Rosarius minor: "Revertere, revertere Hortulane, revertere & augmenta Rosarium meum..."
Many manuscripts had plenty of problems: phonetic spelling, bad grammar, copy errors, misunderstanding of abbreviated words, later more or less fixed (sometimes rewritten when too horrible) in printed editions.
All this does not make grammar absent, on the contrary: they tried to write as well as they could. -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
Koen G > 03-05-2022, 09:47 PM
Writing monolingual dictionaries is typically something that would only become possible after the Renaissance, when people started viewing one version of the language as the true version, something to be catalogued. In the Middle Ages, the rule was generally that written language was a reflection of the way people in a certain region spoke. (Text was usually meant to be spoken as well, so writing and speaking went hand in hand).
The same goes for thinking about grammar. Latin had rules, but this was not a concern for spoken languages. The first English grammar only appears by the end of the 16th century, see here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In a sense, a consciously ungrammatical text in medieval vernacular would be anachronistic, because they did not think about the vernacular's grammar. It was the way you spoke and that was that.
(Note: some of this may be different for Italian, which I don't know much about. They tended to be earlier than the rest in their thinking about language).
So to get to the point, this is what I think about various scenarios. Keep in mind that the VM text is large, so the phenomenon at play must be used extensively, not just for a few sentences or a single poem.
* A language experiment with faulty grammar: almost impossible, anachronistic.
* Someone who is not a native speaker struggling to write the language: possible, though it would be the kind of thing we usually see in just a few words, in marginalia etc. We also see it in medieval Latin, where authors' mastery of the dead language varies. But even the worst Latin writers do much better than Voynich translations
* Poetic liberties: this is certainly possible, authors may write weird things because of rhyme, rhythm and metre. But these oddities would be limited, and the bulk of the text would still be grammatically sound.
* A weird dialect. This is possible, but in this case the person who proposes the VM solution should explain how this particular dialect explains the phenomena observed. What we usually see is that VM translators use dictionary forms, and the result is a grammatical mess.
And that is what it usually boils down to. The translators tend to disregard the fact that languages use grammar. This may be because in the case of English speakers, they don't feel the importance of cases in languages like Latin. Or because they focus so much on dictionary forms that they forget all inflection and conjugation. It feels like a bad excuse to then transfer this lack of concern for grammar over to the VM makers. -
RE: To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?
tavie > 03-05-2022, 09:48 PM
Even when there are deliberately stylistic adaptations of grammar for literary effect, or unintended non-standard grammar, I'd still expect to see some clear syntax. Cvetka's poem exhibits clear syntax.
If the Voynich manuscript was mostly/entirely lists (as the Linear B tablets were inventories), then we would expect minimal grammar. But while there probably are some lists there, the text appears to be flowing prose.
There is also the possibility of words being deliberately reordered in a random way in a sentence as part of a cypher technique. If this were the case, then I would imagine the solution would be extremely difficult both to discover in the first place and to prove. As you say, lack of grammar is why multiple solutions have failed to be proved. I think the solver's only hope would be to "translate" each individual word in the manuscript and show that in each paragraph they could all be rearranged to form grammatical sentences without exception, and that the paragraphs clearly flowed from one another. But since it's clearly not a simple substitution cipher, I can't see how the solver would be able to work out what the rest of the words mean without syntax as an aide.
It's also worth noting that theories haven't failed only because they've fallen short of an arbitrary standard of grammar: they've failed because they have nothing to distinguish themselves from rival theories. Multiple people have shown how easy it is to build up a lexicon of deciphered Voynichese words for completely different languages. Demonstrating a correlation with the grammar of the proposed language, along with explaining Voynichese behaviour, seem to me to be the only two ways a theory could stand out from the pack and be seriously studied and start the path towards acceptance. Without both, there's just...noise.
In short, if there is no/very little grammar in the Voynich, I can't see how it could be solved in the first place, let alone proved.
[Edit - some speculation You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. en francais about why the song is written that way]