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Re: VMs: Letters bound later?


Hi Elmar!

Thanks for the warm welcome :)


Gordon Ruggs lately performed an experiment to create Voynichese-like gibberish
with an automated algorithm, and he reported it took him something like "under
two hours" to come up with a page -- though it's not quite clear whether this
meant the text generation only, or whether this included actually writing down
and painting the pictures etc.

IIRC, another source did facsimiles in the "VM style" and also reported working
times of not more than several hours per page. (Mind you, most of the drawings
are comparatively crude.)

So, in all likelihood (unless the encoding algorithm is astronomically
complex), it was possible for a single person to create the VM within a few
months.

That's interesting to hear, although I meant something else when saying that it would be interesting to find out how long it took to write the book. What I meant was if the VMS was written in one session, with only breaks for sleep and such, or if there must've been long breaks between pages, chapters or alike. Coming from the letter theory, there would've been long breaks between single letters, as the sender would have to wait for a reply, and such.


Actually, my pet theory is that the VM is German in origin, and the reason
nobody noticed is that it's not current High German, but one of the dialects
spoken around 1450 (which appears to be the date of the creation of the VM).

Do you have statistics for that time as well, or would you even have some
insight in language peculiarities of German back then? (I think of stuff like
the scharf-s only appearing at the end of a word, while some VM letters only
seem to appear at their beginning -- "words written backwards?", and things
like that.)

Well, the german of the 15th century actually is not that far from todays german. Nowadays we would call the german of that time "Frühneuhochdeutsch" (early-new-high-german), and todays is Hochdeutsch (high-german). As a german native I have no real problems reading those texts, if I concentrate and keep the a few rules for combined vowels, etc in mind.

I'll give a short example (from "Helene Kottanerin: Denkwürdigkeiten", Vienna, dated between 1445 and 1452):

Do von Cristi gepurd ergangen warn fierzehenhundert vnd dar nach in
dem Newn vnd Dreissigisten iar zu den Ostern vnd phingsten,
Vnnd do der edel furst Albrecht erwelt was zu dem heiligen Römischen
Kung vnd vormaligen kron zu Vngern auch enphangen het vnd die
KungInn auch enphangen het, Do kom sein gnad her nach Prespurgk vnd blieb
nicht lang hie.

And a quickhack translation:

Da von Christi Geburt vergangen waren vierzehnhundert und da noch in
dem neuen und dreissigsten Jahr zu den Ostern und Pfingsten,
und da der edle Fürst Albrecht erwählt war zu dem heiligen römischen
König und vormaligen Kron(-prinz) zu Ungarn auch empfangen hat und die
Königin auch empfangen hat, da kam seine Gnade her nach Pressburg und blieb
nicht lange hier.

And for the english reader a more-or-less translation so they can understand it:

Because from christs birth were passed fourteen hundred years and because still
in the new and thirtieth year to Easter and Pentecost
and because the noble prince Albrecht was chosen to the holy roman
King and former crown (-prince) to Hungary as well as received and the
Queen as well has received, there comes his graciousness to Pressburg (a town in hungary) and didn't stay for long.

(Excuse me not completely rephrasing it...)

Even when we look at the texts of Wolfram of Eschenbach (1170-1220), the german used at that time (Althochdeutsch - Old-high-german if I'm no mistaken), still is readable with a bit of training. One of his poems can be seen at http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/eschenba/gedichte/ursprinc.htm. There are relatively simple rules how to resolve the vowels with the "roofs" atop to vowel-combinations of todays german, and then the words are almost the same. A scan of a page of his most famous work (Parcifal) is available at http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/eschenba/parzival/parzival.gif, where one can see that the style of the letters is a bit different from todays style, but with a bit of concentration, one can read those too. I can't really see a resemblence to the symbols used in the VMS here either, except for maybe the ch.

For the interested: There are about fourty Frühneuhochdeutsch works available at http://www.ikp.uni-bonn.de/dt/forsch/frnhd/.

I'm thinking about running those texts through a parser to analyze the structure of the words and the occurences, although I think one wouldn't find any new things compared to todays german.


About the language pecularities: Yes, we have the world famous sharp S, although maybe not for long anymore - Some people think the german language needs new standards and they've taken out a lot of sharp S's while defining the last officially "correct" german.
However, the sharp S is not that much of a mystery: It came from the writing of SZ and developped into something roughly resembling a B, because the non-capitalized Z used to be written like a subscript 3 with a loop at the bottom, while the S used to be written like an f without the dash in the middle (more like the mathematical symbol for an integral, for those who're familiar with that). Further, I think that the SZ was actually brought into the german language from eastern languages like czech and hungarian, because they use them alot - but I don't have any sources telling so, that's just my idea. Oh, and while it's surely true that there is ... sorry, there was (damn reformers!) ... a rule in german grammatics that a double s at the end of a word has to be changed into a sharp S, it's surely not true that the sharp S only occurs at the end of words. There are a few words where it's used inmid of the word, but it's surely not a lot. (And there is a rule for that too: ss after a "long" vowel has ... had ... to be a sharp S, like "müssig" would have to be "müßig", while Meße would be wrong - has to be Messe). (Can english readers see the sharp S and ü [ue - umlaut u]?)

Another thing about the german language is, that there have never been any really strict rules about the grammar or the syntax, so the use of words and the spelling often differs, even in works of the same time. Worsening this is the fact that there have always been a lot of different dialects, and these dialects often differ a whole lot from high-german. (An example is the Mole, which is in high-german called "Maulwurf", but in styrian (south-eastern Austria) dialect its called "Sche"). Even today those dialects differ so much, that people like me, who have grown up in the eastern part of Austria have a hard time understanding someone who grew up in the western part (Vorarlberg or Tyrol) - in terms of dialect; Luckily everyone knows how to express himself in high-german nowadays, too. And when it comes to written dialect then even today there can't be seen any fixed rules of how modern german-dialect writers form there words - they just use the letters we have and the pronounciation we're used to and plug them together so that the written words, when read with german pronounciation sound like the dialect its meant to be in. (There are a lot of german dialect works to be found online, just google for them - and sorry for my Austria focus. I don't know too much of works from Germany, but I guess it's just the same up there.)

Then there is the thing that we call "Vorsilben" (pre-syllables). In german we prepend words with certain syllables when changing it from one tense to another. An example is sit-sat-sat, which is in german: sitzen - saß - gesessen (middle one is sass for the non-sharp-S clients). So "I sat on a stool" is "Ich saß auf einem Stuhl" and "I have been sitting on a stool" is "Ich habe auf einem Stuhl gesessen." (Here the english 'been' has wandered to the pre-syllable - at least that's what I think could be used as a 'rule' when constructing the words as a native english person.)
Of those pre-syllables there are quite a few and the grammatics book I have handy here (only a small one from 1971) lists the ones that can be used for nouns as: un-, ur-, be-, ent-, er-, ver- and zer-. For the verbs there isn't even a list in the book, it just says that the often give a second meaning to the verb (like abfahren would mean "to drive away" while fahren only means "to drive"). Those pre-syllables can then even be cut off the word again, but only from the verbs, when used in special combinations (taking the abfahren example again: "Wann fahren wir ab?" means "when are we driving away?", the pre-syllable has here wandered to the end of the sentence). The grammatics doesn't say anything about it, but I think that this detaching only works if the used pre-syllable has a meaning by itself too ("ab" has the meaning of away, "zu" has the meaning of "to", "ent" has the meaning of off, ge has no meaning by itself, but gives a native german the immediate hint that the word is for something that's in the past... just the first feeling I get). And here's the real tricky part: if you find a german word with one of those pre-syllables in the beginning, then it doesn't necessarily have to be one: "Geste" is just the word for gesture, and "Verb" is just the word for verb.
Some of the words can even have more than one pre-syllables, but that's a special case then, where there's meanings bound to them. Like "zugezogen" is past form for ziehen (gezogen), which means "to pull", prebound by a zu that means "to"... all in all the word then means pulled to something, like "ich habe mir eine krankheit zugezogen" would mean "i have an illness pulled to me". (the english to is prefixing the gezogen, and the mir is the english me thats at the end).


I hope that gives a few new interesting insights - I would love to continue, but it's way past my sleeping time over here and I have to get up early tomorrow. I'll probably add some more tomorrow, if I can think of other things that might be of interest.

Greetings,
Christoph 

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