RE: VMs: Has anyone been down this route before?

[Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Some thoughts on Brian Tawney's E-mails:

as far as I know, nobody has really made a 
very thorough comparison of the properties of
the VMs text with that of texts in the Arabic
script. In that sense, your route is largely
untrodden.
However, in another (important) sense, you're
going down the same route that probably most
of us have gone before. This is not meant to
be a criticism - I've been there myself.
This route is:
- to make a general hypothesis (the text could
  be based on Arabic)
- to look for an obvious, specific, point of 
  similarity, or clue (the meaning of one
  particular word or group of characters or 
  even single character)
- to take this further and bump into
  inconsistencies.

So far so good, but the problem that comes up
(seemingly inevitably) in step three above
does not necessarily mean that one should give
up the original idea. The jump into a specific
direction is probably made too quickly. 
It should be possible to make more general or
high-level comparisons, in particular for a 
comparison with Arabic, because there are so
many ways one could interpret ('transcribe')
a text written in Arabic, for example:
- vowels represented or not?
- hamzah, shadda and what have you written or not?
- based on written character or pronounciation?
- which was the base language?

Anyway, on your other problem:

> > /h/ is always preceded by /c/  with or without
> intruding
> > gallows. /c/ is always followed by /h/, again with
> or
> > without intruding gallows. So we can have only:
> 
> > 1. ch
> > 2. c<gallows>h
> 
> Alas, my transcription of the text must be
> unorthodox, or there must be
> something I don't understand about it.  I count over
> 1000 different words
> that have an /h/ not preceded by a /c/,  which occur
> (in total) over 4000
> times.  For example, I find:
> 
> aifhhy

[snip]

> aifhy, raithty

[snip]

> I also find 91 words that have /c/ not followed by
> /h/ (which is admittedly
> a discouraging number).  For example,
> 
> aicky

[snip]

In principle you're right. Quite some words
do have h which is preceded by i instead of c
(possibly with a gallows in between).
The number 91 above seems reasonable, but the
higher values (1000 and 4000) above seem
impossible.

> Unfortunately, I'm not sure where I picked up this
> transcription, since I
> was trolling the web.  Could someone point me at a
> more orthodox one?

A quick search shows that the word
raithty (which is quite unusual) comes from 
Takeshi's transcription and was originally written
as raIThty :
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/Notes/044/Takahashi/pages/f107r.htm

Cheers, Rene


		
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