Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Nouns in the Rohonc Codex

I have a word-splitting algorithm and a context similarity algorithm. If I feed my Rohonc transcription into the word-splitting algorithm, then feed the resulting words into the context similarity algorithm, I can get a sense of which words in the Rohonc Codex are similar to each other in meaning or function.

As an example of how the context similarity algorithm works, if I use the King James version of the book of Matthew as a source and I look for words similar to "Jesus", I get the following top five words:

SimilarityWord
0.37HE
0.25THEY
0.22PILATE
0.22PETER
0.18SHE

These are all nouns and pronouns referring to human beings.

What do we get if we perform the same steps on the Rohonc codex? I have previously identified the word below as possibly meaning "Jesus":
N.IGHA

Here are the words my algorithm identifies as most similar in the RC:

Similarity
Word
TranscriptionNotes
0.27
CUT.Ctentatively "Pilate"
0.24
CQ.B1CUunknown
0.24
Nfirst glyph of "Jesus"
0.22
IGHAsecond glyph of "Jesus"
0.22
RT.A.CO.Dtentatively a saint's name

It is rewarding to see that the word I previously identified as "Pilate" appears at the top of the list, and a saint's name appears at the bottom of the list.

The wholly new information is the second word, CQ.B1CU, which now looks like a noun referring to a human being.

The appearance of N and IGHA as similar to N.IGHA is also interesting and deserves investigation. Indeed, in the titulus crucis only the second glyph is used to represent the name Jesus. Presumably this is really a two-word phrase, and only the second glyph actually represents the name "Jesus," with the first glyph N representing the title "Lord" or something similar.

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