The Voynich Ninja

(12-12-2016, 11:31 AM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Any actual thoughts on the subject to contribute, David?

The actual thought was already there, but I always learned we Dutch are way too direct for the Belgians, so I tried to write it between the lines.



Since that doesn't work:

"Which changes to EVA would have the most impact?"  

This question was asked many times. Suggestions were made. Nothing changed.
For me, Eva is good, and everything I have is based on it.  If there comes a new transcription, nothing changes.
A letter is a letter. If it can be written as two separate letters, it doesn't change things to my knowledge on those letters.


If you read the paper on for example, how was the Copiale cipher solved.
The transcription itself or how it was done was not really a factor in solving it.
Of course you need a basis transcription, but that is enough.

Look at the Phaistos disk, do you think it matters how good you describe the picto's ?
It doesn't really matter at this point in the research. 

There are still people in 2016 who want to make a new transcription on old manuscripts.
For example on bible sources. Very good if that's your field of study,
but in order to understand the basis of the text, all you need is a basic transcription.


What matters on the Voynich is professional and structural research and ideas & people that are willing to cooperate towards a solution.
Even here on the forum, everybody is doing his own "thing" unfortunately. I would like suggest suggestions on improving that in 2017!

(12-12-2016, 08:35 PM)Davidsch Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.What matters on the Voynich is professional and structural research and ideas & people that are willing to cooperate towards a solution.
Even here on the forum, everybody is doing his own "thing" unfortunately. I would like suggest suggestions on improving that in 2017!

Very interesting Davidsch, what do you mean? What would you suggest?

The most important property of the text of the VMS is, that all the words are related to each other. This relation can be described by a set of rules. If you apply this set of rules to a word of the VMS this would result in other words which are also part of the manuscript. The most basic rule is for instance that a glyph can be replaced with a similar shaped glyph. For instance if a word contains the glyph ch a word containing sh instead of ch should also exist for the VMS. Another rule is that nearly every glyph can be removed. Because of this rule you can expect beside the word cheedy also the words chedy, chdy, eedy, cheed and cheey. A third more complex rule is that you can add a glyph to a word. For instance it is possible to add an 'o' in front of a word but the letter next to 'o' normally transforms into 'k' in this case. Because of this rule beside the word cheedy also words like okeedy and qokeedy exists.

If you want to examine the relations between words in the VMS the transcription alphabet doesn't matter. On the other hand also very rarely used glyphs or glyph variants exists in the VMS (see for instance You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). If this variants are important in your eyes each transcription alphabet would be imperfect.

For me one useful addition to EVA would be distinction between normal glyph o and "escape o", which can be seen in the beginning of some words right before gallows and is written below baseline. This kind of o is used only for decapitalization, I believe, and should not be taken into account when deciphering corresponding word.