The Voynich Ninja

The blog post is a bit vague, but it seems the author is claiming to be able to read the text as heavily abbreviated Latin. It's not the first time this approach has been taken - but a cleartext excerpt frome You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which actually makes sense, is given (which is a bit rare).


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It will be interesting to see the methodology and further development on this as the blog author seems be reasonably scientific and well-versed in medievalia judging from his previous posts.

Not much to go on yet, I'm curious to see his method.
One first test will be the amount of freedom built into the system. Usually, people who use a method like this allow for so much leeway that pne ciphertext could translate to a million different plaintexts (and/or the other way around). 
To get to this kind of coherence, I predict the freedom built into his system will be very large. But we'll have to wait and see 

Hello all.
As I recall, Mr. Lockerby corresponded with Nick Pelling on "Cipher Mysteries" for a while a few years back and had previously posted 8 or so Voynich themed articles on the same "Science 2.0" site around the same time. The first of these at:

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It will be interesting to see what he's done in the years since.

Best, E

It's very easy to get Latin out of the VMS text. Very easy.

In Latin, all the letters with tails are abbreviations, the curve above the letter is an abbreviation, the number 9 at the beginnings and ends of words is an abbreviation and, in Latin, there is leeway in how they can be interpreted (the squiggle above the letter abbrev. can be er, re, ir, or ri, the 9 abbreviation can be con, com, cus, cum, sometimes rum, etc.—I've blogged and posted about this many times).


I just glanced at You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. again and got this, in Latin, in just minutes, without much effort:

"and why he causes us"

and

"I am at and that will burden him..."

Looks like it might be working, right? I didn't take liberties with the text other than to expand a couple of the abbreviations with their accepted alternates. I used a consistent system.


Is it Latin?

If you see my original, you will see that one has to take a "soft" approach to Latin grammar and simply make sense of adjacent words, you will also start to see an unusual amount of repetition and lack of letter-placement flexibility, the longer the passages, so... until the Science20 "proposed solution" is revealed in detail (with the actual method used), it doesn't mean anything.

Claiming decipherment without explaining not a bit of the methodology is not something by which confidence can be rooted into the reader.

So for the moment it looks like YAVS (yet another Voynich solution).

Quote:"I am at and that will burden him..."

That sounds good.

"I am at <the beginning of my book> and that will burden him <the future reader>"

(28-07-2017, 11:05 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:"I am at and that will burden him..."

That sounds good.

"I am at <the beginning of my book> and that will burden him <the future reader>"

LOL!!!!!    


For the record, I keep meaning to say this and keep forgetting... I think there might be a small scattering of Latin words in the manuscript. Just as English has the occasional Latin word (especially medical terms), the VMS looks like it might have a few also, but I have seen no strong indication, no matter how hard I look, that the text, as a whole, is written in the same system as that handful of words.

It's darned near impossible to wrestle VMS text into grammatical Latin without taking substantial liberties in interpretation, even if one considers it to be in note form, or to be a compilations of lists, even those have a certain pattern to them that is not evident.


So... I'll believe it has been decoded when I can see the method and can double-check it for myself... not before.

I'll give an example...


EVA-shody

In Latin, tr/cr/ti/ci is frequently written as a ligature that looks like a bench character (I have hundreds of examples from medieval Latin texts).

If you put a cap or squiggle over it, in Latin, it becomes ter or cer or tir or cir or cit or rit (or one of the other interpretations, depending on whether the second char expands to c/t/i or r—which are all valid expansions in Latin).

Also, in Latin, the 9 at the end becomes -um or -us (and occasionally others, but -um and -us are overwhelmingly the most common).

Now let's say that the figure-8 character in the VMS can be either d or t (some languages don't make a distinction between d and t—to a foreign ear they are sometimes treated as the same, to a hearing-impaired person they can also be difficult to distinguish).

So, in Latin, it is justifiable to read it as cerotum/ceratum (waxy liniment/waxy ointment)—which would fit the context of the VMS.


People find a word or two or three like this (the VMS is full of them) and they get all excited... they think they've decoded it. The problem is that most don't take the next step, to see how often it occurs, WHERE in the sentences it occurs, and to confirm that it is correct in context with surrounding text in at least a semi-grammatical way or some way that would indicate poetry, notes, lists, etc. (which may be looser grammatically, but still have certain structural regularities).

Once they do notice the level of inflexibility of the letter positions and the unusual amount of repetition, many of them give up or they start taking liberties with the translation that are difficult to justify.


I pay no attention to claims of proposed solutions unless they reveal their  method. Even when they reveal the method, I often discount it because if the method only yields a handful of words out of tens of thousands, it's probably a coincidence.

Another installment has been posted. Here is the "Latin":

"banis oleoris croque et potis"

Which has been translated as:

"a bath of potent saffron oil"


I'm not going to comment on this (yet). I'll try to restrain myself.

Quote:The relevance of word games to the VM is this: if you love language or if you like to do crosswords you can 'do' the VM.  With the help of a good Latin dictionary.  Also, if you see it as a game with words you will be more likely to see the patterns of Latin rhyme and aliteration, and semantic analogies between stems or roots, which I prefer to call semantic core concepts or cores.  Look at the VM script as sequences of prefix-core-suffix and you will find Latin words by the hundreds.

"If you like to do crosswords you can 'do' the VM."

I shall also restrain myself


Edit: I can't. Stellar with better grammar. Called it.
Edit2: Okay that was a bit of an exaggeration, but still. This bit gave me a good laugh:

Quote:Back to the medieval public baths.  It would make good sense to address the sensibilities of ladies "of the better sort" by ensuring that they did not bathe downstream of the plebs.  The Voynich Manuscript appears to show such a bathing hierarchy.  It also clearly shows the waste being discharged to the ground, where it is of use only to wild creatures, being likely to cause deformities in humans.