The Voynich Ninja - [split] An interview with Stephen Bax

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(16-09-2017, 09:12 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.English has 26 letters which represent 44 common sounds. Same as Voynichese.

It's not the same as Voynichese.

In English (and other languages) you can shuffle those letters around to create those sounds. For example, SH and HS are different sounds, based on the order of the letters. So are TH and HT. You cannot do that in Voynichese. It has severe restrictions on the position of the glyphs.

For example...

vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.
ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.
cc is almost invariably midword.
d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.

... and there are many more examples.

When you restrict the position of the glyph, you are also restricting the possible sounds that can be represented by that glyph. If you use three glyphs for one sound (as was suggested in the original video), then the available pool for remaining sounds is significantly diminished not only because they are less in number, but because their associated positional rules are restricted even further by association.

Voynichese is full of positional restrictions that are not characteristic of natural languages. Even Asian languages, which have a few of these characteristics (the ones that are syllabic) do not have anywhere near as many restrictions.

(16-09-2017, 09:00 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question was how do you resolve the problem of there not being enough glyphs to encode all the other sounds if you use three glyphs for one sound-family. The VMS's character set is restrained to begin with. Use three-for-one and it becomes even more restrained.

I am sorry, JKP. I thought you asked a question "to all of us" and I did my best to reply. The question seemed to be if we believe that the VMS is a one-to-one substitution code. My poor English, I guess.

Be patient, but I need clarification also on the sentence above. The meaning of "all the other sounds" is unclear to me. Do you think there is a universal set of sounds common to all languages? Or maybe you have a specific idea about which language corresponds to the script? I don't know which language it is, so I don't know which are all the sounds of that language.

As Stephen wrote in point 2.2 of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., if Voynichese makes use of digraphs and trigraphs, it seems easy to accommodate at least 20 more sounds in addition to the two possible r-sounds. I think that the ancient Latin alphabet had 23 letters and 3 of them corresponded to hard-c (C, K, Q)?

[Image: latin_classical.gif]

(16-09-2017, 10:01 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 09:00 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question was how do you resolve the problem of there not being enough glyphs to encode all the other sounds if you use three glyphs for one sound-family. The VMS's character set is restrained to begin with. Use three-for-one and it becomes even more restrained.

I am sorry, JKP. I thought you asked a question "to all of us" and I did my best to reply. The question seemed to be if we believe that the VMS is a one-to-one substitution code. My poor English, I guess.

Marco, I'm sorry, too many discussions on one thread.

I did ask a question specific to Bax's method and I did ask a question to all of you and I too got confused as to which replies were to which, so I apologize for that, that's why we start new threads. I thought it belonged in this one, since the question was derived from the method proposed in the video but now I see too many topics on one thread doesn't work.

(16-09-2017, 08:39 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 08:37 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why are we saying "one-to-one substitution code" in reference to a language? Substitution ciphers are for existing scripts. Most linguistic solutions would consider that the script we see is referencing the underlying language and not some intermediate script.

Emma, I don't know if you've watched the video, but in it there are charts and in the charts the system laid out is essentially a substitution code.

I don't remember the charts you're referring to. But I guess that they're phonemes and not characters.

(16-09-2017, 10:01 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 09:00 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The question was how do you resolve the problem of there not being enough glyphs to encode all the other sounds if you use three glyphs for one sound-family. The VMS's character set is restrained to begin with. Use three-for-one and it becomes even more restrained.

I am sorry, JKP. I thought you asked a question "to all of us" and I did my best to reply. The question seemed to be if we believe that the VMS is a one-to-one substitution code. My poor English, I guess.

Be patient, but I need clarification also on the sentence above. The meaning of "all the other sounds" is unclear to me. Do you think there is a universal set of sounds common to all languages? Or maybe you have a specific idea about which language corresponds to the script? I don't know which language it is, so I don't know which are all the sounds of that language.

...

What I meant was that in his system (the charts he posted on his video), he was mapping the Voynichese characters to specific sounds (he was saying the sounds out loud in the video) and was using several VMS glyphs to represent similar sounds which leaves a very reduced pool of glyphs to represent the others but he did not resolve that issue in the video or, to my knowledge, on his blog.

Whatever he may have said to Nick about bigraphs and trigraphs is not relevant until it's established that they exist. Nick knows the math on bigraphs and trigraphs and is completely aware that it increases the pool of sounds (as does everyone on the forum who understands the math, including me) and doesn't need to hear basic high school math concepts from Bax.

The point is that the system shown on the video (and which has not been substantively altered since that time) did not work that way, the information on bigraphs is rhetorical until it is incorporated into the system that was visually presented to us. If Bax has revised it, he needs to post it, because unfortunately, we cannot see what is in his head.

(16-09-2017, 10:13 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Whatever he may have said to Nick about bigraphs and trigraphs is not relevant until it's established that they exist.

I find this point of view peculiar. If you think everything that is not established is irrelevant, we can resume our conversation when the manuscript is fully translated.

(16-09-2017, 07:27 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 12:51 PM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You need then to tell Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B and identified it as Greek, that his methodology was wrong :-)

I am not sure from your description that you have grasped the underlying principles of what I was trying to do.

And also you have definitely not understood how I was referring to Arabic. It is simply wrong to say that I "maps words like Taurus and Centaur/Centaurus and Coriander to Arabic"..... where did I map the word Taurus to Arabic? Or Coriander? I cannot see how you got to this interpretation.

Michael Ventris was deciphering a natural language. There is no evidence yet that the VMS is a natural language. You are not the only person who has tried the same methods as Ventris—they are widely known.

Can you tell me who has tried to follow the same process, of working from the known, and then trying to identify sound/symbol correspondences?

I grasp what you are trying to do very well. I can follow the video step-by-step and see exactly what you are doing. But what you are doing does not acknowledge 1) why your system does not generalize to the rest of the text and

It is early days and only a few signs have been identified. If we can identify more sound/symbol correspondences then we might start to see larger patterns, but we can't run before we can walk. Even so, it can be generalised to some extent - see the example discussed here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where it helped us to identify a plant and perhaops a name.

2) the positional regularity and rigidity of specific VMS glyphs

What do you mean?

and 3) the reduced character set that is inherent in your system of mapping more than one glyph to related sounds.

What, reduced by one? What significance does this have? There are still plenty of characters to work with..

As for the Arabic, do you want me to quote from your video word for word? Whether you call it Arabic or "possibly some extinct language possibly a Semitic language" (or whatever weasel/waffle words you want to use), you completely missed the fact that the words you chose map naturally (and better) to Latin than they do to your system.

Sorry, this is getting offensive when you say my words are 'weasel' . If you believe it is Latin you should prove it.

I've noticed you almost never answer honest questions about the specific problems inherent in your system, which is what legitimate, sincere researchers usually do. What you do instead is turn the question back on the person asking it and imply that they don't "understand" you or your system.

Again this is gettig offensive. I have a full blog where you can ask me questions and I have never refused to answer any. Look at my blog and you will find answers to many objections. Also, I am busy - too busy to deal with people who simply want to attack and not offer constructive discussion.

(16-09-2017, 10:44 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 10:13 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Whatever he may have said to Nick about bigraphs and trigraphs is not relevant until it's established that they exist.

I find this point of view peculiar. If you think everything that is not established is irrelevant, we can resume our conversation when the manuscript is fully translated.

Somehow my answer to this got lost when the thread was split. It's late. I'm too tired to hunt for it, but my comment was within the context of Stephen's method, Nick's question, and Stephen's response, not a general comment. You know me well enough to know that I would not discount something simply because it has not yet been firmly established.

(16-09-2017, 09:54 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 09:12 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.English has 26 letters which represent 44 common sounds. Same as Voynichese.

It's not the same as Voynichese.

In English (and other languages) you can shuffle those letters around to create those sounds. For example, SH and HS are different sounds, based on the order of the letters. So are TH and HT. You cannot do that in Voynichese. It has severe restrictions on the position of the glyphs.

For example...

vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.

ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.

cc is almost invariably midword.

d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.

... and there are many more examples.

When you restrict the position of the glyph, you are also restricting the possible sounds that can be represented by that glyph. If you use three glyphs for one sound (as was suggested in the original video), then the available pool for remaining sounds is significantly diminished not only because they are less in number, but because their associated positional rules are restricted even further by association.

Voynichese is full of positional restrictions that are not characteristic of natural languages. Even Asian languages, which have a few of these characteristics (the ones that are syllabic) do not have anywhere near as many restrictions.

vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.
ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.
cc is almost invariably midword.
d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.

I love the words 'almost' and 'with rare exceptions' in these examples. That means immediately that these are NOT 'severe restrictions'! This for me is an example of overanalysing and ending up in a self-imposed dead end.

There are perfectly enough symbols in the Voynich script to accommodate two sounds in the region of /r/ , and a terminal symbol (EVA m) as a counterpart to the main symbol (EVA r). But we are so far from having a full sound/symbol correspondence list that at this stage the discussion is a waste of breath. It doesn't move us forward in any way, so personally I intend to waste no more time on it, and focus instead on continuing to try to decode the script.

(17-09-2017, 11:03 AM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 09:54 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(16-09-2017, 09:12 PM)davidjackson Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.English has 26 letters which represent 44 common sounds. Same as Voynichese.

It's not the same as Voynichese.

In English (and other languages) you can shuffle those letters around to create those sounds. For example, SH and HS are different sounds, based on the order of the letters. So are TH and HT. You cannot do that in Voynichese. It has severe restrictions on the position of the glyphs.

For example...

vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.

ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.

cc is almost invariably midword.

d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.

... and there are many more examples.

When you restrict the position of the glyph, you are also restricting the possible sounds that can be represented by that glyph. If you use three glyphs for one sound (as was suggested in the original video), then the available pool for remaining sounds is significantly diminished not only because they are less in number, but because their associated positional rules are restricted even further by association.

Voynichese is full of positional restrictions that are not characteristic of natural languages. Even Asian languages, which have a few of these characteristics (the ones that are syllabic) do not have anywhere near as many restrictions.
vords like daiin... the iin part can only be preceded by "o" or "a" and with rare exceptions, it can only be at the end of a vord.

ot or its variants 4ot and yot are almost always at the beginnings of words.

cc is almost invariably midword.

d9 (dy) is almost invariably at the ends of vords.

I love the words 'almost' and 'with rare exceptions' in these examples. That means immediately that these are NOT 'severe restrictions'! This for me is an example of overanalysing and ending up in a self-imposed dead end.

There are perfectly enough symbols in the Voynich script to accommodate two sounds in the region of /r/ , and a terminal symbol (EVA m) as a counterpart to the main symbol (EVA r). But we are so far from having a full sound/symbol correspondence list that at this stage the discussion is a waste of breath. It doesn't move us forward in any way, so personally I intend to waste no more time on it, and focus instead on continuing to try to decode the script.

The exceptions are rare. Some of them may be copying errors. When you have something that occurs 5,467 times in a specific way and then you find it on one of those lines in the manuscript where you can't tell if something is a space, a half-space or no space, then one ends up with a few exceptions.

There are also a few places where it's simply impossible to tell if the character is "o" or "a" because it's been drawn like something in between.

I have examined every glyph in the manuscript at least three or four times because I created a full transcript.

How often do you see EVA-k or EVA-t at the ends of Vwords?
How often is EVA-l preceded by anything other than EVA-o or EVA-a?
How often does aiin occur anywhere other than the end of a Vord?
How often does EVA-dy occur anywhere other than the end of a vord?
How often does a benched gallows occur at the end of a vord?

Even if there are exceptions (and there aren't many), Voynichese is very positionally constrained. A few exceptions do not change the basic structure of text that spans a couple of hundred pages.

In natural languages, a variety of sounds is created by combining letters in different ways (earlier I used the examples SH and HS). You can't do these kinds of recombinations in Voynichese, it follows a set of rules, which significantly restricts the numbers of sounds that could potentially be represented (assuming the representation of sounds is even intended, which it may not be).

How many natural languages have restrictions as severe as these as to a character's position in a word? I've done a very extensive search of languages trying to find something that is even half as restrictive and have not, so far.

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