18-09-2017, 11:41 AM
Since Stephen Bax is now on the forum and can directly respond to questions about his original video "Voynich - a provisional, partial decoding of the Voynich script" posted on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., this might be a good time to discuss some of the ideas presented in the video.
PLEASE NOTE. This is only a summary transcript (you can watch the video for the full story or read this as you follow the video). I have not included every word. I left out many repetitive words and ones that refer to pointing at things on the screen to make it as streamlined as possible. Note also that I have commented on the information in the video from personal and professional points of view. My opinions are in square brackets and usually in blue.
I'll start by stating my perspective... I don't see this (or anyone else's "solution" as a "provisional, partial decoding". I haven't seen any decodings yet. I see these as theories (there is nothing wrong with theories).
There isn't really any such thing as a "partial decoding" unless the part that has been decoded can be verified as correct. Some claims have more credibility than others and there are a few good efforts out there that might bear fruit eventually, but none are yet convincing enough or comprehensive enough (they lack confirmatory support) to establish that the theories are indeed fact (actual decodings).
Here follows a summarized transcript of the video, with my observations and opinions added as commentary. Bax's statements are marked with quotation marks.
![[Image: DoarusComment.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/DoarusComment.png)
![[Image: Karotas.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Karotas.png)
![[Image: CentaureaSpecies.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CentaureaSpecies.png)
![[Image: CentaureaChart.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/CentaureaChart.png)
![[Image: Rsigns.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Rsigns.png)
• Analysis of Plant 3v. [A proposed identification of Helleboreis used to try to discern a name within the text. Since the identification of this plant as Hellebore is controversial, I am reserving judgment on the textural interpretation. The drawing doesn't resemble other drawings of Hellebore (including the Arabic drawing shown onscreen), nor does it resemble the live plant and thus I can't really form an opinion on whether the correct word has been ascribed to the plant.]
• Analysis of Plant 29v. [I have no argument with this being Nigella. It strongly resembles both the flowers and the claw-like seeds—a resemblance that's been noted by a number of people. The description of the text follows much the same format as previous discussion.]
• Summary and Test. [Two charts are shown onscreen—consonants and vowels, and interpretations of the glyphs are summarize. As a test of the interpretation system, Bax chose a word-token (keedey) from one of the plant pages and interpreted it.] "It's tempting to read it as kooton. Now could this possibly... be cotton? Well, if you look at the plant itself, unfortunately there's no sign particularly of cotton in there, which is disappointing. It would be lovely if there was a little cotton bud appearing. So we can't say for certain whether this does actually mean cotton, but nonetheless it's still a possibility and my proposal is that we continue to try and read the pages using the letters that we have and then work hard to get the remaining letters that we don't have so far..." [I thought one word-token was a rather brief "test", so I grabbed a chunk of text from one of the least controversial plant pages. The results are displayed in the following image to the right of the original chart from the video.]
![[Image: SummaryandTest.png]](http://voynichportal.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/SummaryandTest.png)
• [The final segment is a recap of familiar VMS history and issues, and Bax's views on the VMS not being a secret code, but an unknown script.]"... I subscribe to the cultural extinction theory of the manuscript's origins. But again, as I say, what we need to do now is I hope build on what I have done so far in terms of decoding the script, decode it fully and then try and identify the language in which it was written.... I've identified, as I see it, roughly ten words and fourteen signs and clusters, depending on how you count the signs and clusters, of course. But I hope I've also contributed in terms of methodology. I believe it's a useful method to focus on proper names just as Champollion did and Ventris did in decoding their particular languages and scripts, and I think that way we can possibly build up a complete sound-sign system—that's what I'm moving towards next, and then finally move toward a full decipherment. If we're lucky, we'll be able to identify the language, that will help us considerably, if not, we'll try to reconstruct the language from the evidence that we have, and try to understand what's going on in that way." [Acknowledgments to Zandbergen, Beinecke, and Yale.]
Based on video published by Stepehn Bax on Youtube February 2, 2014.
PLEASE NOTE. This is only a summary transcript (you can watch the video for the full story or read this as you follow the video). I have not included every word. I left out many repetitive words and ones that refer to pointing at things on the screen to make it as streamlined as possible. Note also that I have commented on the information in the video from personal and professional points of view. My opinions are in square brackets and usually in blue.
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I'll start by stating my perspective... I don't see this (or anyone else's "solution" as a "provisional, partial decoding". I haven't seen any decodings yet. I see these as theories (there is nothing wrong with theories).
There isn't really any such thing as a "partial decoding" unless the part that has been decoded can be verified as correct. Some claims have more credibility than others and there are a few good efforts out there that might bear fruit eventually, but none are yet convincing enough or comprehensive enough (they lack confirmatory support) to establish that the theories are indeed fact (actual decodings).
Here follows a summarized transcript of the video, with my observations and opinions added as commentary. Bax's statements are marked with quotation marks.
- Background and Premise. The first 4 minutes is devoted to introducing the speaker and the history of the manuscript, and transitions into the next segment with the following statement [a slide of the Taiz & Taiz 2011 quotation is shown onscreen], "... that despite all these years and the efforts of very many people, we still don't understand a single word of it. But I propose today to put that right to some extent. I'm proposing today a provisional, partial decoding of the manuscript..." [A link to the full paper is posted onscreen.]
- Brief Introduction of Method. The next segment gives a brief reference to the history of code-breaking, specifically citing Simon Singh, The Code Book (and, in turn, Champollion Young, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Michael Ventris, Linear B script from Crete), with an image of Singh's book. "And the question is, how did they do it? Because I... basically I want to follow more-or-less their approach." Examples of method follows, including identification of proper names (looking for names of pharaohs and towns), building up a scheme of sound-symbol relationships, and then identifying the language. Bax then proposes following the same method with names of plants in the VMS and that a "small-scale approach" might be better than using a "big theory approach, top-down." "So I propose to examine five plants in the manuscript, and one constellation, the constellation Taurus... trying to identify the probable proper names of these plants, and then gradually working out the sounds of each Voynich sign, side-by-side".
- Plant Labels. The next segment illustrates two folios from the VMS big-plants section, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. with an inset enlargement of Voynichese oror. Bax: "When I was looking at the manuscript... I noticed this rather interesting pattern here... which looks like an o and then a character which is transcribed in some of the transcripts as an r, and then another o and r. It's quite unusual to get a repeating pattern like this in the manuscript, so I thought to myself maybe that's a word, it could actually be a word, and it's transcribed as oror, but I thought it might actually resemble the word arar, which is the Arabic word for juniper and also the Hebrew word or related to the Hebrew word for juniper."
[For the information of readers, since this is an interesting topic, oror occurs 16 times, alal 43 times, olol 49 times, arar 57 times. The pattern oror only occurs by itself (without suffixes or prefixes) on one rosette page and one starred-text page.]
- Details About the Plant Labels on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and f16r. Bax points out poror on the top left of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a plant with four broad leaves and long flower stalks), toror at the beginning of the last paragraph on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (a plant thought by some to be Cannabis) and orom on the top right which he describes as follows, "And I thought to myself also this word here [orom], could be oror but with a slightly different ending, which I'll come to in a minute... But it then occurred to me that this plant here, in this picture [f16r], might well be a type of juniper... and I thought that might be the name of the plant and the text linking with the picture. So I produced a short article about this two years ago and sent it round to a number of people to look at... [description of juniper with pics]... Some people have identified this as the Cannabis plant, but for me the spiky leaves are far more like this one. So it seemed to me that this oror shape might be in fact representing the Arabic a'ra'r or something similar to that..." [Comment: I personally don't think You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. looks like juniper. Juniper has whorls of leaves all along the stem, the VMS plant has single leaves at the ends of long petioles. Juniper has short clusters of berries at the nodes, the VMS plant has spikes of florets with leaflets coming out from the florets at the terminal end of the stalk, but I'm willing to consider the possibility, even if I think it's unlikely. I also don't think the plant on f15v, next to poror, has anything to do with juniper.]
- Pleiades and Taurus. [Image f68r is shown on screen, with a chart of glyph correspondences in the lower right. "Now, I said to you before that not a single word has been interpreted in the whole manuscript but actually there is one word which people have identified, and tried to identify and interpret, and this is the word Taurus.... But here you've got a curious, like a looped line here [f68r] going to seven stars.... It was thought that these seven stars might mean the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, which are in the constellation of Taurus and that this possibly actually means Taurus; some people have suggested that. [This identification with Pleiades and Taurus to which Bax is referring has been made by a number of people, including darkstar1 (January 2001).] "Now, I think that's possibly true because if you take the letters that I've already identified with a'ra'r... and that seems to fit with Taurus more-or-less..." [The following is a detail of the onscreen image with my commentary on the right.]
- Coriander. [Plant 41r is shown on-screen.] "And here we have what I think might be the plant coriander. This has been identified as the coriander plant by Sherwood and others, and it seems quite distinctively like coriander.... Although, of course, like all the Voynich plants, there are some rather odd elements of it which nobody quite understands but that could just mean that it's a foreign or unusual version of the plant. But anyway, taking other people's idea that this might be coriander, I notice that there's a strange addition to the text. You've got the normal text here on the bottom, but you've got something added just above the first word.... Now, it struck me that this might be typical of medieval herbal manuscripts. It might actually be the name of the plant, but a different name from the normal name that the writers know. So the writer is basically saying, this plant is called whatever we normally call it but this is what other people have called it.... So I assume that this might actually mean coriander or some version of the word coriander.... There are hundreds of different ways of writing coriander..." [Detail of the onscreen image follows, with commentary.]
- Centaurea. [Plant 2r is shown on-screen.] "...This is the plant which is called Centaurea.... This has been identified again by Sherwood and others as the Centaurea... and I think there's very little argument about that.... but this is obviously not a western European version, but it could be from eastern Europe or from Asia." [See images and my commentary below.]
- Centaurea History & Text Analysis. "And now, if you look at the first word again, and again it's important to start with the first word because in medieval herbal manuscripts that was typically where the herb was actually named, not always, but typically, it was named there or at least in the first line. So here if we look at the first word and also the first words of the second paragraph, we've got two paragraphs here... and you'll notice that the first letter is the same as the letter that we just saw with coriander, the /k/.... So I was beginning to suspect that this might be the word Centaurea in one form or another... Now Centaurea was a very well-known plant in ancient times and the Middle Ages..." [Centaurea minor (now known as Centaurum) and Centaurea major are shown onscreen along with a centaur from Harley Ms 1585.] "Now, here is an example from an Arabic manuscript... obviously in Arabic they call it "Qnturyun"... which obviously comes straight from the Greek..." [Image of Plant 2r is shown again, with a text-correspondence chart in the bottom right along with a verbal description of the chart. See alternate interpretation below with my commentary.]
- [Plant and centaur image shown onscreen.] "... Now, there's a slight problem here and that is that we now seem to have three different signs for /r/." [Close-up of three glyphs used for similar sound values.] "... Now that could be problematic but in fact this is not entirely impossible because it's quite likely, as it seems to me, looking at the shape of this one, that this one here is simply the same shape with an ending downwards to signify, for example, the end of a line or the end of a sentence, or the end of a paragraph. So it seems to me that these two could be exactly the same sound but simply in a different position." [Continued discussion of inherent vowels, etc., and other possible explanations for three glyphs for one sound. See the following image for my commentary on the probable origin of three VMS glyph shapes.]
• Analysis of Plant 3v. [A proposed identification of Helleboreis used to try to discern a name within the text. Since the identification of this plant as Hellebore is controversial, I am reserving judgment on the textural interpretation. The drawing doesn't resemble other drawings of Hellebore (including the Arabic drawing shown onscreen), nor does it resemble the live plant and thus I can't really form an opinion on whether the correct word has been ascribed to the plant.]
• Analysis of Plant 29v. [I have no argument with this being Nigella. It strongly resembles both the flowers and the claw-like seeds—a resemblance that's been noted by a number of people. The description of the text follows much the same format as previous discussion.]
• Summary and Test. [Two charts are shown onscreen—consonants and vowels, and interpretations of the glyphs are summarize. As a test of the interpretation system, Bax chose a word-token (keedey) from one of the plant pages and interpreted it.] "It's tempting to read it as kooton. Now could this possibly... be cotton? Well, if you look at the plant itself, unfortunately there's no sign particularly of cotton in there, which is disappointing. It would be lovely if there was a little cotton bud appearing. So we can't say for certain whether this does actually mean cotton, but nonetheless it's still a possibility and my proposal is that we continue to try and read the pages using the letters that we have and then work hard to get the remaining letters that we don't have so far..." [I thought one word-token was a rather brief "test", so I grabbed a chunk of text from one of the least controversial plant pages. The results are displayed in the following image to the right of the original chart from the video.]
• [The final segment is a recap of familiar VMS history and issues, and Bax's views on the VMS not being a secret code, but an unknown script.]"... I subscribe to the cultural extinction theory of the manuscript's origins. But again, as I say, what we need to do now is I hope build on what I have done so far in terms of decoding the script, decode it fully and then try and identify the language in which it was written.... I've identified, as I see it, roughly ten words and fourteen signs and clusters, depending on how you count the signs and clusters, of course. But I hope I've also contributed in terms of methodology. I believe it's a useful method to focus on proper names just as Champollion did and Ventris did in decoding their particular languages and scripts, and I think that way we can possibly build up a complete sound-sign system—that's what I'm moving towards next, and then finally move toward a full decipherment. If we're lucky, we'll be able to identify the language, that will help us considerably, if not, we'll try to reconstruct the language from the evidence that we have, and try to understand what's going on in that way." [Acknowledgments to Zandbergen, Beinecke, and Yale.]
Based on video published by Stepehn Bax on Youtube February 2, 2014.