The Voynich Ninja

Quote:Edit: Anton: Just to be clear, I did ask him first whether he'd like me to share the paper here

Koen, of course I did not mean that you did that against his own will. But the link is public access anyway.

But (if that's not a secret), did he know about our forum in advance? And if yes, why did he hesitate to present his ideas here himself?

---

Quote:Actually, he started (like many others) by writing to the Beinecke. This was already in July.

They should introduce a new position, something like Voynich PR manager...

1. He hasn't read very extensively if he says, "Curiously, not one theory suggests a female hand."

I've said there's a possibility it's female many times and so have numerous others. I don't know if it is, but I almost always say "the illustrator" instead of "he" or "she" because I'm trying to remain gender-neutral about the author(s) until more is known.

2. I notice he didn't mention Nick Pelling's book. If one is researching the VMS for a university degree, and citing precedents, as he does in his introduction, Pelling's book should be on the list (never mind, he added it at the end).

3. Oh boy, now he's got me going... "The general consensus therefore seems to be that the code is unsolvable."

Absolute nonsense. If that were true, this forum wouldn't exist, there wouldn't be so many blogs explicitly devoted to the VMS, and there wouldn't be so many dozens of proposed solutions every year.

4. Also, while I agree that it might be book of healthful practices, I see no evidence that it's specifically geared toward "childbearing and the associated complications..." There are what look like many pregnancies (women were basically always pregnant in the middle ages, before birth control), but there is a conspicuous absence of children, and only a couple of possible references to the actual process of childbirth.

5. "So, perhaps most surprisingly, the manuscript is not written in code at all, but simply the contemporaneous alphabet and language of its time and place. Remarkably, this fact seems to have been hiding in plain sight all along." << This statement is pretty insulting to the many people who HAVE suggested that the VMS is not written in code. In fact, many avoid the word "cipher" because it has not been established that it is ciphered.

6. "However, the lack of punctuation marks in the manuscript also suggested that the symbols take different forms, so that punctuation is indicated in a unique way." Many scribes did not use punctuation.

7. On page 3, he suggests that a different glyph (he calls it a "form") is used for each letter depending on its position in the word. Thus, he posits several different glyphs for the letter a.

Those who have studied the entropy characteristics of the VMS will understand why a researcher making this statement must provide a considerable amount of evidence to back it up. How you are going to have enough glyphs for the rest of the alphabet if 4 VMS glyphs are used for "a" and 6 are used for "s". He also claims that this assumption helps reveal where the punctuation lies.

8. I'm going to skip the statements about punctuation.

9. Cheshire is claiming the repeated words are used to create a count (rather than writing a numeral). Considering that many old languages use letters for numerals (as in Roman numerals), I find this hard to believe.

10. The rest is a table of correspondences. It's not much different from the letters many people have assigned to VMS glyphs, with the most notable exceptions being EVA-q, EVA-d, EVA-F and the tail in "daiin". He assigns "r" to EVA-l and "s" to EVA-r, but I've seen others do that. So... nothing really new here.

11. I'm not sure what he means by "reverse of Spread 176. Right." but he refers to it as the "final page" and talks about it as though the text on 116v is part of the evolutionary process of the old script (as he sees it) in the main body of text. I'm quite sure it's not. It's Gothic cursive c. 1385 to c. 1520 and it is probably marginalia.

12. He explains the frequent repetition of certain glyph-combinations at the ends of words as "an apparent use of rhyming words to poetic effect". While I'm not discounting the possibility of rhyme (it was common in the Middle Ages), I don't think glyph repetitions that are excessive can be explained away by calling them rhymes.



Marco, now that I've read the paper all the way through, I can see why you brought up the issue of not matching images to labels. He asserts many words that are nouns, some of which would surely relate to the imagery, and yet these potential image-text correspondences are scarcely mentioned. Even when he does mention them (briefly, on page 19), he switches from Vulgar Latin and Romance languages to Croatian/Slovenian/Polish, as though he couldn't make any sense in it in his chosen language, Vulgar Latin, and so resorted to other languages to explain it (a bit like people who start anagraming when they can't make sense of the labels). Starting on p. 21, he mentions a few more diagrams, but he doesn't back up his interpretations, he simply says what he thinks they mean and comes up with some pretty strange not-quite-Latin translations.


I found it difficult to read beyond this. On almost every paragraph after this, he switches to other languages to try to explain the text. I understand that proto-languages lead to many others but this is treading on unsteady ground. Just as anagraming enables people to turn VMS into something that makes sense, but in a subjective way, picking and choosing from dozens of different languages is much the same thing... it's a rationalization unless specific justifications are demonstrated.


Is this part of a PhD thesis (or a side-note to the Vulgar Latin glossary PhD work)?

It needs more work, more specific explanations of the logic that leads to each conclusion, and more study of the way VMS glyphs and tokens relate to each other positionally and grammatically. Also, he states outright that the glyphs are proto-Italic, without sufficient evidence for this assertion.



 

It looks so good at the beginning... But I never thought that the Vulgar Latin differs from the usual Latin and Italian so much 

Cheshire's proposal seems to me to be out of synch with historical developments. His title is "Linguistic missing links..."

Even though examples are sparse, the history and evolution of Old Italic has been studied going back almost 3,000 years, with references to similar scripts such as Old Etruscan and Picene. Similarly, the history of Latin (not just the script, but also the linguistic development) has been reasonably well documented for quite some time.

If I understand his proposal correctly, the time frame of what Cheshire is claiming would have to be much earlier than the creation of the VMS.


Cheshire explicitly states in the abstract that his paper "provides the solution..." to the Voynich manuscript text. It is not presented as a theory.


I was wondering how other people felt about his assertion that a "proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols for its writing system" could exist at the time the VMS was created. Romance languages and the alphabets by which they were expressed were already well developed by the 15th century.

I'm aware that he refers to a "diluted, corrupted and simplified version" of Vulgar Latin, but it seems to me that medieval-period corrupted Vulgar Latin is something quite different from a "proto-Romance language and proto-Italic symbols".

I took Cheshire's correspondence chart and the first line of the VMS, and the transliteration comes out like this:

Qua eeat alar as amaus aeor aeos emeset a los aeorna

Apparently he's mostly focused on discovering the Italic language. This would explain why he doesn't seem to focus too much on the VM as a complete manuscript with text and illustrations.

Quote:Now I have the time, I attach my 'working lexicon' for the project. As yet it is incomplete and approximate, as it takes a great deal of time and effort to locate the words. The manuscript language has undergone memetic evolution over the past 450 years, so the spellings and definitions have altered within the various modern Romance languages. This means that degrees of freedom will exist until the lexicon is tightened up, which will happen gradually as the whole manuscript is processed. 

You will see that I have used marker words in the paper to objectively show that the symbols are correct. Therefore the corollary is that other words must be correct even if they require locating. Thus, it is case of detective work in order to find and define the vocabulary.

Please disseminate my paper and lexicon to all other scholars of Latin and the Romance languages, so that others can participate. Ultimately, the manuscript will have considerable linguistic and semiotic value I'm sure.

I just sent him a mail outlining some of the problems.. fingers crossed.

Okay now I'm lost. I'll share my mail and then his reply:

Quote:Hi Gerard

I'm sorry to say that there are serious issues with your work. Don't feel too bad about it, hundreds of people have attempted to somehow read MS Beinecke 408 and they all hit the same walls - even professionals in relevant fields.

Specifically to your paper, I see significant problems related to linguistics, history and the specificity of the Voynich manuscript.

- Linguists have used the comparative method to reliably reconstruct the proto-Italic language and it does not correspond to what you propose. See the Wiki: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . The method you used ignores fundamental laws of language change and cannot produce reliable results.

- The proto-Italic language was spoken before the Homeric poems were written, just to provide a comparison. By that time, it had already evolved to Old Latin, which is attested mostly in inscriptions. The earliest know author in any Romance language was You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , who lived in the 3rd century BCE, over half a millennium later than the extinction of the proto-Romance language. It is absolutely impossible for any large text in proto-Italic to have survived, even in transmission.

- Proto-Italic changed into languages like Latin. It would not have been understood anymore by the time we get the first Latin authors, and certainly not 2 millennia later, when the Voynich MS was written.

- The Praeneste fibula bears the oldest known inscription in a Latin language: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. . It is clear that at this time the Latin culture was in an "inscriptions" stage (like runes on Viking swords) and longer texts were not made. The language you propose for the VM is still much older than this! No linguist or historian could take this seriously, since it's simply not compatible with the evidence.

- I don't know where to begin listing the problems with the VM itself. The text in MS 408 is statistically very odd, leaving us scratching our heads when we compare it to real languages. I'll give just one example (but there are many like this). 

The following graph compares where in the word a specific letter occurs. The first bar is word-initial, the last one word-final. In Latin, "d" occurs more in the beginning of the word, but in over half of the cases it occurs elsewhere. In the Voynich manuscript, the sign you transcribe as "d" occurs almost exclusively in word-initial position. 

(Marco's graph)

This is absolutely impossible in a Romance language. Indeed, the comparative method teaches us that "d" occurs anywhere in the word in Proto-Italic. But Voynich glyphs behave differently. These statistical anomalies are one of the reasons why the manuscript remains undeciphered to this day, and indeed why some researchers think that it cannot encode real language.

I hope this helps.
Koen

Quote:Hi Koen,
Many thanks for your reply - I feel bad that you have invested so much time and effort, as I am entirely certain the solution is correct. I have conducted hundreds of experiments and every one has generated a positive outcome. The marker words demonstrate objective proof, so we know that the other words are correct even if they have yet to be located and defined. It's simple scientific logic. 

I might add also, that various linguistics experts have begun to verify the work. I am not at all interested in the 'Voynich code' element, as that is entirely trivial, yet overblown in the minds of enthusiasts. That is why I have not used that word in the paper. 

What is important is the linguistic and semiotic discovery, as that is what it gives to science. Perhaps you would like to participate by contributing to the lexicon. The science is all that matters. 

Kindest regards,
Gerard.

There are many people who are entirely certain that their solution is correct, but unfortunately the solutions are all different. Let them decide between themselves which one is most correct.