The Voynich Ninja

I am fascinated to read that while the author believes the content in the manuscript's written text is fairly ordinary:

Quote:... written in a perfectly ordinary language and is simply a tome about homeopathic remedies and practises relating to the spiritual belief system of the High Mediaeval period in Mediterranean Europe..

he then says the language is low/vulgar/commoners' Latin

Quote:....  it is revealed to be the only known document both written in Vulgar Latin, or protoRomance, 

but using a script even older than classical Latin

Quote:using proto-Italic symbols

I have some difficulty on that point, because despite my ignorance of comparative linguistics and phonetics,  I learn from the wikiwand article 'Proto-Italic languages' that:

Quote:The Proto-Italic language is the ancestor of the Italic languages...  It is not directly attested in writing, but [the language, not the script] has been reconstructed [font=Lora, serif]to some degree through the comparative method. [/font]

I understand this to mean is  that 

1. there are no written examples of 'Proto-Italic' language, and scholar's efforts to reconstruct  Proto-Italic  language is derived by analogy, back-projection and comparative linguistics.  And secondly
2. There is no 'Proto-Italic' script.

There is an 'Old Italic' script.  Since this is really basic stuff, and I'm no specialist, I'll stick to wikiwand for the quote.

Quote:Old Italic is one of several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times  for various Indo-European languages  (predominantly Italic) and non-Indo-European (e.g. Etruscan) languages.

The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia and Cumae in the Bay of Naples, n the eighth century BC.

Now oddly enough I don't think it necessarily impossible that someone might adopt the symbols of an ancient script in order to suggest that their recipe-book was full of ancient wisdom.  We know that Marsilio Ficino asked for an appointment to a rural town in the heel of Italy, in the belief that the locals preserved an authentically 'ancient Greek' language, presumably with associated script, writing and something of medicine (given his particular interests).

Baresch evidently believed the content was ancient, too, and non-European.

Kircher had such a collection of ancient and antique scripts that he claimed to be able to read that one would have loved to see his seventeenth-century library.

So it's not impossible.  Monuments and papyri and so on exist to the present day showing scripts so ancient we can't read them.

Not impossible - but is it true?

Had this 'PhD student' asked my advice, I think I'd have told him to make appointments with scholars in other departments of the university and request their evaluation of his (a) historical perspective (b) ideas about language and linguistics © ideas about epigraphy and paleography and finally (d) his ideas about medieval medicine, and his efforts to locate the sources of these supposed recipes and advices.   

Medicine has a lineage.  

and see

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Postscript: The author is mistaken in describing the 'old saying' as a tautology

Quote:There is a tautological saying; if a solution seems obvious then it is obviously the solution. 

It is not a tautology but an error.
A solution is sought according to the way an individual perceives the nature of the problem - and that perception is affected by personal as well as impersonal biases:  his or her  natural capacity, personal inclinations and prior learning. This is why, when a certain chemical engineer announced an 'obvious' solution to the problem of engine wear... adding lead to the petrol... no-one stopped to do the other sort of math.  'Obvious' can be counter-productive, and sometimes historical events are counter-intuitive.

Just so people know, the original paper linked by Koen in the first post has been updated with more recent papers by Cheshire.

It appears that Cheshire no longer makes the original paper available at that link.

In his very first solution, he thought that the Voynich MS was mid to late 16th Century. I don't remember now if this was reflected in the ones now removed, but that could be a reason.

Edit: apparently not. They are still here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
but something is a bit odd about the dates.

His first ever communication about this whole topic is from 7 July 2017.

New on LingBuzz, Cheshire has another paper up: "Plant Series, No. 6. Manuscript MS408. Portfolio 4, Right (JPEG 009)" (Jan. 2020), here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Overall, Cheshire is undeterred from his approach. For example, it includes this gem:

Quote:Note: The word æia (aeia) is the Latin version of ehyéh, which is a Hebrew term, meaning to be, to exist, I’ll be, and so on.

A lot of wrongness is packed into this. The Hebrew ehyéh (אֶהְיֶה) is a first person imperfect, not the infinitive "to be" that he chooses for the translation. Either "I will be" or "I am" would have been a better choice for the Hebrew word. Completely unmotivated is the use of Hebrew instead of Latin for such a basic concept, since Latin already has words for "to be" (esse), "I am" (sum), and "I will be" (ero). So the Latin version of ehyéh would be sum as the Vulgate famously translates Exod 3:16, not the non-Latin aeia. Finally, the vowels don't match up between aeia and [font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]ehyéh, and the consonants are missing.[/font]

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Neverthless, the paper has some proposed flora comparisons, which might be of interest.[/font]

Cheshire calls folio 4r "Portfolio 4, right". I don't think I've ever seen a medieval codex folio called a "portfolio". Does anyone know if this is a valid or alternate way of referring to a folio?


Cheshire identifies the annotation "rot" in the stalk as the word "toa".

There's no "a" in there. I've never seen any examples of "a" written this way. One can debate whether the word is meant to be read top to bottom or vice-versa, and whether the bottom letter is t or c (both were written very much the same at the time), but I don't think there's any doubt about the letter on the top. It is a footed-r written in an extremely common, typical way for the time. So neither the top nor bottom characters would be read as "a".


Can anyone else see outlines of Andromeda and Perseus in the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. plant root?

He continues to identify a rare VMS glyph as the letter f/v/ph even though these letters are common in Latin and other Romance languages.


There isn't much in this paper. A plant ID that has already been suggested by other people followed by a misreading of the letters r o t / r o c (the way the stroke is added, it's probably rot).

He just.. doesn't know much about any relevant field. And he calls folios portfolios because the words sound similar and that's how Cheshire does language.

I once took the effort of explaining all this to him when he contacted me through email and I got a load of insults in return.

I have also tried to reason with him about the need to consult subject experts, and he is entirely unwilling to do so. And so he continues to perpetuate mistakes in terminology that could easily be rectified (such as the folio/portfolio mishap..."portfolio" is absolutely NOT a term that anyone who knows anything about manuscripts would use to describe a single leaf). This is, of course, in addition to the fundamental flaws in his methodology, which have been noted elsewhere.

(08-11-2017, 07:59 AM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I was recently contacted by phd student Gerard Cheshire, who wrote a paper proposing an Italian language solution for the VM. Even though somewhat strangely there's no reference to the MS in the title.

The paper can be dowloaded here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I haven't had time to look at it yet but will comment later.

You very well know Ken, that the Voynich MS is written in thee most perfect form of Ancient Hebrew dialect ever to be written and/or spoken.  And you know this because, you too can reed the Voynich MS....so why don't you just tell the public the truth?

The book was written that had washed up on the most northern shore of Siberia, where he was found by a Jesuit priest beach-combing on mid-Fall morning.  The priest took the young man, who told the priest that his name was "Far" (written 'Poar'), into his cabin where the  pair sheltered the harsh Siberian winter.  In the Spring, the Jesuit priest took the young man to a monastery/castle in the farthest north of Russia; still Siberia, where Far lived in the main hall for the next 50+ years until his death in the mid-1400's.

But, You, Ken, already know this and you're playing a pretense.  Shame on you.

So anyway, to pass the time in the monastery/castle during the long winters, Far wrote what we now know as the Voynich MS....and you already know this.

It's sad....but you have GOT to GO.....but unlike Far; YOU have NO HOPE!!

Blocked at every turn...lol

Jehovah's got this....you guys are HISTORY!  Amen and Amen and AMEN

Off to the banal pools with you.