The Voynich Ninja

There has been a flurry of recent Voynich "solutions", so I was curious about whether we had missed any and Googled "voynich solution"and found this paper just published yesterday from J. Michael Herrmann at the University of Edinburgh entitled "The Cannabis Page of the Voynich Manuscript".


There's a fair amount of agreement on the identity of this plant. Quite a number of researchers have suggested Cannabis. To me it looks like cannabis as well. In fact, I had trouble coming up with good alternate IDs. Perhaps that's why the author chose it as an example for his theories about the text.

The author believes the VMS "is written in a natural language" and states the following, indicating that he is referring to his previous paper on the Pahlavi hypothesis:

"The present attempt builds on earlier work of the author on the Pahlavi hypothesis, but revises some of the claims made in the previous paper [7]."


The link to the new article is here:

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He had the Pahlavi theory I note. Although in this latest paper he seems to drop the idea, saying only that 'it was in the right ball park'.

If one looks at the charts (I think they started approx. page 10), one sees that when he translates the words into actual sentences he take a lot of liberties.

For example, if a word doesn't seem to make sense, he leaves it out of the sentence. Also, there's a lot of subjective tinkering with the words to turn them into sentences, a process that appears to me to be similar to what farmerjohn is doing even though Herrmann and farmerjohn are proposing different languages.


I think Hermann is keeping the word "Pahvlavi" in there because he's still making glyph shape correspondences between the VMS characters and Pahlavi, but most of them have to be reversed or flipped or both and even then most of them aren't that similar.


I've been able to get many words and sentences out of VMS code in a dozen different languages, it's not that hard for the simple reason that vowel-consonant balance is similar in most languages. What is hard is staying true to the "deciphered" words and getting anything even close to a rational and consistent paragraph out of them. The temptation to massage the words into truly meaningful text is great but as soon as that is done, it becomes a subjective process of "creating" meaning rather than finding it.

-JKP-

You say "there's a fair amount of agreement on the identity of this plant" - that is, for folio 16r. 

Can you be more specific?

(23-01-2018, 06:09 PM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.-JKP-

You say "there's a fair amount of agreement on the identity of this plant" - that is, for folio 16r. 

Can you be more specific?

Diane, when you look at all the charts of VMS plant IDs and the various opinions expressed on blogs and on forums, the two plants that stand out as having more agreement than most are the Viola and the one that looks like Cannabis.

That doesn't guarantee that's what they are. It only means that a higher proportion of people seem to agree on these two plants than on other plants, which is why they tend to be used as examples when researchers present their translations.

-JKP-

I guess I don't think so much of 'agreement' as I do of reasoned exposition and explanation by the person concerned.  A conclusion is only worth as much as its evidence and reasoning; it's not as if these are photographs which can be matched one-to-one with living specimens.

In fact, I think the plant is meant for the non-hallucinogenic sort - what we tend to call hemp - but perhaps that will seen a bit nit-picking to some members.

The reason I want to comment on this attempted translation by the Professor in robotics, though, is that I think we can't do justice to any attempted translation unless the proponent also provides their transliteration of the text.

This is because a person able to extract a sentence from the text isn't necessarily going to have the skills needed in historical linguistics to achieve a valid modern translation.

A case in point is that in reviewing Herrmann's paper, my first reaction was incredulity that he should talk about smoking 'pipes' of cannabis at a time when - so far as the historical record allows us to know - the only place there might have been pipe-smoking of cannabis was in Africa, yet he identified the language as 'a sort of Persian'.

However, I decided to dig a little deeper in historically-appropriate sources, one of the more appropriate for our needs and for Persian-dialect regions being the Syriac book of medicines, in which I found that perhaps the problem wasn't anachronism, but only Herrmann's being less-than-proficient in his translation to modern English.  Perhaps.

Herrmann gets "pipe" but perhaps a specialist in historical linguistics would have thought it better translated as 'tube' and this would not be ridiculously anachronistic at all.  A bit from the Syrian (Nestorian) Book of Medicines, as translated from the Syriac by Wallace-Budge.

Quote:“Or heat mustard in the same way and let the smoke enter  into the patient’s mouth. Or …. heat the seed of the hyoscyamus plant over a fire [apply the smoke as before], and it will relieve the pain. Or inject into the nose of the patient extract of fresh kunbare ( cannabis seed), or …

So it turns out that using smoke from herbs by mouth and 'injecting' via some sort of tube into the nose are practices historically attested.  From that it would be a small step to administering smoke through a tube (not a 'pipe' in the modern sense).  I find no evidence of that, so far, but it's certainly not beyond historical possibility.

Providing a transcription, as well as posited translation, is one way to prevent attempted translations being dismissed as ridiculous... not necessarily because they're wrong, but because the would-be decrypter isn't also a specialist in comparative linguistics and the way a word's sense evolved over time.

I've asked the moderators if they'll make a separate heading for 'Offered translations' - at my estimate we have had somewhere between 20 and 30 so far.  I guess my reasoning is that those who ignore the past are only condemning themselves to repeat it.

Quote:Diane: I guess I don't think so much of 'agreement' as I do of reasoned exposition and explanation by the person concerned.

Diane, do we have to argue over whether the drawings that look like plants are plants?

No, it would be a waste of time. Some are more fanciful but, for the most part, they appear to be plants or inspired by plants and reasoned exposition is not necessary.


Similarly, there are a couple of plants in the VMS for which people mostly agree and there is no way to get "reasoned exposition" for something people simply recognize, like an apple or pear—it's a waste of time to argue about it if only a few people think it's something else.


Most people agree on Viola and what is probably Cannabis and what is probably Ricinus. You might disagree, but that's what most people think they are not because of consensus, but because that's what they look like!


We can agree to disagree until someone can corroborate it with a translation of VMS text or with an exemplar labeled in a readable language, but if that never happens, then arguing over the more obvious IDs is pointless because if the VMS text never gets translated then it's opinion and will never be anything else.

-JKP-

When you say

Quote:do we have to argue over whether the drawings that look like plants are plants?

I agree there is nothing to argue about in that.  A drawing is NOT a plant.    The drawings that are subjectively interpreted as representing plants may, or may not have been intended so.

The maker's intention is a reasonable subject for discussion, and for each individual to present his or her reasons (and evidence) for holding one opinion or another.

Of course we had far more high-handed attitudes a 100+ years ago.  Wilfrid employed the 'Believe-it-or-else'  style in saying the manuscript was an autograph by Roger Bacon.

What a pity people didn't insist on his presenting his argument, and evidence, in a reasoned and less autocratic way.

So many decades of wasted time by those who tamely nodded along could have been spent on less erroneous ideas.

The same is true for the 'I-say-so-there-and-i(unspecified) important-people-agree'  style of O'Neill.

More decades of mis-directed energy and foolish acquiescence to his 'sunflower' nonsense.

I do not like to waste my time.  I am not inclined to be a tame 'believer' - I much prefer to see the decent thing done:  evidence and argument presented to me.

And when you say

Quote:Some are more fanciful but, for the most part, they appear to be plants or inspired by plants 

I recognise the 'fanciful...' passage you are quoting, and I know its source.  It has no valid source.  It is some unacknowledged person's unsubstantiated assertion, repeated between 1962-1967 by members of the Friedman group and for which there is no reasonable argument to be found: neither in their writings, nor in the bald quotation of the same notion by Kennedy and Churchill (2002).

Your repeating the word 'fanciful' as you do shows that you have received an impression that this passing, unsupported notion is somehow 'fact'.

And that tells me something else - that you are not someone so arrogant that they would try to pass themselves off as a professional evaluator of medieval pictures.  You are a genuine and hard-working amateur and the quality of your efforts certainly deserve the reputation you have earned by them in this forum.

I would urge you not to adopt 'meme' ideas either.  And once more, my sincere thanks for that transliteration of the page from Sozomeno's notebook.  I can count the number of such responses on one hand, and my thanks is as much for your attitude to the request as for your response. Truly.

Oh Diane, please don't do that. I did not quote "fanciful" from anybody. It's a normal English word that well-describes some of the VMS drawings and that's why I used it.

You seem to think no one on the forum has an original thought in his or her head or that we someone can't think up the same "best word" to describe something (except maybe you).


Please, keep it on topic and stop demeaning us by pretending that when we use appropriate words (that sometimes coincidentally happen to be the same words chosen by someone else) that we copied them. Are you also going to accuse me of stealing "naturalistic" from someone else?

..
I independently believe that some of the VMS drawings are more naturalistic than others and some are more fanciful than others and that is my opinion and my own choice of words.

(24-09-2020, 01:41 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This thread, and the paper it discusses, cross the line from descriptive to normative. That makes me uncomfortable, as it should anyone who values objectivity in scientific and historical inquiry.

I just read the paper for the first time when the link was posted by bi3mw on another thread.
My reaction was, I think, similar to yours.
I wondered whether the author was seeing what he wanted to see in the translated text?

Also, as JKP says, the glyph shape correspondences between VMS and Pahlavi are not that similar.