The Voynich Ninja

"No, the Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Is Not Written in Hebrew

Despite the silly claims of two computer scientists."

Haha. There's like an exponential curve that always recurs in the media's degree of rejection of Voynich theories they first hyped.

Best quote from the article:

Quote:At this point, it must be said, Hauer and Kondrak’s paper descends into silliness. Quite apart from the unlikelihood of even the most esoteric of manuscripts beginning in such a manner, one can only compliment Google Translate on its ingenuity. She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house, and me and people? Even after “spelling corrections,” the Hebrew words in question mean no such thing. In fact, they mean nothing at all. Translating them without Google’s finessing, one comes up with something like “And he made her the priest each man to himself to his house and on me his people the commandments.” If this was the winning entry in the trial-decipherment round of competition, one can only imagine its rivals.

How about placing punctuation marks?

And he made her the priest. Each man to himself to his house. And on me - his people.

"The commandments" may be the beginning of the next phrase, still undeciphered.

That's still nonsense, but it would be worth a closer look if this was the only problem. It isn't though. This article is really good (thanks JKP) so let me also highlight the next paragraph:

"Moreover, it is hardly surprising that Hebrew should have yielded more actual words than other languages. By designing their algorithms for vowellessness and anagrams, Hauer and Kondrak tilted the playing field in favor of Semitic languages. If one takes, for example, a three-letter English word like “cat,” one can derive only one other word, “act,” by scrambling it—and many three-letter English words yield nothing at all when rearranged. But with a three-letter Hebrew word, the results will be quite different. By adding different vowels to the consonants yod-lamed-daled, for example, one can get yeled, a male child or boy; yalad, “he gave birth”; yeyleyd, “he will give birth”; l’yad, “next to”; and d’li, a bucket. This gives Hebrew a significant competitive advantage, because it will present the cryptographer with many more words to work with, especially if he is willing to take liberties with them like Google Translate."

Closed case for me.

But, in Hebrew, when "yod-lamed-daled" is written, how does the reader understand whether it stands for "yeled" or "yalad"?

Context.

When context is missing, vowels tend to get added. In many of the abjadic scripts, vowels gradually got added (often as dots) to prevent ambiguity that was present in the older scripts.

And Hebrew is not completely vowel-less. Aleph/Alpha is a vowel, and is explicitly written in a number of abjads (or built into syllabic versions of certain glyphs).


It doesn't surprise me, either. Think about the first sounds a baby makes... a, a, aaaa (with hand stretched out... feed me/give me), mamama bababa, papapapa. In many languages, mama papa aba, ama, are the words for mother and father and in many abjads, the a is explicit, which means you ony have to guess at the other vowels, which are often less frequent that "a".

(16-02-2018, 12:00 PM)Koen Gh. Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's still nonsense, but it would be worth a closer look if this was the only problem. It isn't though. This article is really good (thanks JKP) so let me also highlight the next paragraph:

"Moreover, it is hardly surprising that Hebrew should have yielded more actual words than other languages. By designing their algorithms for vowellessness and anagrams, Hauer and Kondrak tilted the playing field in favor of Semitic languages. If one takes, for example, a three-letter English word like “cat,” one can derive only one other word, “act,” by scrambling it—and many three-letter English words yield nothing at all when rearranged. But with a three-letter Hebrew word, the results will be quite different. By adding different vowels to the consonants yod-lamed-daled, for example, one can get yeled, a male child or boy; yalad, “he gave birth”; yeyleyd, “he will give birth”; l’yad, “next to”; and d’li, a bucket. This gives Hebrew a significant competitive advantage, because it will present the cryptographer with many more words to work with, especially if he is willing to take liberties with them like Google Translate."

Closed case for me.

I am puzzled.

Hauer and Kondrak wrote:
"In order to apply our system to abjads, we remove all vowels in the corpora prior to deriving the language models used by the script decipherment step."

Shouldn't three consonants in Hebrew be compared with three consonants in English (not consonant-vowel-consonant like "cat")?
Since they consider yeyleyd (with 'y' occurring three times) and "d'li" (with no 'y'), shouldn't the same be done for English?

Take English words with only 0..n occurrences of y,l,d, and all the vowels you need. They are a rather long list, including:

add, added, aided, ailed, all, aloud, daily, dale, day, dead, deadly, deal, deed, delay, delayed, dial, did, died, dull, dyed, eyed, idle, idol, ill, lad, lady, laid, lay, lead, led, lied, lily, loud, odd, oiled, old, yell, yelled, yield, yielded.....

Marco: I think the author of the article I quoted assumed that Hauer and Kondrak allowed it to be an abjad because they selected Hebrew. Even if that's incorrect, it's an understandable assumption because scrambled vowelless English makes no sense, it's a useless cipher. The same is true for anagrammed vowelless Hebrew but at least there you've got some cultural arguments in favor of the vowelless aspect.

And it's like JKP says, context is key in full abjads. Since here the context would also be scrambled, and hence unavailable, problems are only compounded.

As so often, the mere rumour of 'decipherment' creates so much noise, and is so easily reduced to binary Yes/No - further messed up by the odd Voynichero's implacable determination on some theoretical narrative that the basic questions are forgotten.

First - does the hand resemble any that we find in Jewish documents of the period up until 1405? 

Voynich studies is constantly obfuscated by retrospective imposition of LATER items on the primary source and the whole historical cause-and-effect issue is forgotten.

So - does the hand move like any of the attested PRE-1405 Jewish scripts?

Secondly - who says the language has to conform to liturgical standards of Hebrew?  What about dialects?  Written variants are often pretty grammatical Hebrew (as far as I know), but can be written in other scripts, or - more to the point - may use a form of cursive Hebrew script to record a non-Hebrew language.

What about the Karaites who (as I have mentioned) omitted many of the letters which are present in formal, liturgical, Hebrew now standard.

And then there are other historically viable possibilities - as a purely hypothetical example, let's suppose that Mar Sawma tried to communicate with the Latins in his best biblically-learned Hebrew?  We could expect grammatical errors such as 'she' for 'he' and so on.

And so finally you get to the problems of translation as such.  I hardly need explain how badly a text can be mangled - even/especially by Google translate.

Reading blogs written in Hindi, Russian, and even German  anyone knows that the result of a poor translation into English can make the writer seem all but incoherent.

People looking for a nice-neat cipher solution are - I think - in an anchronistic dream where two people who had a common language and a common cipher key, and common (high) levels of education which provided standardised grammar and orthography put information neatly in and get precisely the same neatly-out.

If it weren't against my principles, I'd bet my house on two things:  First, that if the text is ever read, it will be found not in such a cipher and secondly the whole content of the manuscript will be found to owe nothing whatever to noble courts or to central Europe.

Of course, if such a solution is ever found, I expect I'll be told to 'just ignore' it. 

(19-02-2018, 04:26 AM)Diane Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Secondly - who says the language has to conform to liturgical standards of Hebrew?  What about dialects? 

Hebrew was a dead language outside the synagogue during the middle ages.

I can't remember if this response to the AI announcement was ever linked on the forum. If not, here it is. What is shows most clearly is that "translations" evaluated by someone who really knows a language are viewed differently than by those who think they have created readable text in a language they don't know (or don't know well):

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