The Voynich Ninja

[quote="tavie" pid='47476' dateline='1633469173']
[So the fourth way:  to point out to you that you have myriad competitors, many of whom have also "identified" an isolated word that matches one in their target language.  Some have identified many words.  A tiny minority went as far as translating sentences, albeit nonsense ones.  And like you, all of them have exclaimed "It can't possibly be a coincidence!" ]


The solution is quite simple. 

Yes there are those who said that they found the solution ("just like me"), as you said. 
In this case it is necessary to measure the matching words and sentences they offer with numbers as an expressions of mathematical probabilities. Then you see the numerical equivalent of my readings in the probability space. 

The result will likely look like the numerical ratio of the size of an ant to the size of our world. 

I can say that I have read all the articles about Voynich so far. 
That's why you made such a comment to me, so I just thought of this comparison. 
I'm sorry to write this but someone has to say that the comparisons are not in the equivale scale.

Thanks

What they are also not allowed to do is to take expressions from different regions. They must remain true to their location.

The way I have seen it now, there are expressions from different regions, Bursa, Sivas, Antalia.
Imagine that in my language there are up to 200 dialects. I can find 20 other descriptions for each word. So it would be quite simple, but would never stand up to scrutiny.

What you might need to know is that my wife is from Sivas and studied at the university in Taxim Istanbul. I will not make it easy for them even with Turkish when I put your theory to the test.
So far, nothing has convinced me that I would even consider Turkish. Starting with the travelers consist of a family would be this tense situation of when fighting with the Turks just before Italy from 1380 -1440.

[quote="Aga Tentakulus" pid='47497' dateline='1633521479']

Mr Tentaculus,

We do not yet know which dialect or sub-dialect the VM author used 600 years ago. For example, we do not have in-depth knowledge of the languages of some historical Turkish communities living in the Balkan geography and in the north of the Black Sea. In other words, not only me but also linguists have not analyzed some of these dialects in depth since they could not find much written material about the language of certain Turkish communities or geography. For this reason, it is not possible at this stage to make a positive or negative comment about the author's spoken language in the detail you mentioned. Moreover, it would be useful for me to inform you about the following issues.

1-) Approximately 50% of the words we read are available in the dialects of the Black Sea (Karadeniz) region of Turkey today. An important part of the remaining part is the words in the dialects of Thrace (Trakya) and Aegean (Ege) region. However, the Black Sea, Thrace and Aegean regions are close to each other. Less part of the words read are the words from various parts of Anatolia and in the Azerbaijani Turkish language. We have also seen words written with sound value used in some of today's Uzbek-Turkish languages. However, later on, we learned about the phonetic structures that inform us that these could be in the old Anatolian dialects too.

2-) In the early days when we started reading in VM, I thought that the author was someone who lived with groups that spoke Uzbek-Turkish in the Azerbaijani-Turkish geography and spent a part of his life in Anatolia. Because we know that people who are exposed to different Turkish dialects for various periods of time exchange words from each other after a while, and there are cases of shifting and/or mixing in their dialects. For this reason, the existence of people who use mixed dialects is already known. Moreover, it is known that there are manuscripts written using mixed languages other than dialects.

3-) Studies on the compilation of Turkic languages words with field studies have not been carried out sufficiently broadly and in detail. Linguists should have worked harder in this area and completed the deficiencies. However, especially in the widest-time of Ottoman period almost no study in this field. In addition, after the 1970s, studies in this area remained rather weakly too. Moreover, the task of compiling the words in the language of the Turkic-speaking peoples in the former Soviet geography remained in a worse condition. The Russians authority may not have enough supported that kind of the academic studies in this field because these studies were mostly tried to be done partially after 1991. As a result, recorded word recording works for region by region did not make in detail in largest Turkish speaking geography. It is possible to look at the current table and think that word was used only in a certain place is not realistic. Linguistics is already looking at the available data. But if you don't collect enough data from some region, the weak collected results will be deceiving. For example, I explained the word ZULAK, which means onion, a few comments ago. (I showed that the onion plant image drawn in the VM manuscript is also realistic and matches the selected photograph.) That plant name was recorded in Black Sea region according to the dictionary. But I have personally witnessed the people who sing this plant as ZULAK in the Aegean and Mediterranean area too.
In another example, many of the words that are thought to be seen in the dialects of some regions such as Kars region, Erzincan, Sivas, and Iğdır region are also present in Azeri Turkish dialects. In other words, if the subject is the Turkish language, this detail that you think and write is not exactly like that.

4-) The author must have developed this special alphabet just for writing this script. Because she/he did not want everyone to read the content for two reasons, and this work was written for only one or a few readers.
A-) The author was coding about some confidential information or spying activities in the work. For this reason, its content should not be for everyone.
B-) The author may not want the medical information in this book to be read and understood by rival physicians or ordinary people. In other words, as a doctor and pharmacist, she/he must be writing his writings for specific purpose. Or, she/he may have needed to develop a medical language for herself/himself, as she/he did not want every reader to understand the content related to drug making or medical applications.

5-) For all of these reasons, (/or, for some of this reasons) the author may have written the words using a mixed dialect, with sound values that are not in his daily speech but found in other dialects. So she/he must have deliberately created this structure. Thus, when she/he needs a word that starts with the letter O during the coding, she/he may deliberately write the OY form used in Uzbek dialects instead of the word AY in Anatolian Turkish dialects. She/He must have used the mixed dialect consciously in this way and made it easier for her/him to code.

6-) The author may have used one of the minority dialects. So maybe his mother tongue was not Turkish. Maybe his parents were from different regions and languages, and the author was using a mixed language or one of the minority dialects 600 years ago. The head of the Turkish department of Istanbul İstinye University told me this after my presentation at this university. But actually I don't fully agree with this idea. Although I am giving you this idea as a possibility here, I myself think that the author would prefer to write such a book only in his native language. In other words, if the main sentence structure and the majority of the words are integrated with Turkish (which it is), I think that the possibility of the author using one of the sub-dialects that is now forgotten is stronger. For this reason, the author must not have written in one of the minority dialects. However, I cannot say that this probability is zero.

7- Turkish language is a language in which new meanings are derived with the help of root meaning contents of word roots and word suffixes. In other words, word suffixes do not change the meaning content of the root of the word in any case. However, affixes diversify the root meaning and provide the derivation of new words. We know that some words to be used in a very wide geography in the past are still alive, but only in some local dialects, although they are totally forgotten in certain geographies today. This means that, these issues cannot be looked at independently of the time factor. So, if you look at today's table and say that this word is using in the Sivas region and the other word only is in for Muğla region, unfortunately you will be saying this information by looking at the current situation. How can we claim that a word we are reading in 600 years old VM today not used in a wider geography 600 years before today? While the words were spoken in a wider geography in a certain time period, they may be used in a narrower region today. This does not mean that this was the case in the past if this is the case for today.

As you can see, this issue is not what you think. If one or several of the 7 possibilities I have given above have occurred at once, the example you have suggested will not be valid for VM writing. Anyway, this writing is not an ordinary writing. In other words, I can say that it is out of the known examples and the first and last example of its kind. For this reason, it is difficult to explain this with the expectations of ordinary linguistics. Today's expectations come from reading other experienced and well-known manuscripts. But this type of manuscript had never been experienced before.

Regards,

Mr. Tentaculus

When I am try to clarify your question (and some other questions before), I wrote "he"/"him" for the author in some places in my previous comments. However, it is not yet clear whether the author is male or female, or how she/he defines her/his own identity.

(Although, later on, when I realize my typos myself, I try to go back and edit the wrong part. However, I felt the need to make this annotation considering the possibility that the readers may have read what I wrote before I edited it. Or because there may have been typos that I could not correct because I still missed it.)

As far as I understand from my readings, the author was not alone during the time the VM was written. As I wrote before, the author and her/his associates consist of three families with a total of 9 people, including 3 children.

When I look at the way the texts are written, I think that the main texts (most probably) came from two different hands. Moreover, considering that the author is a doctor/physician, I think that she/he was interested in the patients around her/him during her/his long term trip in Europe.

Also, this manuscript was probably written in two copies. I think that the first (lost) texts was fully written by the author and the second copy (in my opinion, the second copy of the work that in Yale today) was mostly written by the author's life partner. Since the author may had also been busy with some patients and she/he had been busy with plant collecting, and searching (and/or planting) some greens to making with them medicines. So the author daily activity area mostly was outside their nomadic type plase of temporary residence in day period probably.

In fact, looking at the layout and beauty of the VM texts, I have always thought that it might have come from the careful hands of a woman. As a result, although I may have carelessly used expressions like "he"/"him" in some of my comments, this is probably not the case.

So, most of the copy we have today may have been made by a woman, and I think there are two separate hands in the main parts of the texts we have. Of course I could be wrong.

However, later additions were made to these texts in the form of interventions and/or additions by two other hands in two different time after VM was fully ready. Since I wrote my opinion about these detail in one of my previous comments, I will not repeat them here.

Kind regards,

(04-10-2021, 03:06 AM)Ahmet Ardıç Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Some theories are only approved by the science of mathematics itself, and it is unnecessary to seek further confirmation from academies. Of course, such theories can be revised again and again to see if the evidence and findings are realistic and accurate.

Hi, Mr. Ardic,

I apologize for not answering sooner. I took time to examine your theory from the comments discussed in this forum, as well as on your web page, so that you cannot accuse me, that I don't know what I am talking about. So far, you did not convince me.
I still believe that you have no right to call your transcription alphabet 'Old Turkish Alphabet', without reference to the manuscript known as VM. You cannot compare that with European Voynich Manuscript, because Zandbergen did not even claim the alphabet was written in Europe, although he would have much better claim of doing so. 
You should not degrade the intellectuals working on solving the VM, if they do not agree with you. Convince them with better proof than you are offering. You should be grateful to Zandbergen for placing the EVA alphabet, and other information about VM, on the internet, so that it was available for you to study. To disregard all his information about the VM, just because it does not fit into your fantastic theory about the Turkish traveler (the story keeps changing from one solitary Turkish traveler to an European tourist family with three children).  Instead of accusing the intellectuals on this form of 'mental constipation', you should praise them for their effort and dedication, since they each contributed a peace of a puzzle towards solving the VM. And whether you like it or not, they would be the final judges of your work, regardless of how many Turkish experts agree with you, since their collective knowledge about the VM and their ability to test your theory is far greater than that of your friends in Arzerbaian. They have different experts (artists, linguists, logical thinkers, who came up with many clues that could not be ignored. Yes, they were not able to solve the mystery of the language, but Tavie and others came very close to pinpoint the location of the script and language, Petersen pointed out grammatical peculiarities that not even Dr. Bax noticed, Koen has done very good job of matching religious overlay on mythological images in the VM, to mention just a few.

Therefore, forget about statistics, and focus on grammatical and other clues they pointed out, but cannot explain. If the VM is written in Turkish, you will have no difficulty explaining some 4000 words starting with 4O (EVA-qo, ATA-do), most of which are comprised of a prefix, root word and suffix (or grammatical ending). Analyze them as well as you had analyzed the word  YARARSAM (the first word in the Sunflower page, transcribed by your alphabet).
Since you challenged me with your statistical data, I will take you up on this. What are the chances that I can find all three parts of this word - YAR-AR-SAM in Slavic languages, as well as one in German and English? The word SAM appears also in Hebrew names - Samson, Samuel, in the name of early Slavic king Samo, and in USA fictional Character 'Uncle Sam', or in English word 'lonsam', or in German 'Samstag'. 
In the medieval writing, J was written as Y, so that the Slavic YAR is now spelled as JAR. 
JAR  is the Proto-Slavic word for early (in time, or early in year (like in springtime). In Slovenian, the word JAR has been used mostly for JARO ŽITO (wheat that is planted early) or JARE KOKOŠI (spring chicken: JARČKA - spring hen, JARC (spring ruster). I suppose the association with YAR and LOVE could better be derived from the activity of a ruster. The association between YAR and year can be found in German 'Jahre' and English 'year'. 
This word has also other meanings, like angry, revengeful, rude, self-righteous....

AR is the grammatical ending, indicating male profession.

SAM is a verb with similar meaning as you explained, for the verbal form of 'I AM' (where pronoun I is implied with the ending). In Serbian and Croatian, this word is spelled and pronounced as SAM, in Slovenian, it is spelled and pronounced as SEM, and in various other languages and dialects, it  can also be SIM, or SAN. So much for being exclusively Turkish word for 600 years. 
In Slavic languages, SAM  can only be used for 1. person singular with adjective or preposition (sem tu - (I) am here; star sem - old (I) am. 
The word SAM can also be used as to form a past tense, which would be acquardly translated in English.  For example: SEM DAL - would literaly be translated as 'am gave' because of the grammatical forms. Since English has a different grammatical structure, the word would be translated as: I gave. Since the word SEM is only for the past tense, a different word is used for the future tense, and for conditional mood, although the ending of the verb remains the same as for the future tense and for the conditional mood. Example: BOM DAL - (I) will give, BI DAL (I) would give. 
Since Slovenian has also very flexible word order, the words can also be reversed.

I suppose you tried to explain the complicated Turkish grammar. 

As you can see, I understand how the word SAM works, without knowing Turkish. I do not even believe you transcribe it correctly. 

Lets look at the statistics:
If I can find ten manuscripts, created in Europe in the middle of 15th century, where this same word - (EVA-dain, ATA-sam) is spelled as DAM, and you can not even produce one document, where this word was written with the same characters as in the VM, what is the probability that the word should be read as DAM, rather than SAM.
I suppose the probability will increase if we add the fact that images in the VM are not Turkish, but European. Or that they include hidden Christian images, and naked females, or the fact that Turkey and Turkish speaking European territories were not that tourist friendly at the time when Turks almost killed German King. I do not have to tell you about their atrocities during their Balkan invasion, you can look it up in the history books. I do not resent Turkey or Turkish people for that, I just mentioned it to explain to you that the probability that a Turkish traveler delivered the VM as gift to Emperor Rudolph II.
So much for the probability. The VM solution will not be solved on probability, but on the documented facts, primarily linguistic. I understand the phonetic speech was not written correctly, but differently by different writers who use different dialects, but there are other to prove the language. Don't compared the decoding to ancient Hittite inscriptions; there are plenty of documents from the Middle Ages where the letters, comparative to VM glyphs could be found.

 

.

SAFSU 
[attachment=5907] The word SAFSU is read on page 75v. 

The word  SAFSU  was written right next to the drawings of women bathing under streams of water like spring ponds and the drawing of water with pool. 

The sound value of the word and the way it is written have remained the same without any sound value changes in the intervening 600 years. The only difference is that the author wrote this word likely in the form of a compound word (or in a way that looks close to each other). 

We write this word today as two separate words (like: SAF SU). But the sound value has not changed in the intervening time. 
It is possible to say that the author wrote the word SAFSU (SAF SU) in the sense of "clean water" or "purified water". 

To see the meaning of the words, see these pages: 

[attachment=5908] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  

[attachment=5910] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

[attachment=5909] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 
  
 NOTE: 
Probability of writing the first 2 letters of the word "SAFSU" correctly is 1 in 32400 (180 × 180) with the letters that will be chosen randomly from a 180 letter of mix. alphabet (which also included combined letters).

In same way; Probability of writing the first 5 letters of the word "SAFSU" correctly is 1 in 188.956.800.000 (180 × 180 × 180 × 180 × 180) with the letters that will be chosen randomly from a 180 letter of that kind alphabet.

[Remember, in the VM alphabet that we have considered, multiple syllable combinations such as double, triple and quadruple are used with tamga/mark characters with together of sound values of numbers from 1 to 9. Even if we accept this each combination characters as simple/single-sound signs, we can talk about a writing system with more than 140 alphabet characters. Probably this number will exceed about 180 when we check all typing letters in VM pages in the future even if we  include the double, triple and quadruple letter characters in this calculation included as like single syllable . In this way, our probability of randomly choosing first 2 letter calculation (even the first two letters of any word) is 1 in 180x180, (that is, a probability of 1 in 32400) to match with any known word in any language. We have not yet counted how many different drawings there are in the manuscript. And I must state that the total number of them, as well as the fact that this word was written next to the kind of some "water" drawing is not even included in this probability calculation.]

[quote="cvetkakocj@rogers.com" pid='47504' dateline='1633639737']

Please calm down. You may have read what I wrote, but it is clear that you do not understand enough. How you can connect from one my comment to Mr. Zandbergen or any other person after my explanatory statement? There is no connection with this researchers in that way. 

We wrote the ATA alphabet naming on our own page. I don't know how other people call it on other web pages. But we did not name the transcription as VM Turkish alphabet. For this reason, it is not for anyone to hold us accountable for a situation that has nothing to do with us. We did not use this name, but if you had to make an analogy, the Europeans should not have referred to it as European. Because there is no proven material evidence to say that the manuscript and the alphabet is of European origin. All these are just comments, ascriptions and personal opinions. With the naming of EVA, a perception has been created in people's consciousness, knowingly or unknowingly. This type of conditioning is just one of many small elements that lead to false inferences about writing. 

I am not saying that these are done consciously, but I am saying that you or any other person should not look at their work with European-centered glasses only. There are many different examples of such approaches in Western history and linguistics articles published in many European and American Academies. My criticisms are not directed at any particular person. It is general. I'm talking about approaches that are often shown. There are numerous examples. It's a subject independent of the name of individual people.

I don't think there is any insult in my posts, but I may have expressed a certain sentence a bit rudely and I had already accepted this in my two page previous comment. I've already explained the purpose and to where I'm addressing that what might be seen as rude.

What is not understood for me is why did you try to connect this issue with other people by writing their names in your opinion. Here, I think it is not appropriate to set up this type of approach.

I respect every researcher who has worked on VM to this day. I don't think I have disrespected anyone. The names of Zandbergen and Bax and some other researchers are also mentioned in the book we have written, and we also refer to their work. And we respect their work too.

The EVA alphabet and others didn't work yet. It is not personal but it is technical issue. So, you can't connect any of my comment with those people.

Because there is no insult here in that point like what you think.

We present ATA alphabet transcription of Voynich manuscript with some readings. After a while, a university will come out and will announce about VM Turkish content with using ATA alphabet transcription for sure. There have already been an university dean and some Turkish language department professors who have personally made similar statements. We think that an official announcement will be made as a corporate when the time comes.

Of course, we will not give up on presenting scientific evidence just because you or someone else does not believe that there is Turkish language in the content of the writing.

I will not touch on the other issues you have written, because I have already made a statement about those details on various dates before.

Kind regards,

Notes: 
Using statistics and math with grammar overlaps at the same time is important. Currently, Math also saying that "Turkish words are exists and recorded in VM texts". Please do not waste your energy to think of whether we will have difficulty in explaining 4000 words. It seems that we are likely to explain the remaining words in about next 23 years, in the same way and proportionally, as we read 700 words and 100 sentences in 8 years, if the author did not write in a mixed language.

Of course, this process will be accelerated if other researchers join our work using ATA transcription. Thus, even if there are words in another language in writing, it may be possible to find them collectively. After all, one of the reasons we make our comments here is to understand whether there are other participants who will speed up the process. But if you're so in love with your position that you keep forcing a lock that needs to be opened with the wrong key, just keep moving forward as you have done so far.

I understand that you don't understand how we analyze the word YARARSAM and its sentence. Of course, this must be due to the fact that probably I am not a good narrator personally.

So, knowing something is one thing, being able to tell someone else what you know is another. But as I mentioned before. I will show how the sentences coincide with the Turkish language, without haste and by presenting their scientific basis, with many examples many more time again and again for sure. If you want to look at those examples, it can help you understand the subject.

Thank you very much for the various examples you gave us about how we should do our job and statistical approach. However, I did not understand yet that how your explanations would be help us to read VM is not clear.

If you don't mind, please read the VM texts with using your reference method as you suggested to me here. And feel free to explain some full sentences with using any transcription in any languages to give complete examples. So next time,  when I share a sentence reading from VM by using our ATA, please you also share one sentence reading by using your method, and maybe this correspondence will become more useful and enjoyable. 

Thanks,

[attachment=5912] ZORAP (covered waterway)

We read this word (ZORAP) in page 77r.
The phonetic value of the word, which was written as ZORAP 600 years ago, is the word SARAP, which lives in Anatolian dialects today. 
Z/S and O/A sound transformations consist of a dialect difference that is very common in Turkish-speaking geography. 

There has been a situation where the word written here matches with the drawing made in page 77r.

Meaning of the word SARAP is "üstü kapalı suyolu" in Turkish ("covered waterway" , "covered watercourse")

See:  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  [attachment=5913]

I think you have made your point that you have a problem with supposed Euro-centrism in the Voynich research community, but it does not improve the credibility of your own theory. To be honest, I think the interest for your theory faded when you made these sort of statements and also suggested historical revisionism in this thread.

Also worth noting, the EVA today stands for Extended Voynich Alphabet. I don't know why it was originally named European, maybe because the authors were European, or because the EVA contains latin letters which is typical in Europe? My point is that I find it hard to believe that the intention with EVA was to proclaim that the VMS must be European.

With that being said, I look forward to read more of your output.

@joben
It's not that simple either.
After all, it was the Byzantine Empire for a long time. Eastern Roman Empire. See Bishop of Adana (Turkey), also known as Santa Klaus. And still went as far as Venice in the year 1000.
The Ottoman attacks were a reaction to the European Crusades, and they were not friendly either.
Everything has left traces, but nevertheless I consider Turkish in today's way as highly improbable.
The idea of European origin is due to the German words, the incomprehensible Romanesque and the wall crenellations and plants, and drawing style and.........

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