The Voynich Ninja

In addition to that all,

Mr. Rene said that; "Now quite a few people think that statistics are in principle useless, but please keep in mind that modern linguists work very intensively with statistics."

But the explanation that I have expressed before that was essentially this; "For the reasons we have already described here, Statistics is useless at this stage due to the data available and the special situation of the texts."

I do not fully understand whether those who perceive our words here supposedly as "Statistics useless" or, write like "we supposedly say the method is useless (as like it was our opinion)" also have an intention about our work. This approach creates a perception as if we said something we did not say. I hope this application is not made exclusively for us.

Mr. Rene, I know you didn't do this on purpose. For this reason, please do not get this my comment personal because it is general manner here in long time. In other words, others in this group similarly made similar allusions. So this my comment not for Mr Rene but in general.

I will provide additional evidences in certain way for specific questions if needed. However, if I read some words that has not changed its phonetic value for 600 years and show it as a plant name in the dictionary and wich plant drawings is match on the same page where this word is used. How is this type of match can be called by linguists (and/or you)?

Telling us that "modern linguists are very busy with statistics and work very intensively with statistics". But, please also remember that modern linguists have not been successful in reading these VM texts yet."

But we say we do it with using linguistically proven technique. Moreover, we do not just say, we provide linguistic evidence. Do you have a rule that the evidence will not be taken into account if it is not statistical?

Even though they never get real and repeatable results throughout across 240 pages, some "modern linguists" constantly propose us to use their methots.

Do you not see inconsistencies in this approach towards us?

Isn't there a botanist or linguist in this group who can comment on the drawing name matches we offer?

Wouldn't you like us to present new evidence by refuting certain parts of our work using linguistic methods?

Although most of you have been examining this subject in various details for years, is there anyone other than us who sees overlap in the words we have shown overlap in the details we have presented?

Thanks

Hi, Ahmed,

I hope you and your family are well and that you have been safe and healthy during the COVID years! 

I wanted to try to further explain Rene's point about the importance of statistics and Voynichese. There are certain properties of Voynichese that must be explained if a solution is to be credible. One of the most important is the difference between "Language A" and "Language B". Another is the improbably high number of occurrences of EVA [p] and [f] in the toplines of paragraphs as opposed to elsewhere in a paragraph. Many of these properties are listed here (and elsewhere on Rene's website): 

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Eventually you will need to be able to show how writing Turkic using VMS characters leads to these particular properties. You may not have enough of the manuscript "translated" to answer those questions yet, but at some point it will be very important to show how/if your method explains these and other known properties of Voynichese.

I hope that is a helpful clarification.

- Lisa

Hello everyone!
 
The text of the manuscript certainly has a specific structure, however I think that explaining the images, translating the text and explaining its statistics are tasks that can and should be performed by different people
Why did the author prefer certain terms to others, why did he use this or that abbreviation, this or that figure of speech, not to forget the possible presence of ciphers, anagrams etc?

In short, I consider the requirements presented by René as a distant goal to be reached by the work of several researchers, while in order to judge the accuracy of the translation in the short term, other tests should be proposed.


In the meantime, I wish everyone good luck!

Indeed, this test is only meaningful once there is a specific solution proposal.

Note, that this type of test was already described decades ago. I am no longer sure by whom. Could have been Karl Kluge, who still occasionally writes at Nick's blog.

(03-04-2022, 10:14 PM)Ahmet Ardıç Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Mr. Rene said that; "Now quite a few people think that statistics are in principle useless, but please keep in mind that modern linguists work very intensively with statistics."

Ahmet, 

I understand your assumption that the computer analysis cannot solve all the problems and clearly identify the language, such as vowel/consonant ratio, the number and the length of words, because of the way the words are written (some words have additional diphtongs, some have missing vowels, or even missing consonants), missing or unwarranted spaces. Without knowing the language, there is also a problem with interpreting some Voynich glyphs like EVA-iin and iiin, as Dr. Bax and others pointed out. However, there are things that had been already determined with the computer analysis, such as the prefixes and suffixes. 
You claim that EVA-daiin is Turkish suffix -SAM, meaning 'I am'. A suffix is always attached to the end of the word, and in the VM, there are at least 600 free-standing DAM words, half of them in the first 25 pages. You cannot just attach them to the previous words to work with your theory. 
I understand your reasoning, because Slovenian language has many similar properties as Turkish. It is highly inflective, expresses tense, gender, number with grammatical endings, so that the personal pronouns, such as English 'I' are not necessary. The vocabulary also include many similar words, after all, Slovenian language still contains over 600 Sanskrit words, many of which I believe are also still preserved in Turkish language. 
You read EVA word 'daiin' as SAM, I read it as DAM (I give). It works just as well for Slovenian language, as it works as 'I m' for your translation. Furthermore, I do not need to eliminate the space in front of this word, and I can explain the suffixes attached to it as different conjugation. I can explain the prefixes, EVA qo and o, and what they add to the word DAM. 
Because I read EVA q as P and you read it as D, I read your word DAM as SAM, which also works for Slovenian language, because we use the same word SAM/SEM for 'I am'. In the present tense, this word can only be used with adjective, but in the past tense, it serves as a helping verb. 
The word DAM as a verb has the suffix -am (with the root bein DA, one A is dropped), however due to vowel harmony, in other verbs, the suffix can change to -im, -om, -um. So, you see, Turkish is not so unique. At the same time, when DAM is a free-standing word, it means 'I give', while the free-standing word DOM means 'home'. In this case, the sound value could not be changed at will. There are certain grammatical patterns that need to be explained.
 

Now to the Rene's proposal:

I understand your frustration, because I am encountering similar problems. Not that I cannot find the Slovenian text from that period with many words, even exactly the same, or sounding the same, but the spoken language has changed quite a bit due to the political situation. The spoken Slovenian has separated from Old Church Slavonic, used in Glagolitic liturgy, so that by the time first Slovenian books were printed by the Protestant writers, there was heavy German influence, including the insertion of vowels for unwritten semi-vowels, replacing Glagolitic 'i' (and) for 'inu'. Also, different Latin letters were used for some sound, depending of the linguistic background of the priests who wrote the text. On top of that, the VM has totally different content and different religious terminology.

I checked a lot of medieval books and documents, and I could not find a single sentence that could look exactly the same as a sentence taken from the VM. This does not mean that the language could not be verified.

Your explanation that since computer experts were not able to determine the language in past 100 years, you must be right and computer experts are wrong. A lot has been done without even knowing the language - like recognizing the prefixes and suffixes.

What computer analysts have determined so far is the frequent use of certain words, letters, syllables. These need explanation and can be compared to the use in Turkish or Slovenian, or any other language. If the translation alphabet is correct, some idea of the language could be determined from the frequency of certain prepositions.
 The prefixes could be found in dictionaries, but the suffixes are often not shown, although some dictionaries show the grammatical ending for 1. and 3. person singular, and for passives. This has to be further adjusted for the pronunciation, but in general, it works.

 There is a pattern in the VM regarding spaces that needs explanation, and perhaps example in some other writing. You cannot just group the words together, or put them apart at your own will. If the author was smart enough to expand Latin alphabet to over 100 characters, as you claim, he would also use spaces wisely and correctly. 
Your example of the word OKUMAK explains the possible transformation of the word in different text, and even different pronunciation, but there is no such word as OK U MAK  in the VM, although you claim the word is divided that way. 
It would also be highly unlikely that a travelling family that according to your theory authored the VM, would be trained in humanistic writing and humanistic alchemical art, and even more unlikely that they would draw the plants by memory with root that looks eagle or two headless lions. 
It is easy to take an exotic plant and claim that the name is written somewhere among the text, and then write a story about it, like you did about the sunflower. There is no agreement as to the identification of that plant.
While it looks impressive that you are able to find the names of the some exotic plants, it is at the same strange that you cannot find the names of those plants that could be identified. You will not prove the language is Turkish, if you cannot translate the words that appear at least 100 of times in the VM.

Therefore, do not lecture me that my method is wrong, just because you believe yours is right to the exclusion to all others. Understanding Slovenian language and its dialects, as well as its historical connection to the ancient Anatolian languages gives me advantage other VM researchers do not have. And I am the first to admit that they accomplished a lot based on illustrations alone, by pinpointing the location of the origin of the VM in the region, where Slovenian language was and still is spoken.

Maybe with some humility, we can compare the theories, and help each other, and Turkish linguists, to determine the 'dialect'. After all, there was a strong Slavic community in Turkey, as I read recently in an article.

Cvetka

(04-04-2022, 04:04 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, there are things that had been already determined with the computer analysis, such as the prefixes and suffixes. 

¿How can they have been determined? The numbers of characters is undetermined. The starting and ending of words is undetermined. It hasnt been determined how to transform the vochinese into letters or into words. When an analysis of characters is made nobody knows what is analyzing. In case of a cyphered text measures to avoid frecuency analysis where known: nulls, vowels omitted or letters represented in more than one way. 
How can be correctly intrepreted the results of any analysis with such a wide range of possible variants?

Dear Davis,


Thank you for writing. Yes, we were able to stay busy with our work without losing our health during difficult times. Thank you. I hope you are well too.

Thank you for the details and reminders you drew attention to on the subject.

I perceive and understand the detail you have stated. Moreover, I had read the VM statistics studies you referenced in the past. Yes, it is possible to examine different aspects of texts using statistics. For example, Ratio of vowels and consonants in the compared texts can be checked. Or,  Character entropyis (another metric by which we can compare languages to each other and to Voynichese) can be checked. And some other comparisons can be made through statistics too.

Remember, Bennett (1976) indicate the unusual nature of the Voynich script in his discussion of conditional character entropy (also known as second order character entropy). Which conditional character entropy can also be thought of as the overall predictability of a letter given the pre-ceding letter. In that case, the overall conditional entropy can be calculated from "the conditional probabilities of each bigram" weighted by their overall occurrence in the text for sure.

As you know, based on many past study indicate that character sequences within the words in Voynich text are unusually predictable compared to European languages.

We already have full-page reading of VM as like author wrote (in undefined dialect) with enough words form many all VM pages and phrases and thats all available reads can be use in lexicostatistics measurements and comparisons. For example, the folio 33v we worked on before was read in full. (We are still waiting for Turcologists to evaluate our reading on this page.)

The words of the Turkish language have a phonetic vowel harmony within themselves. In other words, it is predictable and what kind of sound structure will come from which sound is more predictable. Moreover, in Turkish, some letters/sounds are never at the beginning of words, and likewise, some letters/sounds are never at the end of words. I have mentioned these in my previous comments on this page and stated that the same structure coincides with corresponding to the same sounds for Voynich texts. I stated for that structure as "it should be defined as a structural overlap between today's Turkish and Voynich texts".

The vowel harmony rule always works in the language, and most of the time, even if you do not write the vowels partially or completely, a natural speaker of this language will continue to read the unwritten letter at the sound value it should be.

In addition, there is an almost complete overlap with Turkish in terms of repeated side by side word structures such as reduplication, trinity, and quatrain etc. I also mentioned this with examples and past evidence.

ATA transcription enabled us to read these articles, and structurally, such overlaps seem very clear. These linguistic findings and overlaps and the readings that have been made have already shown that the content is Turkish without using the statistical method.

On the other hand, statistical studies for VM have not been able to obtain such a result or identify the language in which the work was written.

The study of linguistic statistics for VM texts is approximately similar to "reverse engineering" in technology and industry. First, the inner parts and sections are examined in a way that can be understood, and their relations and numerical connections are reproduced again, resulting in a whole that will serve to compare the original old parts to other knowns.

So, Linguistic statistics is one of many methods, but it is never the only method that can be applied. We have explained our method and if the VM texts are not rendered correctly with the correct volume value, no statistical comparison will give correct results. This method has already been applied many times, and the positions shown for the VM in the plotted graphs are incorrect.

Because those who do this work create texts by reading the original letters incorrectly and compare unrealistic texts with today's languages in statistical calculations. All of those works are not work yet just for this reason. But I'm not saying that they were applied as good experiments and it is not possible to reach a result using statistics.

However, regardless of the fact that we have enough raw vocabulary words to do Lexicostatistics studies, these words and full-page texts will be corrected by linguists. If these studies are done after specifying the Turkish dialect to be compared, they will give correct results.


Almost every 2 words written by the author were either shortened or written as if they were separate words by separating their syllables or phonemes, or the vowels were written incompletely or sometimes they were written with only consonants.

Moreover, some words were combined even though they should not have been combined, and some sounds were written by lengthening certain sound expressions, almost like a spoken song.

Thus, half or more of the texts were manipulated by the author to make the texts difficult to read. Therefore, if these will corrected more accurately by linguists for Lexicostatistics than correct results can be obtained.

We think that the use of texts in a Lexicostatistics study before these are completed will give misleading results. But there is another reason why we did not do a study for comparison in Lexicostatistics in detail.

We first made the ATA alphabet transcription for the Voynich texts by examining the old alphabets in terms of the Turkish language and blending them with the familiar characters of the Latin alphabet. This transcription enabled us to read the texts in Turkish to a great extent which no transcription has been able to achieve until today, despite the fact that the texts were written by multi-directional manipulation.

Therefore, after the texts are read in Turkish, we never thought to prove it again with using Lexicostatistics comparison to see whether it overlaps with Turkish or not. This can of course be done as a second validation after a while.

Moreover, none of the alphabet transcriptions that enable the reading of unknown historical alphabets and texts have been revealed by lexicostatistics studies. So there is no such example in history. The primary requirement for being able to read ancient texts is to make an alphabet transcription that works as a reading key. None of the transcriptions made to date, including EVA transcription, showed a voice equivalent to more than 100 characters of the Voynich alphabet.

They never predicted true multi-syllable characters and matched them with correct sound values. Moreover, they misread even simple alphabet characters. For example, they were read 600-year-old different VM letters with same phonetic value.

In our study, some letter signs can be read with a double voice, as like other known Old Turkish texts. While this is the case, no matter what method we compare the sound indexes without correctly predicting the compared sound values, it will not give correct results.

In summary, if we are going to do the study you mentioned, it will mean that we try to confirm the findings, which we have already confirmed with our own method, with the proposed method for the second time. This can of course be done. But first, let's get help from linguists to correct the texts, then this suggestion is tried if necessary and it shows overlap.

About the "High number of occurrences of EVA [p] and [f] in the toplines of paragraphs as opposed to elsewhere in a paragraph" as for the subject you mentioned that the signs perceived as P and F are actually a large number of very different syllable character signs.
In other words, if you/we look at them carefully, it will be seen that their number is more than two. So that the ones read as P are different from each other and the same situation is valid for those read as F.

EVA P and F are multiple syllable characters, each of which is different from each other.

No matter which structure in the text you/we want to examine through linguistic statistics, you/we must first find an alphabet transcription whose sound values must be correctly matched. This transcription work is not something that can be done by using eye and analogy or based on personal opinion only. Voynich alphabets are not located of the outside area of the historic alphabet evolution process. These VM letter signs not can be read with personal analogies far from science. EVA is just created with baseless personal analogies except for the well known Latin alphabet characters we use today. It has almost no scientific value that can be used in a scientific study.

Sorry my post was a bit long.

Thank you for reading

(04-04-2022, 03:32 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.[Indeed, this test is only meaningful once there is a specific solution proposal.

Note, that this type of test was already described decades ago. I am no longer sure by whom. Could have been Karl Kluge, who still occasionally writes at Nick's blog.]

Dear Rene,


I dont know what type of test are you talking about. Have you ever seen a single drawing name overlap similar to ours such as presented words phonetic value unchanged since 15th century in the history of VM reading studies?

Many proffesors such as Mr. Stephan Bax was not look for this type of drawing-text overlaps?

Thanks

Dear Cvetka,

I understand you. It's probably true that when you compare the Slovenian language you also see various overlaps. However, it is not possible to read these texts only by asserting them. It is necessary to show complete sentences and a large number of drawings and noun overlaps. It should also be expected that the proposed transcription will offer some reading or full reading of all approximately 240 pages. If these texts are written in a natural language, as they are, then there should be multiple and total overlaps in the whole content and in various structures, not fragmentary overlaps. Our goal is to be able to read the entire manuscript and translate it into today's language. For this we need support of linguists and volunteers to participate in the reading works with ATA.

Please let me tell you clearly. There are multiple Turkish words on every line of every page of this manuscript in Turkish, and about 20% of them have not changed their phonetic value (partially excluding minor vocal differences) in the intervening 600 years. That's clear. And we have identified 92 drawing name matches, and some of them still live in our language today, without changing their phonetic value. We do not just say this in words, we show them in old dictionaries. Moreover, we read many complete sentences.

This rate will increase exponentially as the reading progresses, because we have been look only at 10% of the work in great detail yet.

If you don't see all of these as Slovenian, then I think you may have gone a little too far down the anagram path.

EVA-daiin is not only Turkish suffix -SAM in ATA transcription. We do not read the part read in the EVA only in SAM format as a word suffix. Since I have written about this subject in detail here before, I will not mention the same details here again.

Kind regards

Three interpretations for EVA v are lambda, medieval numeral '7' and Roman numeral '5' in the 4 x17 symbol sequence of VMs f57v.

How can the results of any analysis be correctly interpreted with so many possible variants? The answer is through demonstration. Does the output of the chosen methodology produce a reasonable and viable result? Does the translation make sense? And are the results independently reproduceable?

Choice of language is a choice of methodology. It is only one side of the investigative dichotomy. The other part is the 'subject of investigation'. And for the VMs, while statistics are potentially helpful, it is also necessary to look at specific segments of the VMs text. 

In the VMs, perhaps it is possible to assign a certain special quality to the circular texts. It's the last place someone would attempt to interpret the written text. The plants, the recipes and all that is investigated first. Perhaps circular texts are significant in another way. Perhaps some of them have been selected. Some of them are clearly marked with "Stolfi's" markers. And one of the markers connects to historical heraldry despite some intentional ambiguity. There is a set of different structural affirmations that supports this interpretation. 

Among the examples of circular text, there are those that are marked and therefore might be more significant than others. This is an area where more light needs to shine. If there is a need to demonstrate the validity of a particular methodology, let it at least take into consideration the self-designated, circular text segments that have the potential to produce more significant results.