Ahmet,
You don't need to be grateful for having received so much good will at the start, and if you think that's what I'm saying, you are missing the point.
The point is that all that good will is completely at odds with your contention that people here don't want Voynichese to be Turkish.
When I first saw this thread a couple of years ago, I was not a registered user of this forum and did not know then that I could find out which threads were updated as a registered user simply by checking the 'new posts page'. So I used to visit this thread repeatedly. Because I was so keen to see an update. Because I hoped you were in the process of finding the solution. And yet as this thread developed, I became cynical about this theory and all others.
You started off with good-will. I am going to repeat that as much as I can in this reply. It doesn't happen to many theories when they are launched, because everyone is weary and tired of seeing the same mistakes being needlessly repeated. I can't think of any other theory that people were looking forward to hearing more from. People were intrigued because - despite your claims now to the contrary - they saw Turkish as a good candidate language, and they were happy that a native speaker was leading the research, again a rarity with Voynich theories. You can see similar statements of people being open to Turkish in You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.thread. You even had an endorsement from Lisa Fagin Davies! All this got your theory a foot in the door. But now years down the line, when you are pushed to provide more than just individual word identifications, when your theory is challenged, instead you talk about how people don't want Voynichese to be Turkish, either because we're part of a western academic conspiracy or we're "ostriches" with our heads in the sand, presumably brainwashed by said academic conspiracy.
We've seen similar stuff from other theorists, but in this thread's case, it is worse because of nationalism in the mixture. I can see you don't like that word but I can't think of a better one for the moment for explaining what you have said on this thread and the others:
- It is is why you assume people on these threads don't want Voynichese to be Turkic, and why you seem to be implying we all want it to be a European language. You want it to be Turkish; you project that feeling onto me and assume because I'm European, I want it to be European. Guess what: I'd quite like if it turned out to be Turkic. If it ever turns out to be a European language, I'll be happy to see the mystery solved, but it will be disappointing.
- Nationalism is why you assume that I and other on the threads and linguists beyond here don't want Etruscan to be Turkic. Again, you desperately want it to be Turkic, and you presume other people want to claim Etruscan for their own cultures. Guess what again: I think it would be really cool and fascinating if it was Turkic. Fringe language family theories are often appealing. But the evidence is not there, nor is it there for any other theory about Etruscan belonging to a big family. There simply isn't enough data to reliably reconstruct large language families dating that far back, and there almost certainly never will be unless there is some miracle find of source material. Same for Sumerian.
- Nationalism is why you accusing "western linguists" of "claiming" languages for Indo-European, and then you declare that Sumerian, Hittite, and Etruscan are all Turkish. You are projecting your own feelings onto modern linguists. You're basically fighting a culture war for languages that are 3000-5000 years old...against no one. In reality some theories about Turkic or Altaic have come from western linguists.
- It is why, despite Sumerian's identification as a language isolate being evidence against this Indo-European conspiracy, you explained this away by declaring in the other thread that linguists were adopting a spiteful "if Indo-European can't have it, no one can!" attitude. And then you ignored more counter examples such as Ancient Egyptian, which linguistic consensus has firmly as Afro-Asiatic, and... not Indo-European!
- It is why you are not taking into account how much standard of proof is required in modern linguistics for mapping language families, and how hard this is to attain when you are talking about splits thousands of years ago. This standard of proof is why hypotheses like Nostratic have failed to gain consensus. It's not because "no one wants it to be true." A lot of people would like it to be true out of a basic human desire to solve a mystery and to simplify matters by grouping families together. I would love it if a "Proto-World" could be found. It's never going to happen. (Ironically, there was once a theory Proto-World was...You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)
- Nationalism is why you insist on a much higher standard of proof for what already has linguistic consensus than for your own nationalistic fringe theories. The evidence that supports Hittite being Indo-European is far more extensive and rigorous than any of your claims. It's fair enough to question something that has consensus. That is how it has become consensus: by rigorously surviving challenge. But you are not doing that. You state your theories as facts, and attack those who disagree as either being motivated by nationalism themselves or being ostriches, or at best mathematically illiterate. It is why you state categorically that Hittite is Turkic on the most paltry of evidence against years of solid scholarship. Nationalism is what gives you the confidence to do that against linguistic consensus despite your own comments about language death in the other thread seeming to show you don't understand it. This is the opposite of a scientific approach.
There is a pattern here. You state - as facts rather than as theories - that Sumerian is Turkic, Hittite is Turkic, Etruscan is Turkic, and Voynichese is Turkic, and you say your challengers don't want Sumerian, Hittite, Etruscan, and Voynichese to be Turkic.
The reason why your theory has failed to gain consensus here is not because people here don't want Voynichese to be Turkic. Let me repeat: people were hopeful about your theory when it was first reported! The reason is that neither your methodology nor your results have been solid enough, at least as you have presented them so far in this thread.
It is not enough to keep saying you are acting like a scientist. A scientific approach is centred on doubt, and you have presented yourself on this thread as operating from a position of certainty. A scientific methodology would mean rigorously charting and interrogating every accommodation you have made to your system to keep it working, doing the same for every assumption you make, and for every time you create more degrees of freedom for yourself, such as when you stated the author deliberately mixed dialects to confuse matters (which gives your system a wider pool of words to choose from). Scientific methodology would include playing devil's advocate and coming up with reasons why your conclusions may be wrong.
It is not enough to keep saying your theory is a matter of mathematical proof. You say it is mathematically improbable that you would find a Turkish word by chance. e.g. you declared
"the probability of writing the first 5 letters of 'safsu' correctly is 1 in 188,956,800,800". But plenty of others have found individual words like their chosen language. Cvetka, who I see is also posting in this thread, has identified at least 100 Slovenian ones, I believe. Perhaps you would say we should believe you over Cvetka because you have identified 150 Turkish words? But then what if Cvetka announces tomorrow they have identified 160 Slovenian words?
I have lost track of exactly how many you and your competitors like Cvetka have found
. My point here is that you are vastly, vastly underestimating the probability of finding a word that looks like Turkish. And this is why your theory is not getting consensus. It is not because we don't want it to be Turkish, either consciously or subconsciously. It is because you keep providing us on this thread with only individual word identifications, and this is not enough to distinguish you from your competitors. The exact numbers don't matter. You could say you have at least 550 words and that this makes your theory correct, and that your competitors are incorrect because they only have 200. But that's not enough - how do we know that one day your competitors won't turn up with 600 words?
This is why a theory is not proved by word counts. Where is the proof that your system reliably results in coherent sentences? Where are the translated paragraphs, even pages?
You have obviously spent a lot of years, effort, and energy on your work. I recognize that. But you are banging your own head against a wall if you keep only providing the thread with individual word identifications; keep insisting that this is mathematical proof; and when challenged, keep insisting that your challengers or detractors don't want it to be Voynichese, along with these fringe nationalistic theories.
There is no ill-will against here against Turkish being Voynichese. You simply haven't proved it enough. But the way you are pushing your theory is incredibly self-destructive and is showing that your approach is not in the least bit scientific.
I think I've now said all I can on this.
