Like JKP, I'm open to the idea that the Voynich is Turkish, but honestly this video only made me more skeptical of their work.
Too many vague statements. I don't care about how many times they've been on turkish TV, or how many venues they've given talks in. If they are so sure they have the solution, then show us the actual process and results.
They say they are in the process of putting up a website, and I hope they do and their work can finally be examined in more detail.
Hi, everyone,
I've been in touch with Ahmet recently, and he tells me that they have a book coming out soon as well as an article, both in Turkish. I hope their work will be translated into English at some point, because what I've seen so far is very intriguing!
Lisa
At 15:20, the Ardic video says something I don't remember hearing before. If I understand correctly, the idea is that the text is an acrostic. It sounds like an interesting explanation for line-initial LAAFU effects and it has the merit of being compatible with XV century culture.
Of course, without knowing more details, it is impossible to say much, but I tried a simple test anyway. I collected the initial characters of paragraph lines in all pages (considering benches ch/sh as individual characters) and checked for the presence of whole Voynichese words. The "acrostic" text has as many characters as paragraph lines in the VMS: more than 5000. Among the more than 1900 word types that occur at least twice in the text, only 19 are matched in the "acrostic" text (1%).
As a more "qualitative" check, one can compare the alternation pattern circle[oay]/non-circle, that according to Jacques Guy's Sukhotin-based analysis could be suggestive of the phonetic alternation between vowels and consonants. These are the patterns for [oay] vs all other characters in the acrostic (top) and text (bottom); first 15 pages/lines of Quire 20.
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In my opinion, the patterns in the acrostic appear to be rather random, with circles repeating up to three times consecutively (e.g. 'oyy' in 103v) and long non-circle sequences (e.g 107v kdsdtptpsshtq). I think that the occurrences of alternation (e.g. 104r podokydoy) are compatible with a random distribution. This appears to be quite different from the behaviour of the actual text.
Quote:MarcoP: "At 15:20, the Ardic video says something I don't remember hearing before. If I understand correctly, the idea is that the text is an acrostic. It sounds like an interesting explanation for line-initial LAAFU effects and it has the merit of being compatible with XV century culture."
I was surprised to hear it. You are right that acrostics were compatible with XV century culture. They were popular, both as encoded text and as illuminations, but...
the reason I was surprised the Ardics made this claim about the VMS text is because I tried to work out acrostics (beginning of line acrostics, beginning of word acrostics, end of word acrostics, alternate-line acrostics, and every other combination I could think of) years and years ago and I couldn't find any acrostic patterns. I did the same with anagrams.
But... I wasn't thinking "Turkish?" at the time, I was thinking the more common western languages (this was back in 2008/2009). I didn't seriously start investigating eastern and African languages until around 2010 or so, and by that time I wasn't looking for acrostics any more—I had grown tired of them because they didn't seem to work.
So... when I saw the claim in the video, I thought, "Hmmm, maybe I should have tried it in some of those other languages... maybe I missed something." I am happy you are looking into it.
The Ardics did specifically say beginnings of lines. If there are acrostics in the VMS and they are not in this position, then it is different from what they claim.
You chose a clear way of illustrating some of these patterns and they don't look very hopeful in terms of being acrostics (in any languages). Thank you for the informative post.
I believe they are arguing that the VMS is a phonemic transcription of a spoken dialect of medieval Turkic (as opposed to a written alphabetic language), so I'm not sure if the usual linguistic analyses are relevant. But I haven't read their forthcoming work, so I'm not sure.
Also, the acrostics are said to be in addition to the primary text, not instead of it.
He seems like a nice guy. It's a bit worrying that apparently they accept the sunflower theory though.
I should do Turkish TTR...
Many Voynich researchers are utterly sincere in their beliefs.
Unfortunately, the methodology doesn't always hold up.
Working acrostics into regular text often results in slightly stilted sentences, but that's the kind of subtlety that's difficult to judge unless one knows the language very well. I can work out words and simple sentences in a number of languages, but I would never be able to distinguish a slightly stilted sentence from a normal one in anything but English. A native speaker would be the best judge of this kind of thing.
On another aspect of their "solution"... I am a bit concerned that they have only translated about 60 words in two or three years. This rings caution bells for me because the original video showed something that was mostly a substitution cipher. If someone were using a substitution cipher to phonetically transcribe a language, even an old language, it would be possible to find many more words than that in a 200-page manuscript in three years unless something else were going on.
Thanks for the updated video. I really want their theory to be true, but there are several things that just don't seem right.
They claim they submitted an academic paper that was rejected. They received 2 comments from the reviewers, but were not allowed to use these publicly. Doesn't this seem a bit strange? Why would that request be denied? Is there even any evidence that they in fact did submit an academic paper in the first place?
EDIT: They did in fact submit an academic paper, confirmed by LisaFaginDavis in this thread.
Why are they turning this into a media event? In the latest video he is talking about his father making public appearances, visiting Turkologists in Turkey, etc. He also mentions that they have been in the mainstream Turkish news, etc. To me, this doesn't really mean anything. Of course the Turkish people wants the manuscript to be in Turkish. Of course their news channels are going to favor their theory. It's called preaching to the choir.
They are also leaving us hanging regarding the statement that they have linked 70 unique words to matching parts of the MS, but they are not showing us anything. Should this not be the main priority?
This video is not the first time I have seen one of them claim that previous MS cracking attempts have been "Euro-centric". This seems like an unnecessary term to use as a way to defend their Turkic language theory. A better way to defend their claims would be to... you know... provide evidence.
Why are they planning to release 3 books? It doesn't make sense to me. It seems like they are just trying to profit from their theory by releasing tiny information in chunks. They could just release an hour long YouTube video with a summary of their findings. That would be more than enough.
I am sorry if this seems like unfair criticism, but they do in fact make a very bold claim that they have an alphabet that works 100% of the time and are already talking to Turkish news how they have have solved the riddle.
(05-08-2019, 05:48 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.On another aspect of their "solution"... I am a bit concerned that they have only translated about 60 words in two or three years.
The previous claim (2018 "revelation" video) was "Ata Team Alberta (ATA) has deciphered and translated over 30% the manuscript."
Now in the new update video @2:55:
Quote:The [first] book contains the following: an alphabet transcription, some general information about the Voynich Manuscript, two hundred words and their respective definitions, thirty unique words that are connected to their respective illustrations, and several sentence analysis.
I can confirm that they did submit an article to an English-language journal that was peer-reviewed by two expert linguists but was eventually rejected (at least in part because their English was not fluent enough for this particular journal). Ahmet shared both the submitted paper and the two reviews with me, but all of those are confidential (by request of both the journal and the reviewers themselves) and I cannot share them. The reviewers had some important concerns that they have been working to address.