(22-03-2020, 08:55 PM)joben Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Seriously, why are they physically travelling to a location to get a hold of an "expert", as if they were in a fantasy movie? I don't consider this scientific at all.
It’s possible Ahmet Ardic was conducting fieldwork in Azerbaijan, related to the VMS, as part of his work. If the VMS really was written in a medieval Turkic language, and Mr Ardic was able to translate some of it, it’s not all that far-fetched that what he translated led him to people, places, and/or artifacts in modern-day Azerbaijan. It’s exciting to imagine that when the grand reveal happens, we’ll get not only a transition of the text, but also a connection to a specific place and group of people. I want to believe.
It’s also very plausible that the Ardics have friends, family, and professional connections in the Caucasus region, and weren’t traveling there only to show their work to a local scholar in an Indiana Jones flavored publicity stunt. If I was in the middle of a serious research project, and I was in touch with an academic interested in my work who lived in a place I was traveling to anyway, I’d certainly rather meet and share my work in person if convenient for both of us.
What raises my eyebrow about this update, is that despite going on for paragraphs, Prof Celilov’s letter adds no new information that the Ardics and their spokespeople haven’t already presented. There are no new examples, and the claims are all vague in exactly the same way as the corresponding claims in the Ardics’ announcements thus far. The words of Ardic and Celilov read like the works of two different journalists who used the exact same primary sources. That’s very suspicious to me. The most charitable interpretation of this I can think of, is that Ardic told and showed Celilov no more like he has shown his YouTube audience, and/or heavily censored Celilov’s letter so as not to reveal anything new. It just doesn’t make sense for a researcher who’s truly on the verge of a big discovery, and just needs a bit of expert verification to establish his credibility, to do either of these things. It does make sense, however, for a crank who’s bluffing to do something like this, to stall for time to placate an increasingly skeptical fan base, whether to execute some sort of endgame, or just prolong their five minutes in the limelight as long as possible. I’m getting whiffs of fraudulent inventor John Ernst Worrell Keely, or the Duke and the Dauphin, traveling con artists in Mark Twain’s novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, and their Royal Nonesuch.
I’m fascinated to see how this theory plays out, after such an unusually big and lengthy buildup. The Ardics stand to either gain or lose an incredible amount of face.
Greetings, all,
I hope you are well and that you are staying safe!
Ahmet Ardic and his sons have asked me to share their not-yet-public Voynich website with colleagues, where they have posted much of their work-in-progress (Ahmet asked me to introduce the site to my English-speaking colleagues because he is not confident writing in English). The site is mostly in Turkish, but there may be work there that is of interest.
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Their book is at press in Turkey, but they are planning to make it an open-access PDF in a few months.
Be well -
Lisa
They transcribe [iin] as /m/. The glyph(s) [iin] are almost always found word final and never word initial. While Turkic has few word initial /m/ (depending on the branch), I would be interested to learn if any language has it solely word final (or even coda only)
Not many Turkish words with "m" ?
My private Turkish interpreter just told me there are just as many as with other letters.
(19-04-2020, 03:52 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (19-04-2020, 03:43 PM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
They transcribe [iin] as /m/. The glyph(s) [iin] are almost always found word final and never word initial. While Turkic has few word initial /m/ (depending on the branch), I would be interested to learn if any language has it solely word final (or even coda only)
Yes, or word-medial.
This basically sums up my feelings about every substitution "solution" that I've seen: Solvers don't seem to consider the discrepancy between VMS glyph positions and [language of their choice] letter positions.
JKP and Emma, this is why I originally considered Basque a viable candidate for the underlying language of the VMs. Gavin Guldenpfennig inspired me to look into this possibility, and I was excited to learn that at least in proto-Basque phonology, consonants were very positionally rigid. (Source: You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.). I was also encouraged by the fact that at the time of the VMS's composition, Basque was unwritten, and several learned travelers from central Europe visited and wrote about their experiences among the Basque people in the middle ages. Could the VMS be a German merchant or missionary's attempt to take dictation from a Basque tribal elder, about his people's mythology? A language isolate with no familiar word roots could have been the inspiration to use a whole new character set.
I felt like a proper mad scientist one day — full of a kind of manic energy I've only felt a few times in my life — putting together a table matching Voynichese characters to the relatively small number of possible proto-Basque consonants, broken down by word position. (I still have it somewhere, and can scan it and upload it if anyone's interested.) My excitement dampened quite a bit when none of the correspondences I worked out produced any common Basque words. I also looked extensively at pagan Basque mythology and folklore, and didn't see any common themes in the imagery of the VMs. Oh well.
(19-04-2020, 05:44 PM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Not many Turkish words with "m" ?
My private Turkish interpreter just told me there are just as many as with other letters.
I believe that initial nasal was rare in Proto-Turkic. Many Turkic languages (but not Turkish) later developed an initial /m/ through a sound change of initial /b/ (I'm not an expert on this, but I believe that it picked up nasalisation from a following sound). Turkish itself and many Turkic languages borrowed words from Arabic and Persian which freely begin words with /m/. The loanwords occurred quite early, I believe, so even in the 1400s we might expect to see evidence of them.
They would need a strong argument why /m/ is never found word initial.
I generally agree with most of the comments.
What I would like to see for any proposed translation is how the most frequent words in the target language are mapped to the Voynich writing.
Since in this case, Voynich words are mapped to proto-Turkic words, I would like to see that words like
chol ,
daiin and
chedy map to frequent words in that language. That would be much more convincing than a few specific sentences.
For modern Turkish, a google search quickly turns up this list:
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so I would expect something not too different.
I can imagine that in the Ottoman there are also the dialects, and some with the Persian and Arabic is similar.
Mentally I find myself when I think about the VM in the year 1400 in the Ottoman Empire. Writing is in Arabic style, from right to left. Before the Arabic culture the East Roman Empire was present and not the Arabic one. Here we already have a written, linguistic problem.
Why should someone suddenly write from left to right, and in Arabic, when the previous one was written in left to right in ancient Greek ?
( Why left to right in Arabic, Ottoman ? ) Because it was a traveller ?
Apart from that, there is not a single reference in the VM to Ottoman culture. Even in the style of drawing there is nothing that could point to it.
It can't be a normal writing, the Arabs and Ottomans have written no less than the Europeans. So the alphabet and the language should be known. With an encoding the same rules apply as with any other language, apart from the fact that he does it from left to right.
An encryption system assumes that the person or persons can read it again after 1-2 years.
I took another look at the works. My result, nice but wrong.
I wrote something like this over a year ago. But nothing has changed.
By the way, it was no joke with the personal translator. My wife studied art and music at Taxim University (Istanbul) and my daughter went to school there for 5 years. But now they are back.